Chocolate chip ridiculous...

To reveal a glimpse of your silliness is kind of endearing and even scores you some humility points, or it would if you weren't, you know, too super-humble to care about such things. For obvious reasons, however, I rarely reveal on the world wide web the heights to which my ridiculosity can soar.  An exception...

This week our small group served at Church Under the Bridge, a ministry that does a church service and feeds about 200 homeless folks nightly in Houston.  We brought pizza and cookies.  When we were working out the logistics, I threw down the gauntlet and demanded that the cookies everyone brought be homemade because...

1. I do think it's meaningful to bring good food that you would serve at your own home to these things.
2. Seriously, I rock out at homemade chocolate chip cookies.  If you leave out people I love, my cookies rank second only to books I've read in areas of personal pride.

So, I threw down my homemade demand and then sat for an uncomfortable interval in the silence and guarded discussion that followed and realized that

1. I was one of two people in the room that had access to a kitchen for most of every day.
2. There's really no better way to squelch a serving opportunity than to demand that everyone do it your way, playing to your talents and ideas.

I retracted my demand.  

Fast forward to the evening of the event.  At 5:00 I remembered that HOMEMADE COOKIES banner I'd been flying the week before and noticed that

1. I had to get three kids to karate in 45 minutes.
2. I needed to leave for the service in an hour.
3. There were not 4 dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies in my house.

Now, if I had been mature, I would have recognized the chastening of the Lord and humbly bought some cookies and calmly taken my people to karate.  If I had had a taser gun, I would have tased the children and whipped out those cookies in uninterrupted silence without a problem.  But I do not own a taser gun and there is no way in hell I'm showing up without homemade cookies after the fuss I raised.  It was frantic.  In the end, I could only pull it off by putting the kids in the car, slapping the last batch in the oven, sprinting to the car, driving, ahem, briskly to karate while explaining the meaning of "tuck and roll," drop-kicking the children out of the car and racing back home, where I found

The event was a blessing to me, and you know what?  In the end, I think just hanging out and listening to people who needed to talk is what I was actually supposed to do there - not march at the front of a parade of browbeaten people carrying homemade cookies.  Who knew?