Monthly Archives: July 2026

Jul 28 2026
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The Christian Life

Let God Cook

I’ve always enjoyed the Food Network show Chopped. I’m no gourmet, but since the original Iron Chef first showed up on Food Network, cooking battle shows have tickled my fancy.  One of the most intriguing and challenging aspects of Chopped is the mystery basket.  Not only do the chefs have to battle the clock to create amazing dishes, they must do so using four random, mandatory ingredients revealed only moments before the clock starts.  Prawns.  Chocolate.  Pickled eggplant.  Lemon-herb cough drops.  From disjointed combos such as that they must produce a dish that meets the tough standard of the judges. Some are dazzling successes. Some don’t quite come together but get through by the skin of their teeth. Some end up under a sliver cloche…and…get chopped.

Each of us is something of a mystery basket of random ingredients.  We all have our gifts and talents, hopes and dreams. And most of us have at least some awareness of activities that energize us  As kids we explore and experiment, discovering what our basket holds – and what it doesn’t. As we gradually swap hoods – from child to adult, the ticking clock of the “real world” starts to pressure us into making something publicly presentable, economically productive, and spiritually meaningful (hopefully) of our basket. And like the chefs on Chopped determine what items they need from the pantry and the fridge in order to pull their dish together, we too must pull ingredients from the “pantry” – education, new skills, personal connections, confidence, etc. To be who we think we should be or become, stuff is missing.

Let’s be clear, the Chopped chefs need those other ingredients in some amount to make a cohesive and edible dish. But common mistakes they make are either using so much of those other items that they fail to spotlight the basket items, misusing a basket item due to lack of experience or familiarity with it, or even worse, forgetting to include basket item(s) altogether. Just like the chefs in the competition kitchen, we can go off track when we forsake focusing on the things in the basket that make us who we are. Either we try to pull in too much that is either aspirational or marginal in its impact to living the life God intended for us, or we forget some of our basket ingredients altogether, neglecting real, obvious gifts that we bring to to world: things that others often see more clearly in us than we can in ourselves. Or we may recognize that we’ve been gifted in some way, but lack confidence enough to ever put ourselves out there to use it to full potential. The life that results might be reasonable enough and even somewhat satisfying, but deep down we still feel like something’s missing, or it’s not what it should be.

The solution? Let God cook. The secret to unlocking the best flavor of us, no matter what’s in our basket, lies entirely in the hands of the chef. When we put the apron on and try to cook up the best version of ourselves, we’re always going to fall short. Why? Because to us our basket is a mystery that we keep having to unpack and discover as we go. Our loving Father, the original Master Chef (another great show) knew everything that goes into that basket, and exactly how to pull the very best dish together from it, because He put it there. The “basket” that makes up each one of us unique children of God is no mystery to Him. Unlike those Chopped chefs having to think on their feet and improvise a recipe on the fly to get something decent on the plate, God already had the best plan for each of our lives long before our clock ever started counting down.

Letting God cook isn’t easy. We want control. We often think we know what we want to do, what will make us happy, and what the world expects from us. And sometimes even if we’re clear on what our best ingredients are, putting them together in a way that’s livable and sustainable day-to-day is not a straightforward effort. Speaking from current experience, that can be especially tough to overcome. Having had my position eliminated a few months ago has enabled me to be more fully present for loved ones who’ve needed it in their current seasons of life. It’s also given me time to reflect on what’s in my basket and the life I was trying to cook up with it. And there was a LOT from the pantry in there. While it might have been palatable and even dazzlingly presented to outsiders, it was missing a lot of my basket ingredients and completely unsatisfying to me. I had to step back and realize that if I’m going to come out of this with a dish that satisfies my soul it’s going to require a very delicate and practiced chef, otherwise I’m going to find myself “chopped” from many of life’s more basic physical necessities. God has me in a place where I’m really going to have to let him cook if I’m going to stay in the game.

But Letting God cook is far from just sitting back unaffected and letting life happen to us, either. As each of us reflects on our own basket, we must listen to His voice and trust His guidance to find the best ways to combine our gifts and talents with what the world and our circumstances present us. To do that requires a deeper level of seeking and trusting Him then most of us are prepared for. Following God in this kitchen often involves uncertainty in the day-to-day that we’re definitely not used to, let alone comfortable with. But it’s here that we’re perhaps most open to be made into what God truly envisioned for us when He filled our basket. Total dependence on Him, mixed with mindful action and feeling the Spirit’s flow in moments of energizing efforts enables Him to work through us to create the most beautiful, satisfying, and winning dish that our lives can become.

