Restaurant

ByHal Hammons

We tried a new restaurant the other evening.  We all disliked pretty much everything.  The place looked like your grandmother’s house — that is, if you are in your 80s and your grandmother was a sharecropper.  The paneling on the walls was ugly.  The décor (if you would even call it that) was worse.  The location was inconvenient.  The menus were cheap.  (Ironically, the prices were expensive.)

The food, however, was outstanding.  Interesting.  Attractive.  Tasty.  The worst thing I could say about it was that there was too much of it.  We will be back.

I have my priorities.  I like ambiance as much as the next heterosexual guy.  But I go out to eat for the food.  If I don’t like the food at a restaurant, I won’t go — or at least, I won’t go without kicking and screaming.  They could be giving the food away for free; I don’t care.  And yes, it’s still Hal Hammons, famous tightwad, at the keyboard.  Not a pod person.

I worry we get caught up in externalities and irrelevancies sometimes.  The church, for instance, is the body of Christ (Ephesians 1:22-23).  We are made part of it to “offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5).  If we are given an opportunity to do that, we should count ourselves blessed.  Instead, though, we judge a church experience by how many friends our children have, or how they set the thermostat, or how musical the singing is, or how likely it is that the preacher will shut his trap in time to keep everyone from starving to death.

Are those concerns legitimate?  To one degree or another, yes.  But it’s not why we came.  We came for the Lord.

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Animals

ByHal Hammons

A Buddhist monk was chastening me and other animal-harvesters the other day on Facebook.  We humans are arrogant, he says, to think that eight million species are here on earth simply to serve our needs and wishes, that our abuse of “other animals” is completely unjustified.

 

Brunch

ByHal Hammons

I always take a seat on the patio when I have the option — and when it isn’t too hot or wet.  The other day it was a little bit of both — not too much, though, to discourage an avid fan of sightseeing, people-watching and atmosphere-drinking.

Bigger

ByHal Hammons

The story goes that Yul Brynner, career flying after the success of The King and I and The Ten Commandments, was a bit annoyed at the upstart television actor named Steve McQueen that he had brought into the production of The Magnificent Seven.  McQueen had a habit of playing with his hat, wiping his brow, basically anything to get the audience’s eyes on him while he and Brynner were in a scene.

It went both ways, though.  Brynner, several inches shorter than McQueen, arranged for small piles of dirt to be nearby for him to stand on when acting with McQueen.  McQueen took delight in kicking the dirt piles over.  Ah, the famous camaraderie of thespians!

McQueen’s antics worked, it seems.  He became one of the biggest screen stars of the 1960s.  Brynner’s career, on the other hand, trended downward more and more.  My generation knows him as much as anything for those creepy lung cancer commercials he made just before he died.

Who is “bigger”?  Men have been fighting over that vague concept for centuries.  And women have their own version of the battle; they’re just not as likely to literally kill anyone in pursuit of the blue ribbon.  “We just tease her until she develops an eating disorder,” one female TV character once observed.

But life shouldn’t be a competition for Christians. Our reward is heavenly (Hebrews 11:16).  And heaven has no limit to its capacity.  “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).  So if someone isn’t bumping us out of line for heaven, why should we worry if he insists on being “bigger” in this life?  That’s his problem.  I don’t have to make it my problem.

Bloating

ByHal Hammons

My plate was as full as my heart yet again this Thanksgiving. The difference was, my plate did not remain full. It emptied out. True, it filled up again, but that problem was rectified soon enough.
In my 50s, I’ve discovered this shovel-as-flatware approach to dining brings a different sort of fullness. And this one is not quite so satisfying. And it lingers longer, too.

Appearance

ByHal Hammons

I think I’ve finally figured out what bugs me about selfies on social media.  It’s that attention is being drawn, almost exclusively, to the outward appearance.  Sometimes it’s our accomplishments, sometime it’s our misfortune, sometimes it’s our surroundings.  But usually it’s just our looks.  A new haircut, a cute expression — worse yet, the infamous “Which do you like better?” post, which literally begs for audience participation.  All of this is a 21st Century way of saying, “Look at me!  Look at me!”