“Life is not a perfect graham cracker!”
I had a free period between classes every Monday morning during homeschool co-op. Sitting in the lobby getting to know a new friend, she described her children and her approach to parenting. As we talked Deva blurted out that perfectly quotable statement. My brain latched onto it like a magnet.
Deva described her children in the beauty of their individuality and the color of their contrasts. Her youngest is the free spirit, her oldest is the precise and orderly. She explained an example of the struggle her oldest had with chaos and disorder in a series of events involving graham crackers. This poor kid could not handle a broken graham cracker for an afternoon snack. His God given design for order struggled with the broken rectangles, and no matter how often he was offered crackers in pieces he struggled against it. The dissonance of a perfect shape, now broken, wasn’t a reality that came easily to him. And like the amazing mom that she is, Deva tried to help prepare her child for the struggles of life using simple things like graham crackers.
When have you ever opened a plastic wrapped block of graham crackers and found every rectangle intact? Never! That’s when! Those things always have at least a few broken. Always!! You’re outside making smores’, laying out each ingredient for the moment when that hot marshmallow will make a perfect, sweet sandwich. Ripping that package open you start sorting through the crackers to find the ones that are at least only half broken into squares. Those are the ones you need for smores’, no diagonally broken crackers will do. If you’re lucky you’ll find a few fully intact crackers and break those into your needed squares. The mangled and diagonally broken pieces get shoved into a Ziplock bag for some other use. That’s just the way it goes! We all know it! They’ll be shoved into the pantry to feed to your kids some afternoon, made into a pie crust, or forgotten about for years until they’re finally thrown away.
Deva’s right, life isn’t a perfect graham cracker. It’s broken, messy and rather crumbly. Sure, it’s sweet, satisfying and wholesome. But it’s all of these things at the same time. And I understand her son’s struggle, because I feel it too. It’s not supposed to be this way. God doesn’t love the brokenness and the hurt, it’s not his design. There is something in all of us that innately knows how wrong those diagonal breaks are. We struggle with wanting to see the wrongs righted in the here and now, a world where that isn’t entirely possible, no matter how much effort we exert. Most days are broken and beautiful, all at the same time.
The harsh truth is that some seasons aren’t a partially broken block of crackers as I’ve been describing. They would be better described as crushed rather than broken. No resemblance of rectangles left, more a bag full of cracker crumbs and dust. When you open the box, this mutilated bag of graham crackers is just as unexpected and unrecognizable as the realities in life that leave us in the same. Crushed to an unrecognizable state. It’s hard to imagine finding a way to make sweet, sticky sandwiches in these seasons. They’re just plain hard and unappetizing. Some things can be redeemed (hello, graham cracker crust!) but it’s okay if you can’t see it now. It’s even ok if you can’t ever see it. God doesn’t tell us we have to redeem all things; he says that he will do that work.
I’m not going to pretend I have life figured out, or that I have answers for the crushing and breaking that our experiences bring. But I am going to look for the good and see where God is present in the middle of the mess. To find the sweet and savor those perfectly shaped moments when they come. I want to watch how God is mending the nasty breaks, while still fully feeling the tears of pain roll down my cheeks. Is it possible to find ways of seeing the world where we can find joy in the middle of the pain?
Can we dance in the rain? Can we sing while we weep? Can we eat the broken graham crackers?
This resonates deeply with me. I’m looking forward to future posts!