God Came To Breakfast

God Came To Breakfast

 

A star

fell in my cereal

this morning.

It left a hole

in the roof,

splattered milk

in my face,

and just lay

among the cornflakes,

waiting

for my spoon.

 

I wrote that poem decades ago. It was one of a sequence of 16 poems for a chapbook called “The Ghost Behind Your Eyes” that I self-published in 1986. But I could have written that poem this morning. Yesterday. Last week. Or tomorrow.

That’s just the way God is. God never gives up trying to reach us with love and grace. And not just once. All the time. And not just some of us. All of us. Without exception.

When we don’t open the door, God calls. If we don’t answer the phone, God tries email. When we block God as “spam,” a letter will arrive in the mailbox. If we don’t open the letter … Well, sometimes God can’t think of anything else but coming through the roof like a shooting star.

God isn’t trying to break anything. The furniture hardly ever needs to be glued back together. The carpets are rarely stained. No windows are shattered. And our hair, if we have any, still looks fine.

Yes, sometimes the dog may bark and the cat leaps up on the back of the sofa. But I’ve never had to call my insurance agent after God tired of my insistent non-embrace of all of the love that is right there in front of me.

God will wait as long as necessary for us to pick up the spoon. And don’t worry, God’s love never gets soggy, it’s gluten-free and there’s not a drop of cholesterol anywhere.

Human nature can be such a confounding beast. We accept what our leaders tell us at face value—even when we know for certain they’re not telling the truth. But Jesus teaches us that God is love and instead of accepting the wonder of it all, and sharing it with each other, we reach for the remote to see what’s not worth watching on any of a million channels

God has come to breakfast.

Why don’t I simply dig in?

Why, on some days, do I insist on swallowing everything else? Anything else? Even the thing in the back of the refrigerator that’s so moldy it may have just moved?