Chocolate and Jesus--What Gets You Up in the Morning?

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my grandmother.  She was still in bed and looked to be in no hurry to get up, but then I pulled a box of chocolates out of my bag and suddenly she was doing gymnastics, vaulting out of the bed and snatching the chocolate from my hands.

Years ago, we used to tease my grandmother because if you found a box of chocolates in her house, chances were that you were also going to find a box filled with pinched chocolates as she tried to figure out which ones had the caramel in them and which had the dreaded coconut.

She doesn’t need to pinch chocolates now.  She knows her favorites by heart.

She immediately put a piece in her mouth and began to chew, closing her eyes and savoring the moment.  And then, when she was finished, she flopped back down to the bed.

“What do you think about when you’re lying there?” I asked her.

She was quiet for a long minute and then she looked at me out of the corner of her eye and said, “How to save the world.”

Wow.

I thought about her words the rest of the day.

She was thinking about how to save to the world.

Meanwhile I had spent a large chunk of that day yelling at the cats to stop chasing a giant fly they had found buzzing around the window.

Purpose.

What is our purpose in life?

What is it that gets us out of bed in the morning?

I had gotten my grandmother to at least sit up in bed with the promise of chocolate and I can tell you that love of chocolate can do miraculous things.  And if you don’t believe me, feel free to read my book I Start Each Day with Chocolate.

What is our purpose in life?

It is a question that has consumed the human race since creation.  The French call it finding our “raison d’etre,” our reason for living.  It is a question that permeates our culture.  It is in our literature.  It is in our movies, our TV shows. 

For example, Samuel Beckett wrote a play called Waiting for Godot, the plot of which is this: two men, Vladimir and Estragon spend the entire play waiting for someone named Godot, who (spoiler alert) never shows.  What will Vladimir and Estragon do the next day?  The same thing … they will come to that spot and wait for Godot.  Who is Godot?  Who knows?  Some have speculated that Godot is God, but all we know is that waiting for Godot gives the two men, these two jobless, homeless men, a reason for living.

When I was a kid, there was a cartoon I used to watch called Pinky and the Brain.  The cartoon was about two lab mice, one named Pinky, the other named Brain, and the show always began the same way with Pinky asking Brain what they were going do that night, and Brain, with ominous music playing, turning to the camera and saying, “The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try and take over the world.”

Who knew cartoons could be so deep?

Purpose.

Now take a moment and think for a second about Jesus.  Think back to all the amazing and wonderful things he did, the miracles, the feeding of the five thousand, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the healing of the blind and the deaf, the driving out of demons.

And yet, I would argue, the greatest gift he gave us—excluding for a moment his sacrifice on the cross—the greatest gift he gave us were two little words.

Two words spoken to Peter, to Andrew, to James and John, to Matthew.

Two words.

Follow me.

Follow me.

How important are these words?  They are life saving words.  Because here Jesus is telling us exactly what our purpose is in life.  We don’t have to stumble.  We don’t have to struggle to find meaning in this world.

He is our meaning. 

Jesus is our purpose.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel reading, in John 6:35.  I am everything.  I am your sustenance.  I am the only one who can feed your soul.  I am all that you need to survive.  I am your reason for being.

I went to visit my grandmother again this past Monday.  Again, I found her in bed.  I didn’t have chocolate for her, but I always come bearing gifts.  I had a new phone for her and a pillow, I had made, with all our phone numbers on it, so she’d never have to look for them.  She’d never lose them.  They’d always be right there.

That got her out of bed.

She sat in her chair, feet propped up and asked me what I had been doing lately that was new and interesting.  I lead a pretty boring life, so I always wind up telling her the same things.  I tell her I’m out taking pictures.  On Monday, I showed her some pictures I had taken that day of three Pileated Woodpeckers that I had seen here at Hope.  She oohed and ahhed over them like a good grandmother.

And then I started talking to her about God, because if there is anything that brings a smile to her face as much as chocolate, it’s God.  She isn’t able to get out to church anymore and when I asked her what she missed most, she said the social aspect, talking to people, but also, she added, she misses worshipping.

She misses the worship.

I reminded her that she had joined me at church a few weeks ago, and that she had surprised me by singing right along to all the hymns.  It was a new church, one she had never been to, but she knew those hymns.  She knew every word, every note.

“Well, of course,” she said to me.  She pointed to her heart.  “You can’t forget that.  It’s just part of you.”

As I got up to leave, she took a deep breath and looked around her room.  “I have to get up,” she said, and then paused.  “I have to get up … and live.”

“Yes,” I said to her.  “Live, yes, please live.”

Amen.