Day 53 - August 7 - My Microwave Christianity

Impatience is a frustrating thing -

Have you ever caught yourself standing in front of a microwave, tapping your foot, and muttering "hurry up!"? I've done it a few times, particularly in front of the coffee machine at work. There's this coffee brewer that lets you stick in 50 cents, push a button, and get a relatively decent cup of brew made fresh for you in about a minute. It's convenient, but it's amazing how I take the near-instantaneous delivery of coffee for granted.

Consider the microwave - my family got our first nukebox the year after I went to college. Before that, we somehow struggled along without this wonder of culinary technology, heating our cocoa in a cookpot, making popcorn with a two-piece oil popper (we weren't allowed to have JiffyPop - too expensive), and having to wait for HOURS for mom to heat up leftovers - I don't know how we survived our formative years! I can still remember standing around the kitchen on that Christmas morning back in 1980, marveling at how quickly the Radar Range heated up our mom's famous sweet rolls (we actually refer to them as "sticky buns" here in the Williamson family, but I suspect that talking about "heating up mom's sticky buns" might have been misconstrued, particularly by my brothers... 8-D ). What a magnificent device, the microwave!

Alas, everything has a downside, right? I'll tell you what the downside of the microwave oven is, just in case you don't know - macaroni and cheese. That's right, macaroni and cheese. When we were kids, our mom would make this steaming, bubbling pot full of sticky golden cheesy goodness with crispiness on top called "Macaroni and Cheese", and yes, the capital letters are on purpose. It was a main course in those days, and I remember running in and out of the kitchen every five minutes all afternoon, trying to find out if it was ready yet. Nowadays, the stuff they euphemistically call "macaroni and cheese" (notice - no caps) comes in a box, has powdered "cheese food" and nasty yellowy-orange artificial coloring in it, and generally reminds me of a phrase used by Crocodile Dundee when he described eating an iguana - you can eat it, but it tastes like $@&*!! But wait! You can have it in a hurry! Isn't that wonderful? You can have a box of fake cheese on cardboard noodles - and you only have to wait a few minutes for it! Woohoo.

Contrast that to the wonderful goodness for which we had to wait (for what seemed like hours), and it makes me wonder if maybe - just maybe - I shouldn't be quite so pushy about seeing God work quickly with Connor. Perhaps the final product will be so magnificent that I'll never want to eat mac and cheese from a microwave again, even if I do get it in a hurry...

Fortunately for me back then, my mom knew that my impatience wasn't the deciding factor for when the dish was done - only she knew when that happened, and when it did, it was worth the waiting. Imagine if I'd actually gotten my way - what would I have received? A plate of unmelted cheese blobs lying strewn amidst the shattered rubble of crunchy elbow macaroni (an image which reminds me of many of my early Mother's Day gifts, now that I think about it). Instead, in her motherly wisdom, she knew when the right time to serve was, and the results stick in my memory to this day. So it is with my Heavenly Father, who gently reminds me that, as of right now, it's not dinnertime yet.

I'll check back with Him in a few minutes.