A Recipe for Joy

I love to cook. Well, really I love the idea that someday I will cook. You see I have this plan, this dream that one day I will have that kitchen, the kitchen that is fun and easy to cook in. I see it in my mind's eye and dream about all the wonderful things I will try to make.

I have a lot of dreams (don’t we all?) that may never come true, and that are skinned away every day by the potato peeler of time (please forgive the kitchen-y metaphor, but that's what it feels like!) This is made more tragic by the knife chop of reality cutting those dreams off. But dreams are truly only that—thought pictures and manufactured emotions seeking solace and peace in a story book future.

Well, that was bleak—but also true.

We all know this gradual sloughing off process. We all feel the weight when reality interrupts or cancels out our dreams. As people of faith, we are not spared the epiphanies of bodies too old, places too far, resources too small, friends gone, and loves lost. As people of faith, though, we are given consolation in our pain and hope in our distress that others simply can’t find. Perhaps, the loss of a dream is actually a revelation of God’s call.

With the loss of a dream there comes a certain clarity amidst the grief that highlights an empty place. The revelation can be that place is not empty at all, but filled with the presence of God who has been waiting for you with a plan. I love the expression that God is in the space between our thoughts, the seemingly empty space only useful as a connection is actually an eternity waiting to be found.

In the spirit of dreams lost, I offer this beautiful recipe for joy—it seems there is more than one way to cook.

A Recipe for Joy {A Poem}
By Martha Tinuviel
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Choosing joy--
Is it not like choosing cake--
Simple shorthand for a complex action?
 
What then is my recipe for joy?
Preheat the soul to absolute surrender
To the loving will of God
Who spared not His Son for your salvation.
Blend the Word of God and prayer,
Prayer and the Word,
Until the one is indistinguishable
From the other.
Stir in gratitude:
For God’s past faithfulness,
For God’s present mercies,
For God’s promises sure to come.
Add a generous pour of the oil of the Spirit
Whose fruit is joy,
And blend until thoroughly incorporated.
 
Gently mix in a spoonful of bitter trials,
For they cause the soul to rise toward heaven.
(Take care not to substitute bitter resentment,
Despite the resemblance of containers,
For to do so proves ruinous.)
Add a pinch of the pure salt of holiness
Or the liquid salt of tears.
 
Stir in a splash of sweet spiritual song,
The overflow of the Lord’s work in the heart.
Fold in the priceless treasure of the fellowship of Christ.
 
Optional:
Step outside;
Pay attention; be amazed
At whatever wondrous work of God
Lies just outside your window.
Thank someone.
Laugh out loud
With a friend.
Curve lips into a smile
In kindness to others
If not to oneself.
Make something good and beautiful and true:
A meal, a quilt,
A computer program,
A calculus equation,
A lesson plan,
A song, a garden,
A home.
 
Pour out your offering into each prepared day the Lord allots.
Bake in the warmth of God’s love
Under the heat of His gracious discipline.
When golden with reflected glory,
Share with a neighbor in need
While still hot.
 
Culinarily faithful,
Fr. Bill+