Fast Food

Ministerial Meandering

Fast food

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first; fast food - such as a MacDonalds’ burger only has nutritional value if you eat the packaging.  Nuking suspect patties in a microwave on the pretext that the indeterminate, almost-round slab of rather grey, frozen mush will turn into something delicious is a forlorn hope. 

The quick fix rarely works.  A Band-Aid or Sellotape may suffice for a short while, but it’s going to fail soon enough.  The same is true of learning, I’ve found.  I once dated a girl in Medical School who had a truly photographic memory, andcould speed-read as well.  She won all the scholarships and prizes at qualification, and was the darling of many of the consultants who taught her, because she could always be relied upon to give the right answer to almost any of their questions.  She was, of course, infuriating to the rest of us lesser mortals.  Nevertheless, it was a lack of judgement that taught her that she was not cut out for a surgical career, when, as an intern, she opened the bladder of a patient with a confident sweep of the knife, when she was actually after his appendix.  She remains a world-renowned ophthalmologist who never again touched a scalpel.

For me, learning takes time.  I am not a fast reader, but once I have read a book I tend to remember it.  So, too, with other skills, like cooking, using a chain saw, training a dog; but life skills are in a league of their own.  And spiritual skills - or knowledge - comes grindingly slow to me.

Life-skills require patience and sacrifice; they also require that you understand that you will not always - or even, often - get what you want.  This is an important premise because it is relevant to your spiritual development as well.  You don’t get what you want - but you get what you need.  God will see to that, and you have to learn to ‘let go and let God’ - as the AA aphorism says 

Last night I was woken by a sharp, irregular, tattoo beating off my decking in the yard, rather like a man stumbling with a stick - trying to get to the other side of something, but never quite making it, and starting again -  a bit like Robert the Bruce’s spider.  Rain can sound like that.  So can my brain.

There are times when a fork in the road can feel like a cleft stick, and whichever way you choose to go will result in breaking one or other branch; but to remain immobile is also not an option.  However, it is a pause for thought.  Taking the ‘fast food’ option, which would be to zoom off down one or other path in the hope of some instant gratification, is probably doomed.  What happens is that you find the fast food to be unpalatable, or at least - not as advertised.  I’ll wager that you have never had an item from a fast food outlet that looks even remotely like the photograph in the menu.

But by now you have broken the stick.  What do you learn from this?  The Road Less Travelled that Robert Frost wrote about was not, ultimately, probably any more rewarding than the other choice;

‘And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.’  

And so he resolves to try the other path another day, knowing, as he does so, that he almost certainly won’t come back this way again.  Thus, his decision to take the one path over the other is something he is determined to make a success - because he must.  Whatever happens on this path, he will ‘fake it till he makes it.’

‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.’

Philip+