This morning I decided it’s time to settle myself down and concentrate on writing something about Kairos (God-time intersecting with earth-time), since after all, Kairos IS what inspired this blog into existence in the first place. And so I’m ending up rewinding my mind so it could gawk for a while at a memory from yesterday afternoon.
Here it is.
I was driving home after shopping for the rest of the paint I’ll need for the upstairs walls – a time-intensive errand since the rebate offer expires TOMORROW and I wanted to save $28 on the remaining 7 gallons. That $28 could fund a $25 cash gift for a friend’s kid who just graduated from high school, with $3 left over for me to secretly buy some jelly beans (sssshhhh, don’t tell anyone) – an opportunity not to be wasted, according to my frugal mindset.
After getting the paint, I stopped at Meijer to grab a green pepper, head of broccoli, a few ears of corn, and 4 pork chops that had been marked down to 40% off - and ended up talking with the butcher. He appeared to be in his late 60’s or early 70’s, a wizened-looking fellow with smudgy trifocals, deep facial-wrinkles reminiscent of bottomless glacial cracks, and very little white hair under his obligatory red visor. He’d obviously been around the block, and I figured he surely knew his stuff.
Me: “Hi – I have a quick question for you.”
Him: “Sure – what is it?”
Me: “Do you have any organic meat in the store anywhere? Fresh or frozen?”
He seemed to suddenly stiffen, as if poked on the back of the neck with the bonfire-heated tip of a metal hot dog stick. He gazed into space and squinted with watery eyes at the fluorescent lights, presumably in an attempt to focus. I honestly wondered if he was having a stroke or something. But eventually he turned back to me with a look on his face bordering on defeat and/or disgust, and gestured with a floppy wave of one arm toward the front of the store.
Him: “You could look down by produce in that special case they have down there.”
Me: “By produce?”
Him: “Yes, they have soy burgers down there.”
I tried not to sneer, even thought I felt a hybrid of disappointment and sarcasm rise in my throat. It was as if he’d waved me on toward Antarctica – a place he’d never been, and didn’t ever intend to visit. But he would send ME there…to this foreign-country-of-a-refrigerated-case where they kept the too-expensive, nutritionally questionable FAKE MEAT. I kept my composure and replied with a blank face, holding in the snarl I felt rising inside.
Me: “No, I’m looking for ORGANICALLY GROWN MEAT. Not artificial meat.”
Him: “All our meat is labeled ‘natural’ – does that help you?”
Me: “Ummmmm, no.”
His ego went limp, right there in front of me, like a deflated balloon. He simply didn’t know what I was talking about, but of course couldn’t admit it. That would be unmanly and disgraceful, and he’d lived way too long to dethrone his manhood over some stupid question about organic meat.
I walked away saddened by the fact that such a large grocery with so much stuff lacked Real Meat without added hormones or antibiotics – meat that had not been fed with genetically engineered grain covered with pesticides and fertilizers. But then again, I figured the butcher-man could be wrong. Perhaps he just didn’t know. There could be an organic chicken roosting somewhere, a fugitive hiding behind those frozen chicken dinners with their stilbestrol-shot-up birds fried in high-temperature hydrogenated fat and seasoned with MSG. That would be just like an ingenious organic chicken, to play hide-and-seek behind the enemy lines.
So I decided to check for myself, and began wandering with a dementia-stricken gaze up and down aisles beside various meat counters and freezer cases, glaring this way and that, peering with investigative eyes for that slyly hidden ORGANIC chicken. A pasture-fed cow would have been fine, too, or at least part of one – like a rump roast. I would even have settled for the organs – a heart or liver – or the tail, the lowliest, fattest, toughest member of all. About 15 minutes later I decided the old butcher-geezer was right. There was no organic meat anywhere. Just soy burgers – bah!
On the way home after this rather intense screening of the entire meat department, at an intersection on 450 North (Buck Creek Road, for those of you who know), I encountered the remains of a horrible accident that had occurred about 15 minutes earlier. Several volunteer EMT’s, four police cars, and two ambulances had barely arrived, and attendants were trying to pry a body out of a very crumpled, hardly recognizable car that had evidently been broadsided before spinning into a field where it sat, all in a heap, looking like an asteroid. I didn’t know if the body was dead or alive, but things looked grim, or maybe a few steps down from grim – tragic.
Then, in a moment that could well have originated with God Himself. I realized I could have been tangled up in this accident if I’d not spent 15 minutes wandering around searching for organic meat that didn’t exist. This reality slapped me down internally, reminding me of times as a child when my dad lost it with uncontrolled anger and left me feeling prickly all over and emotionally flattened. I suppose such gut-level steam-roller-ing can be beneficial when it leaves you so stunned that you have no choice but to pay attention and learn from what is going on.
As I turned the car around to find another way home, rain started pattering. These raindrops weren’t anything unusual, they were just ordinary blip-blip-blops on the windshield for goodness sake, but in the context of the last couple of days, and now in light of my near-miss with this accident, I felt the hand of God on my heart. “Rest. Know that I am God. Your life belongs to Me. I give and maintain life, and I take it away. You’re thirsty; I will water your heart and soul. Lean on Me.”
All evening that message sunk deeper and deeper, as if I’d become a very dry sponge soaking up His grace. First I felt humbled, then strangely encouraged, as if fleshed out from the flattened position to become stronger and more submitted to Him than before the flattening. Finally, I meditated on God’s ongoing faithfulness to His people. I am alive because He has ordained that I live, because He wants a relationship with me, and has things for me to do – a slot to fill.
I praise You, Lord Jesus – forgive my weakness. "I do believe; (Lord) help me overcome my unbelief!" Mark 9:24 NIV
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