Grace by the Rivers of Babylon

Despite being my favorite dish, I had never cooked chapati in my life until August 16, 2026, when my kids woke up demanding chapatis. The resident chapati maker herself was one Atlantic Ocean away from this land of the free, having left me with the kids to go and enjoy a two-week holiday back in Kenya. And fatherhood has a way of humiliating you into learning.

So, I consulted some YouTube chef. The video began in a calm, experienced voice: “Get six cups of multipurpose flour.” I paused and got the flour. Back to the video: “Add one teaspoonful of salt.” I paused and added salt. Then: “Add one teaspoonful of sugar.” I stopped. Sugar? In chapat?

My instincts rebelled. I had no memory of sugar in chapat. At what point in the history of Kenyan civilization did sugar sneak into chapat? Sugar belongs in mandas. Chapat is in the tradition of waru, mchele, nyoyo, things you cook with salt only.

Of course, as a New Jersey resident with part-time Minnesota credentials, I should have developed some tolerance for diversity, including culinary experiments. But there are limits. A good patriotic Kenyan will tell you that chapat is untouchable.

Anyway, after a few depressing minutes, I persuaded myself that when a confident stranger with a cooking channel on YouTube tells you to put sugar, you put sugar.

Bringing the dough together was easy. But rolling was different. Apparently, the objective is to produce perfectly round chapatis. A task I eventually conquered by producing approximately round ones.

An hour later, I was ready to be complimented for my contribution to humanity. My five-year-old son, Lwanda, was the first to go. He took a bite and paused. Then with the brutal nonchalance of a child, he calmly quipped, “Daddy, chapos shouldn’t have sugar.”

Just like that. One sentence condemning an hour of labor.

There are things we consume our whole lives without ever knowing the sacrifice that makes them possible. Food, knowledge, relationships, comfort, love, a loyal spouse, a salary, a business client, home… Things so available on a regular basis that they don’t register to us as gifts. Just mere background.

Then one day, distance comes between us and them. And exile does something strange: it converts what you merely had into what you suddenly know you love. Sometimes it takes leaving home to discover what home had been giving you freely all along.

And maybe that’s why, in exile, God sometimes speaks through a small, stubbornly authentic voice. A child’s taste buds can remember the taste of home in a way that an algorithm can’t.

The YouTube chef was not wrong. Maybe it is simply my tastes that cannot accommodate sugared chapatis. But no distant authority, however knowledgeable, can reproduce home for you. They have never eaten at your table, climbed the slopes of your village, lived your life, drank from your streams, or even fought your battles, your thirsts, and your hungers.

Perhaps you are far away today, and only now discovering what you had. Perhaps it has taken you painful moments by your own rivers of Babylon to make you remember Zion.

Take heart. Home is still worth finding.

And sometimes grace leads us there through the smallest voices, like the memory of a taste, a child at the table reminding us of something we had almost forgotten.

Psalm 137:1

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.”