Muddy Pies

Within the last four months I have deeply plunged into the exciting world of cooking. Because I have been working out of our home and with Julie working at the Saltbox, I have been preparing dinners to be ready for her when she gets home. While I wouldn't considered any of these meals to be great works of art, it is still quite a step of growth for someone who pretty much only knew how to boil water to cook hotdogs!

All this cooking reminds me of my older brother. My brother cooked an apple pie for us once as kids and made us sit down and eat it completely. Normally this would be a good thing, but in this case he did not put together the ingredients correctly and so it tasted terrible. While he did not eat it himself, he stood over us younger siblings and made us eat every last bite. It looked OK on the outside but the inside was another matter. I guess my brother was exercising his rights as "lord of the pies".

For many years I have looked at myself sort of like a pie. The outside was covered with a thin layer of Christian frosting that would seem thick enough to pass me off as an angel food cake. But once you looked underneath the religious surface the contents of the pie were not as pleasing - in fact they were made of mud. I tried my best to keep the frosting intact for that special Christian appearance, but the mud still would seep through. The truth is that the false self underneath continuely rose to the surface of my fake veneer. That false self was the way I lived my life out of trusting in human resources. That Christian frosting was tough to maintain when all the while I actually was leaning on my self and not God. It was all a rather muddy affair!

What I needed was for God to take that mud and breathe into it the breath of life. That breathing was simply sitting close enough to him to feel his love-breath for me as I really am. When he wrapped his arms around me and sighed I knew that all frosting-fronts and muddy ingredients were no longer necessary. The mud could be transformed with the real self in its place. He loved me for who I really was and so I could trust him. With that God-breath came a shift from trust in myself and human resources into a radical trust in God. It was OK to be the real me because that was the person he created and loved.

While the pie is still baking in the oven the reality is that now what you see is what you get.