Cutting Edge?

It’s a familiar scene - a Sunday roast dinner is being lovingly prepared and cooked and its aroma fills the home with a sense of well being and anticipation. There are so many flavours waiting for their moment to come alive in the mouths of a very grateful audience and their simmering smell is but a small tease conspiring to get the stomach rumbling with an impatient concerto.

As my wife prohibits me from meddling in the process of cooking such a feast I am delegated a few tasks that she hopes are unlikely to have any spoiling impact on her masterful endeavours. As I set about the first of these, I straighten the table cloth and then begin to add the placemats, cutlery, condiments and drinks glasses. Task two has the artistic sounding title of ‘carving the meat’. In all honesty that is probably too elaborate a description – ‘slicing, cutting or tearing ‘may be more appropriate.

I’ve often come to this theatrical moment and felt that the shining piece of steel in my hand was inadequate for the job. I’ve watched others demonstrate how it should be done and notice the ease with which the knife glides through the succulent juicy meat (sorry veggies but this story just wouldn’t work with a ‘Quorn’ substitute). I’ve tried different knives from the kitchen drawer and all of them seem to attack it like an angry rugby scrum, leaving the strips of meat looking worse for wear. As these ‘chunks’ are served out onto the warm plates along with the perfectly cooked vegetables and fused with amazing gravy, it somehow seems to spoil an otherwise perfect looking meal.

Surely to achieve those evenly cut, aesthetically pleasing slices I would need to buy a new knife – one that is made for the job - one that will gently and graciously interact with the meat and cause it to comply willingly. After years of serving up disappointingly shaped meat because I resented paying the apparently high cost of a professional meat carving knife, I had an idea. I’d recently bought a sharpener to maintain some of my gardening tools, and like a cartoon cloud containing an illuminated light bulb above my head, the thought came to me that I should try using it on the kitchen knives.

With a bounce in my step I got straight to it, expending generous amounts of energy by quickly moving the edge of the blade against the sharpening stone. Occassionaly I would stop and inspect it visually to see if I could notice anything different before repeating the process again... and again and again.

The moment of truth was now sitting in front of me on the kitchen work-surface as a freshly cooked chicken awaited my attention. I stood in front of it, rested the knife edge gently on the seasoned skin and applied a little pressure. Incredibly the knife just cut through the white meat with such ease and perfection. What a moment of great satisfaction.

For years, I had been wishing for a different result and assumed that I needed a different tool in order to achieve it, when all along I simply needed to sharpen what was already in my hand. All too often we can assume that we’re holding inadequate resources to achieve the things we believe we’re called to do. We often either give-up or just make a poor job of it – but so often the answer is to sharpen the gifts and strengths we have. A ‘blunted’ hospitality gift needs to be sharpened. That gift of encouragement which has fallen victim to fatigue needs to find its cutting edge again. Your generosity to others needs to have its incisive impact rediscovered. Whatever we hold, we need to guard it from dulling, tiredness, poor finishing and complacency and ensure it stays very sharp and very effective.