The scraps

I never know when I will be struck by inspiration next, but it never fails to amuse me when I am. He’s like a little prankster that always manages to catch me off-guard. He’s good at his job, and his job is to make me laugh. Today’s “light bulb” moment will have you chuckling as well. If this comes across as a little irreverent, I’m sorry you feel that way. But I believe God has a sense of humor too, so I’m going to run with this thought anyway. 

I sat down the other day at a burger king for a delicious meal of crispy delight, blissful nostalgia and steaming hot side of regret (also known as a whopper with onion rings and a large soda.) As I sank my teeth into bite after delightful bite, flakes of bacon started falling out of the back and sides of my burger. “Not on my watch!” I ferociously proclaimed as I shifted the burger into one hand to pick up all the little pieces of God’s greatest gift to man. 

But as I viciously picked up every last piece, burger still in hand, I began to chuckle. This chuckle turned into the jolliest, heartiest laugh a man alone in a fast-food restaurant could have. You see, in that moment of bacon-bliss, I realized something: God loves people the way I love bacon. Here I am with a sandwich absolutely full to the brim with bacon, and I’m violently scurrying to gobble up the scraps that have left the sandwich. It dawned on me that this is the same as Jesus' parable of the lost sheep.

In case you weren’t familiar, I am referring to Matthew 18:12-14. In this passage, Jesus talks about how a shepherd will often leave ninety-nine sheep behind to go and find one lost one. Or, in my case, I’ll leave a whole burger of bacon to go get a few crumbs that have fallen out. Those are the ones that are important. I could make an appeal to human psychology, where I say something like “oh, it’s because we are hardwired evolutionarily to see the negative over the positive.”

Nah!

This is God we are talking about, here! I believe God’s love is so overflowing, so abundant and excessive that He can’t contain it to a few people. He loves us so much that He wants everyone to come back to Him and experience His presence. Whether you’ve never been in His loving embrace, if you’ve run away from home, or if you’ve been close to Him for years, He beckons us all closer. He ushers us in with ecstatic excitement. Like we were the scraps of bacon that almost got lost in the wrapper. We are the lost scraps of bacon, and He wants nothing more than to keep us from getting tossed in the trash. We are worth far more than the dumpster.

Just think: I just compared us to burger king bacon. If I can love a few slices of dead pig so much, how more do you think God can love us? How much more excited He must be about us when we finally come back to Him, no matter the circumstance. I may not know you personally, but I know one thing for sure: no matter how bad, how clumsy, how useless or awkward you may think you are, you are definitely worth more than a slab of bacon. And if an imperfect man like me can get this excited about a slab of dead animal, a great and mighty God in His perfect love can get excited about you. So breathe no longer your sighs of defeat. Cast off the heavy burden of shame and regret. Shave off your identity of worthlessness and self-hatred and put on the loving identity of ultra-bacon! Because that’s what you are: you’re like bacon, but even cooler. If little humans go missing from the sandwich of God, His eyes get wide. They grow vicious with His bacon-loving intensity. He fights for the little scraps and doesn’t stop the hunt until every last piece is back in His sandwich. Then He beams with pride and excitement as everything returns to the way it should be. Everything back in its place and every last person in the fold of God’s kingdom, safe and sound. 

I hope this metaphor makes you chuckle. I know I’ll never be the same. I haven’t been able to look at a sandwich the same since, so I hope you can share in my changed perspective. May you laugh and think of God the next time you find yourself staring down a delicious sandwich. And if you don’t like bacon, I pray God works on your heart and opens your heart to the truest joy in the universe

Until next time

Cheers