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| Sifting through the pasta for weevils |
Friday night was my turn to cook. I boiled and de-boned the
chicken, added the spices and vegetables and now I was ready to add the packaged
noodles to complete our meal of chicken and noodles, one of my comfort-food
favorites. Opening the package and dumping in the noodles would be the easiest
part of the process…or so I thought. As I opened the box, I saw something small
and black moving around: weevils. They had burrowed inside each and every
noodle and were eating their way through. I was faced with a dilemma: Do I
throw away the whole box? Would I have time to go get another box at the store
in order to salvage dinner?
I sought LeAnn’s advice. She was the one who had taught me
how to shop for pasta and be sure they didn’t have weevils by looking through
the clear packaging to see if there were any white spots on the noodles. (White
spots would indicate that weevils had burrowed inside.) But this particular
package of noodles was the only type available at the store the day we went
shopping and it was not in clear packaging, so I wasn’t able to check the
weevil population before my purchase.
An old anecdote I had heard popped into my head: When a new
missionary finds a bug in her cereal, she throws away the whole box. After
being on the field for a short time, she picks the bug out and continues eating
the cereal. The experienced missionary finds the bugs, mixes it in the cereal
and exclaims, “More protein!”
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| Zooming in on the evil weevils |
I wasn’t quite ready to raise my protein level in this
manner, so I had to decide between throwing the whole box away or picking out
the weevils. Would it be worth it to go through each piece just to pick out the
good parts of the pasta? LeAnn suggested we pick out the weevils. So, there we
stood, scrutinizing every millimeter of every piece of pasta to see if it had
been weevil-ized.
LeAnn mentioned that it reminded her of a Bible verse about
searching and sifting in our own lives. In 2 Corinthians 13:5, it says, “Examine
yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test yourselves.
Standing at the counter, examining each of tiny bit of pasta to
exterminate the unwanted guests took a while. Longer than I’d hoped. Longer
than I’d planned. But it made me think: How much time am I spending examining
myself to see if there is something unwanted that needs to be sifted out in my
life of faith? I’m glad that the Lord finds it worth it to spend time helping
me sift through what needs to be exterminated from my life.
As we stood at the counter, two repairmen arrived at the
house to work on an appliance. As they entered, I wondered what might be going
through their minds as they saw the two of us picking through the pasta. “We should say, ‘Welcome to Weevil-Land,’”
I whispered to LeAnn as they entered.
