Two and a half years. That’s how long it’s been since I stood among our brothers and sisters in South Africa, and this first week of August, I’m going back. But this trip carries two firsts that make it unlike any before it.
The first: I’m taking my mother. Four years ago, when we last went, she was buried in the daily care of her elderly parents, both of whom have since finished their race. That door is open now, and I get to watch her meet, for the first time, the hearts of gold that make up that fellowship.
The second: I’m taking three of my own children. Aviva. Connie. Sean. Teenagers, all of them, and none of them has ever left this continent. I’ll say—just writing their names next to the word overseas puts something like a butterfly in my chest. Not dread. Anticipation. I know what happens when a young heart that has only read about the wideness of the world suddenly gets to stand in it. Something expands that never shrinks back down.
But what I didn’t expect going in was that the real mission trip would start two months before we ever boarded a plane, right here in our kitchen.
Two Questions
It’s been a full year already. Three teenagers deep into an expanding high school curriculum. A flock of sheep to tend. Sean gentling Lyric, his Mustang colt.
Aaron working with his donkey. A batch of meat birds, a standing flock of laying hens, a breeder line of heritage turkeys. Our monthly booth at the farmers market. Our table open—often more nights than not—to guests from around the world, their stories weaving into ours until you can’t always tell where one thread ends and the next begins.
Add to that the daily Bible study I record for The Upward Way, the meetings, the preaching and teaching, the endless one-on-ones with various leaders and their wives that Beck and I separately engage in. Then writing the discipleship packets we’re developing, the high-school curriculum work, the conferences and challenges—wow, exhausting just to name some of it.
So when Beck and I sat down to talk about a possible trip to South Africa, I told her plainly: I did not want my ministry to argue with my family. I wanted, if it was possible at all, for this trip to be the rare place where the two stopped competing and became the same thing—where serving the church overseas and shepherding my own teens through the most pivotal stretch of their lives occurred at once.
The math, though, was daunting. Five tickets, not two. About $1,500 a head. We could not simply write a check for five. So we sat the kids down and put it to them clearly—the opportunity and cost they would have to embrace together, if they felt it was worth it. There were two questions we needed the kids to answer and commit to.
One: If you go, are you ready to let God stretch you—to sing and serve and share in front of people you’ve never met, past whatever comfort zone you’ve been living inside?
Two: Can you raise roughly $1,500 apiece—$4,500 total—in the next two months?
We watched their faces. This was a door they’d been waiting years to walk through, and they knew they wanted to do it. Aviva graduates this fall and still has a full course load. Sean and Connie would have to keep up with their own schoolwork remotely. We made a plan straightaway: lemonade stands, part-time jobs, and—because these are my children and because food is a big part of our family’s craft—we would be doing a great deal of great cooking.
The Hundred-Dollar Cup
The first fundraiser was the simplest one. Sean bought the cups, borrowed the coolers, packed the ice, and set up outside on a Saturday hot enough to make the whole idea seem inevitable. He came home that evening without much of a smile.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“We covered expenses,” he said.
“Anything else?”
He hesitated. “A brother—one who’s actually coming with us on the trip—he handed me a 100-dollar bill for a single cup. I tried to give it back. Tried three or four times. I was afraid I’d offend him if I kept pushing, so I finally just took it.”
“You did the right thing,” I told him. “But that’s not exactly proof of concept for the lemonade stand.”
“No, sir,” he agreed. “We’re going to need something else.”
He was right. And the something else, it turned out, was already simmering—quite literally—in Aviva’s capstone project.
Learning the Margins
Aviva is not only finishing high school this year; she’s building a cookbook, Cooking with Dad, out of everything I’ve taught her about seasoning and method over the years. We’d set a goal of eight finished chapters before we left for Africa. The trip, the fundraiser, and the cookbook wouldn’t stay three separate projects. They were one.
So the second fundraiser was Salisbury steak—one of the recipes bound for that cookbook, tested now under real pressure, for real money. Aviva posted it to Mom’s WhatsApp status and had six large family orders before the potatoes were even peeled. All day that Saturday: patties mixed, potatoes soaked and mashed, Connie working the mixer, Tina and Sean running back and forth, and me browning steaks in batches on the flat top to take some pressure (and heat) off the kitchen stove.
