For Goodness Shakes
Remember those adorable little green aliens in Toy Story, the ones waiting around for “The Claw” to choose the next one to receive freedom? Well, I have a conspiracy theory. I think McDonald’s uses them to make their seasonal St. Patrick’s Day Shamrock Shakes. It’s realistically the only way to achieve that perfect shade of green. I love those milkshakes: just the right amount of artificial mint flavor, some type of “stabilized whipped topping,” and a neon cherry so red you’d think it was radioactive.
Since Ancestry.com tells me I’m three-quarters Celtic, I am obligated to buy one. After all, ridiculous green milkshakes are surely a traditional food of my people. McDonald’s up by the Guadalupe River sells them every March, but that one-lane drive-thru often wraps around the building. One year, I had to wait behind six cars. The first moved quickly. Five to go, but I could tell by the shaking and swaying of the minivan in front of me that it would be trouble. I was sure the woman driving it had an entire church youth group with her, and I imagined her ordering 62 Happy Meals. I remember being mildly annoyed, but eventually the line oozed forward. At the ordering board, I happily yelled out my window, “One Shamrock Shake, please.”
“Sorry, shake machine is broken.”
You know something? It’s always broken.
As we near the close of our laughter series, I suppose this absurd memory deserves to be connected to Psalm 126, one of the Songs of Ascent. It opens in the past, remembering how God restored the fortunes of the people and filled their mouths with laughter. These people knew what restoration looked like because they had seen it together. But then the tense shifts. After the recollection comes the present moment, and they are standing in a dry place.
Maybe that memory of God’s faithfulness is why the person at the end of the psalm can go out weeping and still carry seed. Those seeds are precious. They could be ground into flour and made into bread, but a community that remembers is willing to sow them into the ground, certain there will be a harvest in the future. That’s trust. That’s faith.
Over the years, I have thought more than once about that swaying minivan and the woman who was going to order 62 Happy Meals for whatever small civilization was ricocheting around inside. Maybe it was a softball team. Maybe she had a really big family. Maybe she was the only adult who said yes when no one else could drive. I have no idea. But somebody had loaded those kids into a van and taken them somewhere, letting them laugh and bounce and eat together. That is a kind of sowing, too.
Come to think of it, I think we all do an astonishing amount of sowing. We spend money on kids who won’t remember what they ate for dinner. We give entire evenings to grown children who show up with virtual-reality lightsaber games expecting parental participation. We teach another class. We serve another person. We stay available to our friends. We say another prayer because the Lord has done great things for us.
We keep sowing for love’s sake. So maybe next time I am suffering in a dry place, you might hold the memory of water for me. And next time you are hurting and can’t remember when things were good, I can quietly hold the memory of previous harvests for you. Together we carry something bigger than any one of us alone. We have all tasted tears, but we have also tasted the bread of God’s good harvest. That bread tastes even better than a ridiculous, green-glowing milkshake.
