A friend of mine recently gave us a free week
of meals from one of those companies that ships you a box of food every week. It’s a subscription service that you can sign up for, choosing whether you want two servings per meal, four servings per meal, etc. Some are one meal a week, others are two or three. This one is three meals in a week, delivered all at once. The box comes with every ingredient you need apart from things like olive oil and salt and other staples they expect you have on hand. Apart from that though, everything is there. It comes in little pre-measured amounts clearly labeled, and it also comes with recipes and directions for each meal.
Our first box came this week and it included the ingredients for Tom Yum-Style Shrimp & Noodles, Baked Fontina Pasta, and Salvadoran Black Bean & Cheese Papusas. Hungry yet? The upside is that we get to try new foods in new styles without buying a whole bottle of a spice or a whole package of an ingredient we may not want to use ever again. As I looked at some of the little packets on the counter today I found myself getting excited to start putting one of the recipes together. I can’t wait for dinner tomorrow!
If only all the elements of life came in little pre-packaged little envelopes clearly marked and with attached directions! One of the more humorous examples of this desire is evident in the common reflection that to get a driver’s license we must learn a whole bunch of things and prove that we can do it. All you need to have a child, though is, well, you get it. And then when we have children we wonder where the instruction manual is. I was quite sure I was never instructed on what to do with a child who wanted to eat a stinkbug; the stinkbug didn’t come labeled with a note to read chapter 17. We had to work that one out for ourselves.
To be fair, our faith does teach us some lessons. We have things like the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and Jesus’ assertion that the top two commandments are love God and love neighbor – a blanket proscription that covers so many things. We also have statements about how to forgive, about relationships, and a whole host of others. But that doesn’t mean we have all the answers to all the questions we come up with in this life. Not even close.
As for all the little ingredients of life, we don’t get perfect portion control. Sometimes we get a heaping of pain like buying a giant sized tub of mayonnaise at Costco. We wonder how we will ever get through it all. Other times we get a little packet of something we hunger for, like joy – just a taste, which can’t possibly satiate our yearning. Sometimes our pantry overflows with the leftovers of things in our life that we haven’t been able to deal with one way or another.
The church cookbooks in Central Pennsylvania sometimes had recipes for cleaning out the fridge. “Add whatever vegetable you have on hand. Add your meat. Add leftover mashed potatoes on top. Sprinkle with cheese. Bake at 350 degrees until it’s hot throughout and the cheese melts.” (Surprise! Free recipe with your Rambling this week!) One way of looking at our Lenten journey is to see it as the recipe for dealing with our leftovers. At some point we need to clean out and start over. Much of what we hold onto we can offer up in prayer or mediation. We can leave it when we make our confession and receive absolution. We can work it through has we read scripture and engage in works of mercy. This is the time to do the sweep, especially jettisoning the stuff that is so old and moldy we can’t remember why it’s there or how long it’s been there. Let it all go.
And when we do that, my experience is that we will find more of the things that we are truly hungry for – those things we get only in small measure. Life will never come to us in perfect portions with exact instruction for how to put it all together and do something with it, but we can certainly learn to do better with what we have and to seek out what we need. If we are able to walk through the rest of this season entering into the story and the movement of Jesus’ final days, we will find our way to a new understanding, not only of ourselves, but of God.
In the meantime, I’m going to go home tonight and read up on Tom Yum-Style Shrimp & Noodles. I’ll let you know how it was.
Tom+
O Lord our God, you supply every need of ours according to your great riches: Bless the hands that work in this place (kitchen), and give us grateful hearts for daily bread; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (From the Book of Occasional Services for a house blessing)