Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

food

The ingredient exchange

It was a layering kind of food day yesterday. Isabelle and I started the afternoon by making 7-layer bars for part of Phil’s birthday celebration, which starts tonight for dinner. She, of course, wanted a graham cracker, then some chocolate chips, then some butterscotch chips, then, well, I think you get the idea.

Later, we made Mediterranean lasagna. She ate a few red peppers and wanted eggplant as I diced the vegetables. When I mixed the ricotta and the eggs, she demanded some of each of those. While I was shredding the Gruyere cheese, she was almost inconsolable when I told her she couldn’t have any.

Her insistence on eating the ingredients separately rather than waiting for the finished product reminded me of what we miss sometimes in life.

When we want sex without intimacy.

Relationship without commitment.

Love without sacrifice.

Obedience without respect.

Like chocolate chips or ricotta cheese, these things can be good or OK on their own but are even better when served together with the ingredients that make them complete.

Paul writes in Romans about how the whole world knows about God because His presence is evident in what is created, but how we choose not to see Him.

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. … They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:21-23, 25)

I pray for the strength to wait for completion rather than settle for a taste of something that is far less satisfying.

It’s what’s for dinner

We enjoy watching “Iron Chef America” when we get the chance. Not so much when kitchen stadium visits our kitchen and Battle: Dinner ensues.

Isabelle wouldn’t eat her dinner tonight, even though it contained one of her favorite vegetables in the whole world, peas. She ate a few peas and proclaimed dinner over. This also could have been because she was in the middle of a “Dora the Explorer” episode and we were not eating in the kitchen because we were in the middle of a severe thunderstorm and I wanted to keep within earshot of the local news.

An hour later, after Dora and thunderstorm had passed, she began her requests to fulfill the hunger she now had.

“I want something else,” she calmly stated while looking at the shelves where the fruit snacks, cereal and snack cakes often find a home.

I told her she needed to eat her dinner.

“But I want something else,” she said a little more forcefully this time.

Again, “no.”

She took matters into her own hands, pulling a chair to the shelves, as if to illustrate that what she wanted was on one of these shelves and she could show me what she wanted if I didn’t understand her.

I told her if she pulled anything off the shelves, she was going to time out.

She reached for a box of Life cereal and proceeded to land herself in time out where she kicked and screamed and cried and lamented, “But I want something else.”

I dished up a bowl of the pasta salad I’d made and set her in front of it with a fork when time out was done. She continued to cry, “But I want something else.”

I ignored her pleas and fed Corban green beans. In the midst of her tears, she picked up her fork and began to eat. Tears subsided. And as she took bite after bite, she even said, “Thank you, Mommy” as she ate. The next time she left the table, her bowl was three-quarters empty.

I tell you this, not to brag, but because I feel like lately I’ve been telling God, “But I want something else.” Calmly. Rationally. Then hysterically, as if I’m sure He can’t hear me or understand what I’m asking for. Doesn’t He know I’m hungry, so to speak, and that I need Him to provide?

Yes, of course He does. But what He’s given me is what’s for “dinner” for the moment and I can take it and walk away fed or leave it and continue to be hungry.

I think I’m ready to eat what God’s serving for dinner, and I might even thank Him for it.