Our family loves the food network! Which I’m still amazed how a network about food that you can’t taste or smell can be so addictive. But they have us hooked. One of our favorite shows is Chopped. Four chefs start out competing with four mystery ingredients in the appetizer round. And I mean these ingredients are most of the time things I’ve never even heard of. For instance, last night they had rabbit kidneys, salt and vinegar potato chips, garbanzo beans and some other thing I can’t even pronounce all in their first basket. And they had to use those four ingredients to come up with an appetizer. All in twenty minutes! Crazy!
Each round there are three judges who critique, often harshly, and at each course some one gets chopped. As we’ve watched this over the last couple of years and I’ve heard the often borderline mean comments of the judges I’ve said, “They need to have a chopped with the judges so they can experience what these contestants go through.” And they finally did! And do you know what the judges response was? “I had no idea it was this hard. I am going to view the contestants so much differently now.” And I turned to Philly and said, “Isn’t life the best teacher that way.”
It is so true. We do discover so much when we “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” That is why I am so careful to offer advice to people walking roads that I have never walked. I can give them Godly principles. I can give them general answers of our common denominators, like pain, or loss. I can pray for them. I can listen to them. I can tell them what the Bible says. But to act as if I know, truly know what that journey will hold, or what all the forks in the road will be, or what will be required of them, or what they should do in every situation, I simply don’t know.
What I do know now is how divorce feels. It has given me a common denominator with all of those who have suffered deep loss whether the loss of a spouse, the loss of a child, the loss of a dream. I understand the deep pain of loss. But even inside of those there are so many different factors, components, emotions. I know what it is to be a “bonus-mom” to five children I didn’t give birth to and the unexplainable joys and sometimes breath-taking challenges that come along with that. Yet there are still aspects of “bonus-moming” I don’t know.
I think our challenge in this life is to realize that when God allows something to be written into our story, whatever it may be, He has allowed it so that we will operate with a new understanding, compassion, availability for others who will some day have that be a part of their story. It is also an important reminder that if you’re sitting on the other side of the table, having never spent twenty minutes having to make a “rabbit kidney” appetizer, you might want to be careful how much you think you really know.
Who has God put in your path lately that has had a story similar to yours?
