From Our Minister: Potato, Egg, and Coffee
I find myself thinking a lot about the meaning of life recently. The ‘why are we here?, Is there a point? What is mine to do?” kinds of questions. I’ve also been flashing back to my much younger self – maybe five or six years old. I have vivid memories of sitting on my tricycle in the backyard, gazing at the vastness of a blue sky and wondering what this was all about.
Maybe it’s part and parcel of growing older. Maybe after leaving behind the ‘right’ answers that got us through the busyness of the middle years, we have time to ponder again. To pay attention and to simply wonder. So, I am.
I recently found a children’s story titled Potato, Egg & Coffee. It’s a sweet tale of a daughter experiencing hardship and her father putting three pots on to boil. He places a potato in one, an egg in the second, and a scoop of coffee in the third. After letting all three simmer, he invites his daughter to tell him what she notices. The potato, which started out firm, was now soft and malleable. The egg which went in liquid, became firm. The coffee had transformed the water into a rich beverage. Her father explained that the boiling water was the adversity we all face. We each bring different qualities to the water and respond in our own way. We can collapse. We can become hardened. Or we can transform the world around us by bringing our own special flavor.
Of course, humans are more nuanced than pantry items. We have the ability to choose whether we are going to let life’s challenges change us, or if we are going to make a difference in the world around us. Everyone has a natural tendency, but we can consciously make a decision to bring love to the people around us rather than surrendering (becoming mush) or hardening (acting from fear.) If we are present to ourselves and to what is happening, we can become agents of change simply by sharing the best of who we are.
As I experience my sixty-fifth year, I find myself going back again and again to the poem, Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye. She writes:
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Kindness. Maybe that’s the flavor we have the ability to bring no matter how vigorously we’re being boiled by life. I don’t know. But it’s what makes sense today.
~ Rev Pam