The Cookie Dough Life

I always wanted to be tall. Crane your neck to look at me, kind of tall. Duck to walk through every doorway, kind of tall. You know, Bobby McGhee, kind of tall. (Yes, I’m shorter than Bobby. But when we were kids, being older, I was taller.)    So, based on advice my uncle gave me when I was five years old, I drank copious amounts of milk and every chance I got, I’d hang by my arms from tree limbs, monkey bars and the like, trying to stretch myself into being tall. After all, my uncle should have known the secret or formula to growing tall. He was six feet ten inches tall, if he was a foot. Everyone knew him as Uncle Rob. But, from the time I could talk I called him “Tall Uncle”.    Tall Uncle had an advantage over us mere mortals who suffered from HD (Height Disabilities). He could use his height as an excuse to buy corvettes, for example. He claimed it was the only car in which he could comfortably fit.  I wanted that excuse, too. Still do, in fact. Thanks to my father’s side of the family being tall just isn’t in my genetic code. Think about it. People of Cherokee descent aren’t known for being tall. Still, I drank enough milk to line the pockets of any dairy farmer with his weight in gold. By the time I was in my thirties all that milk took its toll on my system and I was diagnosed lactose intolerant. At least my arms were long. Okay, not really.

Being diagnosed lactose intolerant has a real downside. It meant that chocolate milkshakes were out of the question. It meant that at the end of a long work day, those freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, dipped in a cold glass of milk, were out of the question, as well. (Yeah, I have a thing for chocolate. It’s one of the major food groups, isn’t it? And, to my dismay most chocolate foods, chocolate chips in particular, have milk in them.) That being the case, you can imagine how crushed I was to return home from work only to discover my two loving children working their way through a large plate of chocolate chip cookies and two tall glasses of milk. How unfair, I thought. So, I did what any mature Dad would do… I went upstairs and pouted.

You know that older than dirt question that poses if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, that occurred to me in a roundabout way. If a man is pouting and no one is there to see it, does it count? Put that way the answer is obvious. No! And, I wanted my pout to count. After all, I was exerting the effort to pout. It made absolutely no sense to waste a perfectly well-developed pout. So, I went downstairs. Not just anywhere downstairs. I sat in the family room. Not in just any chair either. I sat in a chair that could easily be seen from the kitchen table. It wasn’t even my favorite chair. But, it placed me directly beneath a tall lamp and illuminated my pouting visage for all to see.

I was really getting into it, lower lip out a mile, when my five year old daughter, Amanda, popped up in front me.  She smiled radiantly from behind a gooey mask of melted chocolate and cookie crumbs. Beneath her little girl nose a milk moustache was turning quickly into a goatee and beginning to drip from her chin. “Here Daddy,” she held her hand out expectantly, “I sucked all the chocolate out. Now you can have a cookie, too.”

Without hesitation I reached out and picked up that saliva-soaked glob of what had once been a chocolate chip cookie. She beamed like the sun. The cookie, if you could call it that, was slippery and uncomfortably warm. Then, no questions, no lecture about being more thoughtful next time and baking oatmeal or peanut butter cookies instead, no telling her she could do better than this, I simply thanked her as if it were the best gift in the world and ate it. And, you know what? At the time, it probably was.

Since then, I’ve often wondered what the Father feels like when I come to him with my imperfect cookie dough life a mess - suffering from a spiritual meltdown due to choices I’ve made, life’s sometimes shattering encounters or devastating losses. I hold out my life, bracing myself for lecture or question and say, “Here, Father, will you take this?”

Imagine for a moment, you have been cut off from every living being on the planet. No one, not your family, your friends, your church want you to even come near them. Everyone is convinced that you have been rejected by God. Fear of guilt by association runs rampant and you are required to warn everyone to stay back wherever you go. You’re infected, hideously diseased. Soon after you’ve been banished from society your body goes through changes you never thought possible. It’s as though you were melting, transforming into a beast. Your mind, heart and soul suffer from loneliness and rejection. To make matters worse you are repulsed by your own existence. The stench of your rotting flesh, symbolic of your shame, follows you. And, you retreat as far as possible from society; heartbroken, rejected, damaged. I think that’s what it was like to be a leper at the time of Christ.

In Mark chapter one, we are told a leper came to Jesus and begged to be made clean. Think of the courage it took for that leper to go against the accepted norms for leper behavior and ignoring everyone else, go straight to the Source. The Message shares the story in the following way: “A leper came to him, begging on his knees, ‘If you want to, you can cleanse me.’  Deeplymoved, Jesus put out his hand, touched him, and said, ‘I want to, be clean.’  Then and there the leprosy was gone, his skin smooth and healthy.”

Did you catch the best part? Jesus was deeply moved! He reached out and touched him! It was Jesus that said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn.14:9, NIV). What does the Father feel when we finally work up the courage to approach Him with our messed up lives? Moved by an unstoppable, relentless love for us, He reaches out and touches us. There is no lecture. He doesn’t ask us how we got here or where we’ve been. He doesn’t tell us to come back when we’ve cleaned up our act. Our act is cleaned up by His act of love. It’s just the Father being the Father.

I don’t know about you, but I need to be reminded daily of the depth and width of God’s love for me. To put it in simple terms, I need to hang out with God. It gives me balance to do so.  In today’s world, metaphorical forms of leprosy still exist, at least in the minds of some. I’ve experienced their diagnosis and treatment. I’ve accepted their point of view as if it were a verdict from the throne of heaven, itself. Like other lepers I eventually retreated. Then one day I discovered the secret. I discovered the Truth all over again and in new and simple ways. Oh, not the secret to getting tall or the truth about height. That didn’t work out so well for me. The secret is to stay within the reach of God. The secret is to wrap-up in that blanket of God’s love we talked about. The Truth is I don’t have to hang from a tree, Jesus did that for me. It doesn’t matter if I’m tall or short. It doesn’t matter if I drink milk or don’t drink milk. For me, what matters is that I’m taking the risk each day and saying, “Here, Father, if you want to, will you take this?” The Truth is - He does want to.

~ Pastor Al