A recipe for hope

Let’s turn down the volume on the harks and the hallelujahs for just a few moments. This is a day for a few affirming words for Christians, that fractured, persevering bunch that agrees on very little, except the hope and healing born in a little boy so many centuries ago.

This story starts not with a Silent Night, but with a violent one.

It happened 25 years ago, the Fourth of July when Jan Bowes was 26 years old. She was living in Albuquerque, N.M., working for the Indian Health Service and planning to attend med school. After the fireworks that evening, she headed to bed.

At 3:20 a.m. she was awakened by the point of a knife at her throat.

A man had crawled into her apartment and was now threatening to kill her. She believed him. “Oh, that’s going to take a really long time,” she remembers thinking. “It’s not a big knife.”

About 40 minutes passed. He wanted to overpower and humiliate her so he raped her instead. Then the door slammed and the man disappeared forever into the darkness.

Jan was devastated. She gave up her job, her plan to become a doctor, her sturdy sense of herself. She dreamed of knives and rarely slept. She couldn’t eat.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to live in a world with such pain.

But one day, a friend asked her, “Jan, why do you think God wanted you raped?”

The question infuriated her. God didn’t cause rape. Besides, she didn’t have much interest in Christianity, nor did she care much for the people who hang out with God. But she struck a deal. She’d read the Bible, start with Genesis and make her way clear through Revelation, and wait to see if she had one. If God was real, maybe she’d stick around.

It’s not the way she’d recommend anyone read the Bible now. You start with Genesis, and you’re bogged down in Leviticus before you know it. But Jan hung in there. She also underwent counseling, and found solace in her relationship with her husband-to-be, a kind medical student named Felix Martinez. And as she read chapter after chapter in the early morning, she discovered a compassionate God that really did care about her suffering.

She had always been confident, now she was filled with terror. She’d always been a pacifist, now she wanted vengeance.

But she found words that soothed both.

She read about God’s fiery plan for unrepentant offenders. And in Deuteronomy she found words like these: “The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured.”

“Yeah!” she cheered. She could let her vindictive energy go. God had it covered.

By the time she reached 1 Peter, she realized she was reading an intensely personal message of love. She could imagine Christ taking her pain into his body so that she didn’t have to carry it around anymore.

Years went by. Her fears and her fury subsided. Healing gradually turned into forgiveness. She married Felix, became a therapist named Jan Bowes Martinez and moved to Spokane. And here she worked with women living in poverty who came to Christ Clinic at Westminster Presbyterian Church on Boone.

She recognized the pain in their eyes. It was like hers had been. She thought the words that healed her would help them, too, and she invited them to a Bible study. The women never showed up.

Finally, one day, Jan said, “I’ll bet they’d come if we paid them.”

And so Christ Kitchen was born. A handful of women arrived early for Bible study and stayed to package a dried bean soup mix that could be sold to cover their salaries. They stayed for a simple soup lunch Jan cooked and left with small checks.

Over time, word of the cash and Jan’s crazy humor and the kitchen’s loving atmosphere spread. More women showed up. The product line grew — Heavenly Cocoa, Joyous Gingersnaps, Testament Tea. Volunteers drove from churches all over town. Affluent women showed up with lavish hot lunches of lasagna and salad and went away feeling nourished themselves.

Now 35 to 40 women crowd into the battered church fellowship hall at 8:30 a.m. each Thursday morning. They bring stories of domestic violence shelters, lost children and heroin addiction. They show up looking for the $7.35 an hour Christ Kitchen pays and wind up transformed.

Jan, who has little faith in politics, turned to a sort of Christ-centered capitalism, fueled by her relentless energy, her humor and love. She and God have built a business. Christ Kitchen took in $117,000 last year. She takes no salary. MBAs blanch when she tells them her business plan. She increases sales solely to be able to hire more labor.

This holiday was her busiest ever. Gift baskets of 12-Bean Disciple Soup and Blue Corn Bread of Life flew off the shelves. She estimated a new booth at River Park Square this season would bring in an extra $20,000 to $30,000 all on its own.

Now Jan has a grant for $220,000 for a commercial kitchen that will employ women more often, for salaries they could actually live on. In 2006 she and Felix, a Spokane pathologist, will sell their large South Hill home and move their family to a 100-year-old West Central house on the Spokane River. There she can minister right outside her door.

Today Jan plans to rest and to celebrate.

She’ll think about the Christmas story, its setting in a dark world of oppression and violence, the pregnant teenager, the homeless couple — and of how light appeared in such an unassuming form.

Aspects of this tale resemble her own.

“It’s just this dark, dark tragedy,” she says, “that ends really well.”