in not just small ways

food list

breakfast: whole wheat bread and peanut butter, gatorade chews (they were free…)

post-race snacks: banana, popcorn

lunch: rice and beans (cuban style), yuca, sweet bread, a little piece of cake

afternoon snack: vegan banana/berry smoothie

dinner: salad, baked potato and broccoli

origin of an item

yuca is one of the coolest vegetables ever. you eat the root of the plant (like carrots or potatoes) and its flaky! yucca plants are grown throughout the americas, but i often associate it with ghana. when i was in ghana a couple of summers ago, yuca (or cassava) grew like corn grows in Illinois. since coming to worship with a bilingual (spanish/english) congregation, i’ve grown to look forward to eating yuca prepared in traditional hispanic ways.

theological reflections

two things happened today.

first: i ran the shamrock shuffle in downtown chicago. i’m always struck by the amount of waste that a race creates. i ran a 5k with a friend in the fall and she said that someone once asked her if she was a christian simply because she didn’t throw her water cup to the ground in the middle of the race (like everyone else). instead she carried it with her until she passed a trash bin. running the race today i noticed that most of us just dumped our cups on the ground. more than that, we used disposable race packets, ate weird gatorade chews, and created the waste that’s accumulated wherever 40,000 or more are gathered.

 

but the shamrock shuffle wasn’t all bad: they had these bins for banana peels. i wonder if that makes up for the non-recyclable paper used for the race bibs.

a friend recently sent me this link to the work of one runner who is trying to “green” his runs by picking up litter when he runs. my guess is that i could run for longer amounts of time if i were stopping every once in a while to pick up litter. it would certainly mean i would leave a smaller mark in my runs. maybe this would make up for the piles of paper cups on michigan ave this morning.

i'm struck by the idea that running could be beneficial for the planet (not just for the runner herself). the organizers of the shamrock shuffle reminded me (by throwing in some separate food bins) that we often engage in a small act and convince ourselves that it is enough. certainly a collection of small actions create a big impact, but we cannot be fooled into thinking that a small action will completely change our impact. it takes big changes and large actions to fix big problems. i wonder if our sins could have been washed away by something smaller than the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (and if there could have been, why didn't God do something less drastic?) i'm convinced that we needed the radical action of God's power in order to make the significant changes we needed to be saved. God did not amass a collection of small miracles without the

second: the pastor at the church where i’ve been worshiping for the last four year said goodbye to the congregation this morning. in my tradition, the relationship between the pastor and the congregation changes or ends when either the congregation or the pastor feel like God is calling something to change. in our situation, the pastor felt called to another position in another part of the country. 

this is congregation (like many presbyterian churches) marks important events with potlucks. one of the oldest members of the congregation often repeats that “one thing about this congregation: we eat!” and we do. because we come from many different countries, the potlucks are collections of different kinds of food—yuca is served amidst o raw vegetable trays and Cuban beans and empanadas and scones.

when the sixty of us gathered around our potluck this afternoon, we remembered that even though our pastor was moving on, we are a delightful collection of people that God has called to this particular community from a variety of places. we are more than just an individual from one place--we are bigger together.

what is true about our congregation is true of all people: we eat. how can we use our eating to make big changes?