Faith like a Lunchbox

My husband has a new habit of taking everything but the correct lunch. We'll have a full conversation about where the right lunch is and what the right lunch is but, as soon as he gets to work, I'll get a text with the truth of which lunch he actually took.

Last week, he took both his lunch and my lunch instead of the muffins I'd baked him for breakfast. Husband up two lunches and down one breakfast and wife left with no lunch.

Last night, I packed up his lunch and didn't even tell him about the second one hidden in the back, just saying, "Remember, your lunch has the blue lid." And, since blue is his favorite color and the lunch was the only one visible and sitting right at the front of the fridge, I thought we'd be golden.

I actually thought he was joking when he texted me this morning saying he could swear I'd said red push lid.

Allow me to explain. The red lidded lunch had about 4 stale noodles and a drizzle of marinara. It was also buried in the back of the fridge. The blue-lidded lunch had a big, delicious slice of homemade quiche in it.

**When I say stale, I mean, we forgot them in the pot in which they were made on the stove all night and a full work day sometime last week.**

Instead of a healthy well-balanced meal for lunch, he will be jawing his way through his handful of mostly naked penne that is not going to sustain him through his work day and night class.

As I was joking with a coworker about this, I thought about how often God must think the same thing about us:

"Jamie, I prepared and set aside for you this amazing, healthy choice for you. I wanted that for you. Did you take it? No. You went digging around the backside of life and found door number 3 which, I know for a fact, will not satisfy you."

It's so easy to make the right choice, but we get caught up in ourselves at the last second. We think, "this is too simple. I must have misunderstood." We convince ourselves it has to be someone else's, that we should look for something other. We think that we deserve something less, that it's too good for us. We're simply not paying attention.


"Wake up, you sleepyhead city! Wake up, you sleepyhead people! King-Glory is ready to enter."
(Ps 24:7)

May our minds daily be awakened to truth, to God, and to lunch.

Slip into Spandex and Live Your Live

Texting a friend overseas today about the life-crushing "disorder" of perceived self-rejection.

It's a topic currently dominating her life and one I am not unfamiliar with in the least.

My childhood was full of love, but I was not a happy child. In fact, I spent the majority of my first 17 years wallowing in a depressive state I could not escape from. I was utterly convinced everyone hated me, thought I was ugly and stupid and were talking about me. I didn't get invited to the parties and, when I was, I was convinced they invited me because they pitied me.

One of my "life philosophies" is the theory of capacity. I've mentioned it before, and it's not complicated or wise. I just think about it a lot when I'm processing past actions.

At each stage of life, though many choices may be available, I believe that you are only capable of making a select few of those many choices based on your emotional/spiritual/psychological capacity at that time. And, unfortunately, it takes making some "life growing" choices to increase that capacity. Good doesn't always feel good.

When I was 17, I saw a sign advertising a new sport in my high school. The word saber was mentioned. For the first time in my teenage life, I went alone: autonomous action. Not one person in that meeting understood why I was there, as they were all band members, and I had no connection to their world. I joined. The next two years were full of spandex, face-hits from wandering flags, and mockery from classmates that I would be involved in something so absolutely ridiculous. For the first time, though, I did not give one flying crap what they thought. Winter guard made me indescribably happy. There was mockery, but there was not shame.

I felt more comfortable dancing in a blue spandex onesie than I ever had in my own skin. My freedom started to seep into my real life, as I was happy. I was truly happy. Clearly, I was a teenager, so happiness is relative to whatever mood swing was going on that day, but it was a marked difference in personhood. I began to believe good things and behave out of that perception. The last two years of high school were fun.

Sometimes, the solutions to problems come in unconventional solutions. I wasn't in counseling or doing any mental exercises. I was doing something silly that had no direct or obvious "purpose."

The devil doesn't always speak to us like a trenchcoated man trying to sell contraband in a dark alleyway. Sometimes, he helps us "focus". And we focus and focus and focus on the problem until we can't see the solution without somehow spiraling deeper into the problem.

Alleviate. Escape. Breathe. Do things that scare you, that inspire you, that refine you.
Stop trying to force a solution and start letting yourself live your life.