I improvised a rich brown gravy on that same flat top—first time ever that way—using the fond left behind from the meat, damming the back edge of the three-foot griddle with foil so it wouldn’t run off into the drip pan. It worked. But more than once that afternoon, the pressure in that kitchen climbed high enough that tempers started running as hot as the flat top. We stopped. More than once. Because there is no version of this story where we’ll tolerate becoming sour and ugly with each other in the name of doing something noble “for the Lord.” Nope! Either grace was going to hold us all together, or the whole thing wasn’t worth doing.
Grace held. The steaks went out. The families were fed. And somewhere in that chaos, the kids started learning what I’d hoped they would: that food, like almost everything else, comes down to margins. Overbuy your ingredients, and you’ll eat your own profit before you ever see it.
Five Gallons
Then, the next Sunday came the meal idea that nearly burst our limits: Daddy’s tikka masala curry, thirteen family orders, twelve servings each.
We wrestled back and forth on the pricing. Aviva wanted to charge no more than $65—already, in her mind, too much to ask. “Honey, you cannot do this without a profit,” I told her. “There’s no point in serving at a loss. It won’t get you to Africa.” We landed on $85—still a fair price for a meal of this scale, serving twelve, and enough, we hoped, to actually add to the tally.
Aviva and I spent an entire Saturday in that kitchen, after my leadership meeting ran long. Whole spices bloomed in smoking ghee until they went dark and fragrant—chili, anise, cardamom, cumin, black peppercorn, clove, cinnamon—strained out, onions dropped into that infused oil and cooked down slow until they became the rich flavor foundation for the whole curry—and wow, how the house became redolent with Indian spices! Mango-onion-mint chutney. A jalapeño-cilantro-yogurt sauce sharp enough to cut through the richness. A vegetarian biryani with vegetables marinated in masala yogurt. Sean grilling chicken breasts to exactly 155 degrees and pulling it early, trusting the carryover heat to finish the job above the safe line. Connie chopping it all down. Aviva folding it into the sauce I’d built.
Thirteen orders. Twelve servings each. A ten-gallon pot on the stove, and somewhere past the halfway mark, we started doing math out loud, in a panic, because we weren’t certain the pot really held ten gallons at all. Beck got Sister Grace on the phone: “Are you sure this pot is really ten gallons?” Soon, we were dangerously sliding the heavy pot out over the edge of the counter, barely holding on by one edge, with Beck beneath it, shining her phone light into the obscured bottom, desperately hunting for a stamped number we could trust.
We had five gallons of curry and twenty-six quart containers waiting to be filled, and no margin left to be wrong.
We filled them anyway—one after another, sauce ladled to the very lip of every quart, until the pot scraped clean and the last container sealed with not half an inch of headroom to spare. Twenty-six quarts. Exact. Every one of us standing there flushed and sweating, staring at a picnic table covered in curry and biryani and two kinds of chutney, wondering how we’d landed so precisely on enough.
We’d told my mother—Grandmama—we’d bring and share supper with her that night from what we thought was one extra meal set aside. Then Beck found a missing text on her iMessage, not her WhatsApp where most of the orders had come, and we realized we were a meal short, not a meal ahead. We had to walk over and tell Grandmama and her guests we had nothing to share after all—that we’d have to scramble something else together.
What we didn’t know yet: Aunt Toni had shown up at the last minute having booked that thirteenth meal herself, then insisted we bring it to Grandmama’s and eat it together at one table. We tried to hand her money back. She refused every time. “This is for the kids,” she said, “and their trip.” So we sat around Grandma’s living room—all of us, the meal we thought we didn’t have—laughing over a curry that had come down to a soot-covered pot and a scraped-clean spoon.
What They Were Actually Learning
The next Sunday dinner would be the most loved but the lowest profits yet. Daddy’s kafta with almond rice pilaf, tzatziki, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh—that one seemed to come together more smoothly. We began to feel like we were getting this down. But by 11 P.M. on Saturday night, I descended into the kitchen and found Aviva still at the island, a massive three-foot-diameter bowl before her, filled with kofta meat mixture as she meticulously shaped each one.
“Daddy, we’ve got this. Please let us do it! You have to preach in the morning,” she protested, trying to herd me back upstairs, but I already had my gloves on. Soon, my playful teasing and boisterous melodies had Connie and Aviva both laughing. We had created a makeshift assembly line: I was shaping the outlines and throwing each kofta across the island, which they had to catch and finish forming before I could send the next one flying. Crazy, yes—crazy fun and utterly wonderful.
So, the tally after the Kofta Sunday showed we’d offered our best flavors and blessed a bunch of families but netted less than expected. Still, it was success!
