House on the Rock

Seldom would it seem that my too-crispy top lasagna noodle could be a tool for gospel impact. The burnt-and-yet-raw phenomenon that is my skillet chicken would, at face value, be an unlikely weapon for waging war against sin or sadness or loneliness in the lives of those around me. But when I stop to consider the sheer magnitude of meals shared in homes that it must have taken for the gospel to reach me from where it started, it is staggering. Presumably there have been chefs worse than myself. If not worse, less equipped: no air-fryer, no Stauffer's heat-and-eat chicken enchiladas, no refrigeration. Sometimes no table, and yet they gathered. The table I have and the food set upon it, from Domino's delivery to attempted tortellini, is a sacred and essential gathering that might be a step toward earth as it is in heaven. Hospitality as a gospel mission, burnt edges and all. Making Jesus known to the nations, noodle by crispy noodle.

"Nothing will grow if your roots are rotten," a student with far more botanical knowledge than myself  only semi-critically whispered as she examined the classroom plants that line my window wall. I breathed in the metaphor as she unpotted and vowed to repot my greenish-brown broken promise from August when I said I'd keep these leaves alive. But staying alive with rotten roots is every bit impossible for a plant and a person -- I think back to that dreadful day in the garden, the original sin that rotted me to my core, the rotten roots that would end my life had the master gardener not come to tread on the very dirt He created and vowed to make me altogether new. Repotted, restored to wholeness and fullness, able to grow despite my rotten roots. It defies botany and science and all common sense that the creator of mountains and nations would take on my root-rot, die and then rise, that I might be planted in the soil of salvation and forever be alive.