The Spices of Life

Every Monday I make my weekly trip to my favorite diner. It is situated in an old building that has been around for the last 100 years and the people there are pure Kentucky. The food is good, the coffee is hot, and the waitresses like to call me "sweetie".

I love it.

I was there this morning and happened to see an older woman sitting at the table next to me. She was there with her son and they seemed to be having a nice time. The son paid the bill and offered to help his mother put her jacket on. She stood up slowly and said the following statement out loud:

"Thank you for breakfast. The food just tastes better when you are able to share a meal with someone."

Her son gave a knowing smile and eased his mother out of the restaurant into the crisp morning air. I kept my head buried in my newspaper but the tears that welled up in my eyes were evident for all to see. The comment was so poignant. The only way that she makes that statement is if she has spent considerable time eating alone. I pictured her in this old house, eating oatmeal, and staring blindly out the window. I could see her eyes flickering as she strained to see down the path...hoping that this was the morning when someone would come and share a meal with her. I could see the sadness that clouds her face when she clears the table and sits down to watch her TV shows.

It just didn't taste good.

Loneliness is such a powerful emotion. It is a feeling that cuts like a knife and then spreads through the body like a fast moving cancer. It will make you cry, it will make you scream, it will control every thought that you have. People will try and tell you that it can be cured with a good book or a night out on the town, but it can't. Loneliness is an emotion that is caused by the brain looking around the room and realizing that nobody is going to come and say hello. It is caused by our eyes desperately looking for a recognizable smile, our ears listening for a soothing voice, our fingers searching for that squeeze of reassurance. We move around the confines of our life and peer into the dark corners of our minds hoping that we forgot a piece of the puzzle. We get down on the floor and pray that there is more to life than waiting for that special someone to walk through the door.

We want the food to taste better, but we lack the spices to do it.

The problem is that we tend to look inward to find those spices that are missing in our lives. We sit in our homes and think that surely we must be doing something wrong. It must be a childhood or relationship issue that has caused us to be all alone. We keep trying to change ourselves into people that we think others want to be with and then are amazed when the world turns its back on us once again. We lay down to go to sleep at night and wonder why there continues to be an empty spot staring back at us.

The trick is to be able to look in the mirror and understand that what you are looking at is a God given image. Loneliness is actually a cruel mirage given to us by the world we live in. This world is packed with people that walk in and out of our lives each day, but yet they remain faceless. God gives us people each day that can change our world into something unbelievable but we have to be able to open our eyes. If we can only look within ourselves to find the cure than we are missing the million other antibodies that God provides each day. Get out into the world and see who is out there! Don't worry about being the right kind of person, don't try and be "that guy" or "that girl". Just be. Shake the burden of always having to be a friend to a bank of superficial people. Instead, walk proudly through life and find the "spices" that make your existence mean something.

Make this meal called Life taste good. Allow the Master Chef to provide you with the spices needed to make the food melt in your mouth and your heart skip a beat. This is a wonderful world that we have been given and God is the great provider.

This journey does indeed taste better when we are able to share the meal with someone.

Invite God to sit with you and let your taste buds revel in the experience.