Adam and I have had a tradition of eating lunch together at least once a week (sometimes 3-4 times a week) for the past eight years. We have gone to many different restaurants, found some diamonds in the rough, some rough places we thought would be good, and, sadly, we have seen a very strange recurrence. Throughout those years, it would seem that as soon as we would find a place that we really enjoyed and started frequenting with regularity, they would close. Honestly, we would find a place we liked and then start going there once a week (sometimes twice a week, but never three times) and then without warning we would show up one day and the doors would be locked and a sign would be on the door: “Out of business”.
This happened first with a restaurant named Sweet Tomatoes. It was a salad bar and soup buffet restaurant and it made us feel like we were being healthy… this is because our other regular spots were Buffalo Wild Wings and Pizza Hut, so comparatively, yes, it was healthy.
This trend continued though: Grillhouse by David Burke was next, followed by the Pizza Hut Buffet (which was a staple throughout both of our childhoods and adolescence), Truco Taqueria at Randhurst (shout out to Lauren Kelley who is a member here and was the best waitress that place ever had!), Ditka’s on Euclid (which if I’m honest, we kind of saw coming because they cancelled their lunch hours and only opened after 4:00 pm, which is never a good sign), and most recently JD’s Q and Brew, who just stopped taking our calls one day and I had to drive up there the following week to see that they, too, had fallen prey to the “TC and Adam like you” curse.
With each closing, we would grieve our loss by falling back on bad habits and lesser (in our opinion) eateries. Claiming that it was ok to eat chicken wings three days in a row because “Ditka’s is gone.”
This obviously doesn’t actually rate on the meter of sorrow and loss as there are still hundreds of eateries within spitting distance of church, and there are so many more things that are much worthier of our sadness… but every time it happens (which I still contend is A LOT) it does bring my mind to how everything has a life cycle.
This is how we start our Lenten journey. With ashes on the head and a reminder that we are mortal, that we have a life cycle… but we don’t get reminded that day that everything else has a life cycle. Our jobs, our loved ones, our cars, our churches, our most favorite putt-putt place, even our earth, and our sun. Everything eventually passes.
As I said in my first devotional asking us to remember that we are mortal and will eventually die hyper-focuses us on our lives and how we’re living. I think that remembering that everything is impermanent hyper-focuses us on treasuring those things that we have even more now.
There’s a common cliché that goes, “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone,” and I’ve found this to be true. Like the sermon from last week about the shepherd who lost one sheep out of 100 or the woman who lost one coin out of ten, we become very aware of what we’ve lost and don’t feel whole again until we’ve found it. The sad part is that sometimes when we lose things, they don’t come back. We learn this every time we lose a loved one, a dear pet, or a house to a fire.
Keeping in mind that there is an end coming for all things can seem quite dour, but I would say that if we truly keep this in mind, we might treasure the moments we have even more. How much would you enjoy one more day with a passed loved one? What if we thought of every day with each other this way? No day is promised, each day is a blessing, and life can change on a dime for any of us. Let us love one another and cherish each moment of our lives as the blessing that it is.
Amen.
P.S. …and Alex said nothing good comes from eating at Pizza Hut… psssh! How about an epiphany about impermanence and a whole devotion? BOOM!
Pastor TC
