Stale Potato Chips

I know it is only Tuesday, and I am only supposed to be troubling you to read this once a week, but something happened tonight that demanded a mid-week update.

You know how last time, after one week in Uganda, I wrote this fairly intense, make-a-deep-point-spiritually sort of blog post. Not this time. This is about something less weighty; nevertheless, near and dear to my heart...

...fried potatoes. I’ve never met a fried potato I didn’t like. Just ask anyone in my family, and they will confirm.

A few short days after writing all that about mild inconveniences vs. extreme hardship I met a fried potato I didn’t like, and what should have seemed mild became extreme.

Stay with me now. This is a big moment. This is the kid who every day walking home from school would stop at the Burger Chef up the street from his house for a snack of French fries. The grown man who every time my wife is out of town for a day or a weekend, binges on Ore Ida Tater Tots, and whose friend hears what he orders at lunch and says, “what are you, twelve”? The guy who gets excited about roadtrips, so he can stop at McDonalds for fries.

But it finally happened. It took living in Uganda, but it happened. I am sitting here tonight in my very quiet house, and with no small amount of anticipation, I go to the kitchen for my bag of potato chips. The ones I just bought TODAY. A brand new, never-opened bag. I’ll admit the bag looked a little funny, but clearly inside there were potato chips. So I open the bag, and the smell of fried potato wafts out, I take the first one and, mouth-a-watering, I pop it in my mouth. And…it is…STALE, I mean Uber-Stale, really, really, really STAAAAAAALE. Suddenly I’m seeing things really differently over here. I am thinking of recanting all that I said the other day about mild inconveniences. And this I know for sure; next time I am going for the bag that was 5,000 shillings instead of the one that was 2,500 (for those of you not keeping track of the value of the US dollar in Uganda, that would be about $2.00 vs. $1.00). All I wanted was a few potato chips with my coke. That’s not so much to ask for, is it? Of course its not! So now I am in a feel-sorrow-for-me-because-my-chips-are-stale funk.

Is that all it takes to throw me off, to get me out of sync, to get me in a wad? Really? Seriously? Stale potato chips??? Yeah, that’s about all it takes…. How disappointing and how predictably real. My self-indulgent heart seizes on something just that mundane, petty, and insignificant, and takes me to a bad place.

Jesus has given me this opportunity to teach students who have been hungry for and finally have some access to a quality biblical and theological education, and I’m worked up over stale potato chips.  He gives me a chance to help encourage and train pastors who truly are starving for the kind of instruction I have been blessed with year after year from Ligonier, Desiring God, T4G, Gospel Coalition, and the like (and the years when I didn’t go to one of those I still have had constant access to great books and ministry resources electronically downloaded instantly for a couple of bucks), and I am bummed out by stale potato chips. Jesus gives me the privilege of bringing his love to little children who would give anything for the stale potato chips I turned my nose up at, and I am obsessing over my NEED for a bag of Lays.

Lord, grant me grace to gain some perspective, if even from a stale potato chip.

Tune in Saturday or Sunday for another post and some prayer request updates…. In the meantime, if you don’t mind, go enjoy some of those nice, thin, crispy Lays potato chips, or better yet, maybe the sea salt and cracked pepper kettle cooked ones, and think of me.

Tim

P.S. Okay, time for true confessions… That part about turning up my nose at the potato chips? I made that up; it was just for dramatic effect. I ate those stale potato chips. I’m just that much of a tater junkie. They were bad.