Lentil Lament

It wasn’t supposed to take hours. 

Hot, frustrated, I rested my head against the back of the chair. My thoughts mutinied, annoyingly prancing ‘told you so’.

Seriously though, didn’t I tell myself 100 gazillion times that the kitchen wasn’t for me? But I got ambitious, spurred on by a seemingly fantastic idea…and free time. Yes, I would prove my prowess as vegetarian chef extraordinaire! Today’s creation: lentil veggie balls.

Don't be fooled. Just breathing too closely to them threatened a collapse.

Truth is I’m like Sweet Brown when it comes to food experiments. But every now and then I take a step of faith (perhaps leap is more accurate) and ‘try a ting’.  More often than not, I surprise myself with the results. I had hoped to pat myself on the back again. Instead I sat, wearily eyeing the bowl of lentil mixture on the counter, praying that the batch of balls frying in the pan wouldn’t crumble like the first.

It did.

Talk about dashed hope. I planted myself in the chair again. Throwing away the mixture wasn’t an option (almonds and cashews ain’t cheap!). I rallied my thoughts. There had to be a way to redeem this potential food fail.

Food Fail About-face

Sometimes, out of the blue, an everyday experience becomes an object lesson. That’s what happened the moment I thought to redeem this situation.

We are only a minute fraction of who God is; but we’re still like Him, created in His image, in His likeness (Genesis 1:26). Therefore it’s not hard for me to connect my desire to save a situation – to fix it, to make it better – with the character of my heavenly Father, who came up with the ultimate redemption plan from before the creation of this world.

God had an amazing idea – mankind. Our first parents were a masterpiece, deemed ‘very good’. But when they chose disobedience over following their Creator, they lost an important ingredient in their original design.

Generations upon generations later, we too, through our choices, have often eliminated the one Element from our lives that will keep us from falling apart: Jesus. We can’t expect to function like we were intended to without Him and he reminds us of this fact in John chapter 15.

Of course we still mess up. We make mistakes and can’t seem to get it together. But God looks at us and says, ‘Come now, let us reason together…though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool’ (Isaiah 1:18). The only thing He’ll be throwing away is ‘our [confessed] sins into the depths of the sea’ (Micah 7:19). But we have to choose Christ if we want to regain what was lost and fulfill our true purpose. Once we are in Christ we are 'new creation[s]; the old has passed away, behold, new the new has come' (2 Corinthians 5:17).

 

My lentil veggie balls were clearly not happening. My new creation? Veggie patties (or burgers). But before I journeyed down that road, I added the ingredient I avoided before: flour. Not a lot but just enough to keep it together.

 

Things don’t always turn out how we want it; but oftentimes that’s our greatest blessing as the end result may be just as good as or even better than we had planned.

Maybe I'll make more time for food experiments after all :).

p.s. They were in fact delish!