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Jul 21 2026
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The Christian Life

Giving Up the Relentless Pursuit

Perfectionism. I’ve struggled with it my whole life. To this day I can still see 5-year-old me being so upset after I’d finished coloring a picture of Dopey in a Disney coloring book. I’d chosen brown for the color of his skin, while my mom had colored another one of the Seven Dwarfs with more of a flesh-toned, pinkish hue. In the moment I felt so wrong, like such a failure. I cried and cried and wanted so badly to go back and erase it all and redo it like mom’s and I couldn’t. Mom was so kind and patient in trying to console me but at that moment, I was beyond anything she could offer in words or motherly presence.

Years later I took guitar lessons with a really talented and patient instructor. He could coax such smooth accuracy and tone out of his axe. It was so frustrating for me as I fumbled through whatever track we were working on, my strings producing nothing even close to what my ears hoped to hear. I found it so hard to practice. My mind and my hands at total odds with each other on every measure. Every mistake a glaring reminder how much skill I lacked and how far away I was from ever being a guitarist that anyone would listen to for free, let alone perhaps someday pay money to hear. I should have been able to step back and accept it all as part of the learning process, but the perfectionist in me just cringed at every bad note until I could hardly bear to pick another string.

For as long as I can remember the need to always have everything colored inside the lines with the right color, or matched note for note with perfect tone and timing, has been a constant. Some combination of needing to feel completely capable, a need for control of the world around me, and an overdeveloped sense of idealism has always driven my expectations way beyond reasonable. And the ensuing inevitable disappointment has led to many a self-inflicted emotional beatdown far beyond those post-Dopey coloring blues. It’s in the midst of one of those beatdowns that I humbly come to the keyboard to offer the words you’re reading right now.

Placing an expectation of perfection on people is far more dangerous and destructive. Expecting perfection of ourselves will harm our self-worth, short-circuit the process of learning, growing, and refining our gifts and talents, and rob us of the joy of so many experiences that life has to offer. Expecting perfection of others is far more harmful. Only one perfect person ever walked the earth, and it’s only in Him that we can hope to be one day perfected. As long as we walk the earth we will always fall far short of our own and others’ expectations of us, and others will always fall short of ours. When we lose sight of that, either out of a desire to try to pump ourselves up or to have our world run in the smooth and orderly way we’ve come to think it should, we risk losing our grip on the things we should value the most: our relationships.

Expecting perfection of strangers, whether it’s the dude driving in front of us or the gal behind the counter helping us change our mobile phone plan, just adds needless frustration and negativity to our lives. Expecting perfection out of those closest to us whom we love most dearly has far worse consequences. Even if objectively we can agree that someone’s behavior is less than ideal, the sheer act of “needing to vent” puts us on the slipperiest of slopes. Could be that their flaws shine a brighter light on ours and we’re too uncomfortable to deal with it. Or when their actions conflict with our idea of how the world should work best, resentment and fault-finding result. From the dawn of time we’ve always had the need to feel like there’s at least someone out there not as good as us. Lord knows, whole Christian denominations have sprung up from that notion. So maybe pride triggers us to look down at them: we’ve got our shit together, why don’t they?

I’ve posted on here in the past about taming our tongues and about restraining ourselves from judgement. When both of those are lacking they intersect in ways that even if we feel justified in the moment, can cause lasting damage to our most treasured relationships. We need to pray constantly for God to help us with both. We are all broken. Grace is perhaps the greatest gift that God has offered to us. It’s the gift we need the most. We need to be ever mindful of that, passing that grace through to all around us, including ourselves. As a recovering perfectionist I know how hard it is to give myself grace. We can’t be perfect even in that, or in giving grace to others. But that’s where the Holy Spirit does his best work. When we come clean about our own brokenness, God’s perfection shines through.

We’re all children of God. He made us all, He loves us all, and He knows us perfectly, top to bottom, inside and out. Imagine if God reacted to our faults the way we react to others’. We’d be doomed. Just as God’s love overlooks all our flaws and shortcomings, we too must never forget that our loved ones’ actions and personality quirks, and even how they relate to us is all part of who they are. Otherwise we risk losing sight of their humanity in those moments.

Here’s hoping today we can all lean into God to help us make peace with the imperfection in us and the people and world around us. Because the relentless pursuit of perfection might be fine for Lexus, but for us as God’s imperfect but beloved children, it’s nothing but a dead end journey to the edge of a very painful cliff.

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