Finally, weeks into the effort, by this past Thursday, we were two-thirds of the way to $4,500, further than any of us, including the kids, had imagined possible eight weeks earlier.
That same day, Brother Gary called Beck. He was hosting a gathering Friday for about 115 seniors and wondered if Aviva could cater the whole meal—entrée, drink, dessert. The first response around the family was that Friday was needed for market prep before Saturday. I told them: learn to pivot. This was a better opportunity than the market. We told Brother Gary yes, and asked him to name a fair price. He landed on $25 a plate, and we built the meal to fit it.
In the middle of my busy Thursday, I looked at my schedule and saw Beck had booked a meeting with my 17-year-old Aviva. She sat across from me. “I need ideas for this meal, Daddy,” she said.
We worked backward from what a room full of senior citizens would actually want—nothing too rich, nothing too spicy—through six different menus, before landing on a taco bowl: cilantro-lime rice, charro beans, fajita chicken, street corn, a bright lime dressing, warm tortillas, and a sparkling mint lemonade to make it feel like summer. For dessert, I told her: raspberry panna cotta. Simple, yummy, and—this mattered as much as the flavor—much of it could be made ahead, so the pressure wouldn’t all land at once on the night itself.
A hundred and fifteen people turned into more than that by the time service started. I didn’t even make it up to the commercial kitchen. This one belonged to the kids—Aviva, Connie, and Sean, with Tina, Cousin Christine and Aaron pitching in, though they aren’t part of this trip. Dinner service went smoothly. Though they ran ten short on panna cotta and covered the gap with ice cream, because that’s the other half of the lesson: you plan meticulously, and then you pivot without panicking when the plan runs out after more customers show than booked.
What Actually Got Raised
We tallied it up this past Sunday morning, and the total told its own story—it ran well past what a $25-a-plate meal should have brought in. Leafing through the basket of contributions, the bills said what the seniors hadn’t: an extra twenty folded in behind another bill, a check written for twice the ask, more than one plate simply paid for twice over. We all felt grateful . . . And more than a little humbled.
Between the lemonade stand’s 100-dollar cup, the Salisbury steak dinners, the Fourth of July sloppy joes and watermelon slush, the tikka masala, the kafta night, and 100-plus taco bowls for Brother Gary’s seniors—plus part-time job checks Sean and Connie kept steadily handing over—we reached and passed our $4,500 benchmark.
We haven’t left the driveway for the airport yet, but it already feels like we’ve traveled a great distance. Aviva knows something now about margins and portions, labor, and which menus generate buzz and which do not. The three of them know better how to keep their hands moving, and they’re learning how to prevent their tempers from flaring when a deadline and a hot stove close in on them in the same room. Every family powwow and huddle—and there have been more than usual—has left us more humbled, more committed, more respectful of each other, and determined to become what God wants us to be to serve, to love, and to bring Him honor.
We added it up last night and figured that more than 650 individual portions have been served. And the kids know—more personally than ever—what a privilege it is to serve so many dear souls whose encouragement and love make the food and effort seem paltry and light by comparison. Business is only as good as the relationships it honors: all the families who supported the effort and paid more than asked, never knowing how tight our margins were. They’re grateful for a single aunt who bought a family meal only to share it with us that same busy night, an elderly minister who handed a 17 year old her first catering job, a Papaw who bought the Salisbury steak meal and also gave twice the amount at the senior supper.
Most of the best things didn’t make it onto our spreadsheet.
So on this Tuesday morning, before a single mile of the actual journey, I’m grateful—not in the generic, general way, but specifically: for a wife who drafted WhatsApp announcements and rode herd on the chaos of teenage food production; for three teenagers who tied on some aprons and picked up grill tongs and did not once quit when the numbers seemed impossible; for a community of people who showed up with interest, jobs, and trust exactly when it was needed.
We are departing for South Africa this very evening. Our family forms just a small part of the team traveling there—quite a crew of individuals talented in music, teaching, and storytelling (to help the small church get its message of hope). Indeed, our family will engage heavily in teaching and discipleship as well. Yet, earlier this summer, we all found ourselves together in a kitchen infused with the aroma of cardamom and clove—an experience that, I suspect, will leave us changed, no longer quite the same people who embarked on this journey.
Thank you all for your love and continued prayers—we’ll be carrying your grace and greeting to your brothers and sisters on the Western Cape, across the pond!
Asi