Make Me Breakfast

I planned to spend Saturday morning with a cup of hot tea and an open Bible, since honestly it had been a while since I had done that. Spending lingering time with the Lord in the mornings is one of my favorite things in the whole world, and oddly enough, it’s the first thing to go when I get busy. It makes no sense, but I’m just being honest. 

This season has indeed been a busy one. I just noticed recently that I haven’t written in over two months and I wondered how that could even happen, but then I look at my schedule and I understand. 

The past two months I have not been writing stories because I have been too busy living them. 

And before I knew it, these stories I’m living were keeping me up to midnight every night, which makes me snooze the alarm and sleep in as much as possible, sacrificing my precious time with the Lord in the mornings on the altar of my addiction to activity and busyness. 

On this particular Saturday morning, I wasn’t expecting visitors until 9:30 for our traditional waffle breakfast, so I planned to spend a couple of hours before that in some much-needed personal stillness with God. 

But the doorbell rang at 6 am. It was my neighbor, one of my Immerse residents who was going through something really difficult and needed a friend. Everyone needs a friend who will get up at 6 am, let you see them in their pajamas and messy bed head, and sit with you while you go through something crazy hard. Just by the time I was ready to go back to my apartment and start my much-anticipated time with God, a friend called as she was on her way over early for waffle breakfast. I had forgotten that she comes early and we often spend that time together one-on-one, catching up on life and nurturing our very precious friendship. By the time she got to my apartment, my next door neighbor (another Immerse resident) called on me to help her with her overflowing toilet crisis. She was trying to get out the door for her first day at her new job right when her toilet decided to break and her childcare cancelled on her. So I found myself calling a plummer, volunteering to babysit for the next 5 hours, and having no waffles ready whatsoever by the time people started showing up for breakfast as 9:30. 

That’s how my life has been going these days. No wonder I haven’t had time to blog. 

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I apologized to the Lord. I’m sorry, but it is happening again. I promise I want to spend time with you, but I keep getting interrupted by these people you have given me to love and serve! In that moment, I felt so guilty. I felt like I had been neglecting God and needed to prove my love to him by dropping everything to spend 30 minutes of “quiet time” with him. There was this subtle fear — like I just wanted God to know that I love him, and I was afraid that he wouldn’t know my love for him since I wasn’t spending time with him like I wanted to. 

I thought about Jesus telling Peter, “Peter do you love me? Feed my lambs.” Only Jesus said it this way to me: “Make me breakfast.” 

His gaze towards me was not condemning, but understanding. I realized that the most faithful and loving thing I could do for God in that moment was to serve breakfast to the people he has given me to love, just like I do every Saturday morning. In feeding them, I was loving him. 

So I went back into the kitchen and started making waffles and greeting every new person that walked through the front door. Jireh was in the kitchen with me, helping flip waffles and chop fruit while I scrambled eggs. It wasn’t long before Jon and Kolton arrived — Kolton went straight to the piano and started playing “In Christ Alone”, filling the apartment with worship music as people mingled and talked and laughed. Jon stayed in the kitchen and practiced quoting Philippians with me, since we have a group of friends who are all memorizing the book of Philippians together. It was amazing — the calming effect that worship and Scripture have on the heart. Peace washed over my soul as my friends came around me in my frazzled state on that crazy Saturday morning. 

Normally, Saturday morning is my time to serve people, but on this Saturday morning, they served me. I was tired and weary from the week and from the unexpected and demanding events of the morning, and they stepped in to cook waffle breakfast. They filled the house with the smell of coffee and the sound of worship, Scripture, good conversation and laughter all mixed together. 

“This is how I wanted to spend time with you this morning,” Jesus said. 

I still love my quiet mornings with a cup of hot tea and an open Bible, but sometimes we meet with Jesus best in the context of community, especially when that community steps into the craziness of life and brings Christ into it. 

Time would not permit for me to catch you up on all the stories of the last few months, but they have been stories like this one. Stories of busy days at work and busy days with Immerse. Stories of sunrise hikes and waffle breakfasts, of good conversations over cups of tea, of dinners around the table...which is by far my favorite piece of furniture and takes up half of my entire apartment. Stories of how God is present in the middle of it all, especially when we look for him and bring him into our normal daily activities, relationships, and conversations. 

That is what it means to see something more. That “something more” is him. He is completely enough, and yet so much more. He is the only one I know who is completely satisfying, yet leaves us always craving more of him. He is invisible, yet seeable and knowable. He is the holy in the common place, the beauty in my ordinary, the peaceful presence in my busyness, the calm in my craziness. He is that, and so much more. Give us the eyes to see, Lord, more of you.