breakfast

Quality prayer is a lot like quality french toast

One of the go-to breakfasts I cook for my daughter is french toast.* It’s easy to make, it can be prepared in advance so that it can be cooked quickly, and, when made with a quality whole-grain bread, it’s a relatively healthy breakfast, combining just enough protein, carbohydrates, and fat to get my daughter through the first part of her day. Also, she likes it so there is never any complaining or procrastinating first thing in the morning when it’s time to eat. 

This morning, as I was prepping the french toast so that I could cook it when she woke up, it occurred to me that, in some ways, french toast is a lot like prayer. I know that sounds silly, and maybe it is, but it made sense to me at 5:30am. So please bear with me. 

French toast, is something that, if you want a good result, cannot be rushed. While the actual cooking of the french toast is a rather quick endeavor, prepping the french toast itself takes time. If you don’t allow the bread enough time to soak, the custard mixture will merely coat the bread superficially, instead of penetrating to the center, and the end result will be dry and unpleasant. 

In the same way, prayer takes time. Our time with God cannot be rushed if we want a good result. If we do not allow ourselves sufficient time in prayer, the Holy Spirit may only enter us superficially, instead of penetrating to our hearts, and our prayer life will feel dry and unpleasant as a result. 

In order to make french toast, you have to plan ahead. You can’t simply throw together french toast at the time you want to cook it and expect it to turn out the way you want. Good french toast requires some, albeit not much, amount of planning. 

Prayer, too, requires planning. This doesn’t mean that our prayers can’t or shouldn’t be spontaneous. Spontaneous prayer is wonderful. Any time we pray it is a good thing. But it is also important that we plan out time to pray, that we set aside time for God, and that we set and keep a schedule for and with him. If we don’t make our time for prayer a priority, the world will always find a way to prioritize itself for us. 

Good french toast requires bread that has the right amount of porousness and integrity. The bread has to be porous enough that, when we put it in the with the wet ingredients, it absorbs as much of the custard as possible. But it also has to be firm enough that it doesn’t simply fall apart once it is saturated. 

Likewise, in order for us to have a fruitful prayer life, we must have the right amount of porousness and integrity. We must be open enough to let God into our hearts, as well as pliable enough for him to do his work in us and to change us into who he wants us to be. But we also need to be strong and upright enough to stand up for the values he instills in us, and to live in the way that he commands. 

Like french toast, prayer takes time, planning, openness, and integrity. Without these ingredients in place, we may end up with something that resembles prayer, but the quality of it may not be what we desire. With these ingredients in place, however, we have a good recipe for making ourselves available for God to do his work in us in a way that is pleasing for both us and him. 

*For anyone wondering, here is a recipe for french toast that I use often and my daughter seems to like it:

INGREDIENTS (serves 2-3 people)
– Four slices of quality semi-stale whole grain bread
-Two large or three medium eggs
-Almond milk (or whatever milk you prefer) in an amount equal to the amount of liquid eggs
-1tsp each cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom
-Olive oil
-Maple syrup (the real stuff)

PREPARATION
-The night before, mix the wet ingredients in a sealable container
-Add the bread
-Flip the bread around in the custard mixture until all slices of bread are coated on all sides (you may have to do this more than once)
-Seal the container and place it in the refrigerator overnight

COOKING
-Place a medium sized non-stick pan on the stove
-Turn on burner to medium-high
-Once the pan is hot, add just enough olive oil to coat the pan
-Add the custard-soaked toast to the pan
-Cook on both sides
-Serve with maple syrup
-Pray
-Enjoy

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

My wife hit me with an egg

While I was making pancakes for my daughter, my wife hit me with an egg. Well, that’s not exactly how it happened. My wife and I were both in the kitchen this morning, rushing around, getting our daughter ready for school, my wife ready for work, and myself ready to go visit my mom in the hospital. I was making pancake batter for my daughter’s breakfast. She likes the pumpkin pancake mix from Trader Joe’s. Today, I mashed up an over-ripe banana in it just to mix things up and so I didn’t have to throw it away, but I digress. 

As I gathered the ingredients for the pancake batter, I saw that my wife was getting something out of the refrigerator. I asked her to grab me an egg because the pancake recipe called for one. She got one out of the egg bin, reached over to hand it to me, and just as she did, I turned toward her, the egg and my elbow meeting at just the right time and angle for the egg to go crashing to the floor. 

For about thirty seconds, we both blamed each other for the mess and then it turned to joking. As my wife cleaned up the egg on the floor, which I think I thanked her for doing but will thank her for later just to be sure, I mixed the pancake batter and proceeded to make my daughter’s breakfast. In spite of the whirlwind of chaos, my daughter got to school on time, my wife made it to the office, and I drove out to the other side of the beltway to meet up with my brother who was acting as my mom’s caretaker for the day, and to see my mom. 

As I sat in a local coffee shop writing, reading, and waiting for the message that my mom was out of surgery, my wife called to ask if I needed any help getting our daughter home from school later. We talked over our plans for the day and both agreed that, if the other needed anything, we would be there to help, eggs in hand. We both laughed at the beautiful chaos that is our life. 

Some days things feel like they are going perfectly. Everything runs smoothly, we are on time, and it feels like nothing can stand in our way. The wind is at our backs, all the traffic lights are green, and the life just seems to fall into place. But other days, in spite of our best intentions and preparation, nothing seems to go right. We feel hurried, clumsy, and like nothing we do is working out. We oversleep, argue, we hit all of the red lights, and we drop the eggs. 

What I try to keep in mind is that God is ultimately in charge of all of this. Of course, we play our part. We have free will and God doesn’t make us do anything we don’t want to do. On the other hand, nothing happens in this world outside of God’s will, either his perfect will or his permissive will. Whether life seems to be going well or poorly, it is all being divinely orchestrated by a God who loves us. He is writing a divine love story for us, even if we don’t understand it from moment-to-moment or day-to-day. 

We don’t always know the plan. We can’t always see the bigger picture. We are asked to trust, to have faith, and to walk forward into the dark unknown on a promise, a promise that God loves us and will not fail us. In faith, God allows us to walk across the stormy waters toward him, but even when our faith falters, when the winds and the waves frighten us and we begin to feel like we are drowning, if we call out to him, he will reach out his hand to pull us up out of the depths (Matthew 14:22-33). 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

French toast and self doubt

This morning, as I was making my daughter breakfast before seeing her off to school, I started to doubt myself as a parent. All of these questions and doubts started to creep in. 

Am I doing this right? What if I get it wrong? Is this food healthy enough for her? Is she getting enough protein so she will get stronger? Is she getting enough carbs for energy? Is she getting too many carbs for the amount of exercise she does? Is she getting too many calories? Or too few?

All of these thoughts were racing through my mind at 6:30am while I was making my daughter french toast and an omelette. The french toast was something my wife had prepped in the refrigerator from leftover bagels we picked up on a recent trip to New Jersey to visit family, and the omelette was just a plain egg omelette.

Then, the thought came to me, “Junk food was basically it’s own food group when you were a kid and you are worried about your daughter’s macronutrients. You are probably doing okay by her.” Standing there in the kitchen by myself, I audibly chuckled.

Life can be extremely serious at times, but there is no reason to make it unnecessarily serious when it need not be. French toast and an omelette is a pretty darn good breakfast. It’s tasty, relatively healthy, and it’s mostly real food.

Yes, macronutrients are important. Of course, whole foods are better than processed foods. But also, we do the best we can with what we have to work with. Life is hard enough without beating myself up unnecessarily for french toast and eggs.