Coconut pie

October 7, 2008

I went to a fantastic retreat this weekend and am still floating on air, immersed in the Christlike love exhibited towards me by the ladies and men who put on the retreat. It was more than words can express and I am starting the week determined to be a better person. But, I have a confession to make about a moment during the weekend when I adopted a non-Christlike attitude (I hate it when that happens, you know? Try so hard to be all spiritual and loving and everything, and then somebody rubs me the wrong way, and bam, out come the claws. Jeez).

Anyway, there was a woman at the retreat whose job it was to keep us moving from activity to activity. She was very drill-sargeant and often rude about it. We mentioned her to the retreat leaders and they said she has a heart of gold, she used to be in the military, and that’s just the way she is. The moderator for the event was her best friend, and kept calling her “Boss-a-me” (as in, “you aren’t the boss of me”). Before long, all fifty ladies at the retreat were calling her that instead of her real name, and I think she got a kick out of it.

Anyway, when lunch arrived, it fell to me to help a lady in a wheelchair get her food, which took some time to get her drink, dessert, and so on. When she was finally settled, I got my own food and sat down to eat. By that time, Boss-a-me was ringing the bell and saying it was about time to go to the next room. Everyone else was on dessert and I’d barely finished my salad, still had my fruit to eat, and most of all, I had my eye on some homemade coconut pie they’d just put out. Everyone was raving about how good it was. I haven’t had pie, my favorite dessert, in a loooong time, and was very determined to get some of it. By now, the bell was ringing furiously, and Boss-a-me is getting very military with everyone, so I jumped up, threw my plates away, and headed to the dessert table to grab a piece of coconut pie and take it into the other room with me. Boss-a-me met me at the table, saying “no food on the tables, there isn’t room”, so I left it. I’d had this very spiritual, Christ-filled weekend, but here I was heading to the other room, muttering to myself about this woman and how rude she was, and how could there not be a space for a piece of pie? When I got to the table in the other room, a few of the other ladies were grumbling as well, she’d made them throw away whole plates of food because there wasn’t room on the table for it (and there was). And, yes, I was feeling guilty about my whiny attitude, and decided that was God’s way of telling me I didn’t need to eat any more sugar.

Well, fortunately, the next activity was quiet meditation (so we could meditate away our grumpiness…we’d gone to bed at 11:30 and had to get up at 5:30, so we were tired, too). The room was darkened, the facilitator asked us to close our eyes, and imagine ourselves in this wonderful scene with Jesus, music was playing, it was so calming I almost fell asleep. In my meditation, I asked Jesus to forgive me for my lousy attitude towards this lady just trying to do what she was asked to do. Soon, we were asked to open our eyes, and were so excited to find they had placed a bag of letters in front of each of us, from family and friends. They gave us plenty of time to read these words of love and encouragement from our loved ones. Needless to say, I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. What an amazing blessing this was.

One of my letters was from my younger sister Katy. She is a petite little ball of joy, with huge dimples and sparkling eyes. She is full of the Holy Spirit. God is always leading her to do things that are so timely for me, and the rest of our family. Well, her letter was just that. She was describing how I’d been there for her while she was growing up. To make her point in her own precious way (complete with a hand-drawn picture)J, she described me as a palm tree, tall and slender, bending down to help others, making it easy for her to climb up and get coconuts for nurturance, with a crown of beautiful palms to keep harm away from her.

Wow. Coconut pie, coconut tree. Ok, God, I get it. Boss-a-me had known we were getting this surprise and if we’d had food all over the tables, there wouldn’t have been room to place these large bags of love letters for the eight ladies at each table. She had our ultimate good in mind.

I get an attitude with God sometimes (the real “boss-of-me”) because I want something and He says no. I may not know His reasons, and may pout a bit. He knows that the thing I think I need so badly will only fill me up for the moment, but the gift He has planned for me will fill me up for a lifetime.

“But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”