Breakfast Is Served

I had to pick up one of my sick kids early from daycare this afternoon. Back at the house and bored from watching too much Paw Patrol, I asked the kids if they wanted to make some cookies to have something to do. Of course they did.

The plan was to make oatmeal cookies. But instead of using uncooked oats for whatever reason, I made oatmeal instead and added it to the batter. Not firm enough to make cookies, I just poured it in a casserole pan and baked it for twenty minutes. Turned out fine and tasted pretty good, no harm no foul.

Anyway, when I broke it down and realized what went into this little oatmeal cake thing, I realized what was in it:

Oatmeal
Butter
Brown Sugar
Salt
Flour
An Egg

In other words, this cake looking thing that came out of the oven:

Was basically my classic diner breakfast fare (sans the sausage):

in another form.


I see this reflected in a couple ways in my own life.

One is that if I ate the same exact thing every morning for breakfast for the past thirty years, I would hate breakfast. We're not robots, we're human beings. We don't eat gruel without taste or soylentgreen every day--even though it would serve the same function as cooked food--for a reason. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. We prefer drinking coffee to popping a couple caffeine pills because there's something intangibly enjoyable about the ritual of preparing, making (or buying), and consuming. Something a little less mechanical and a little more human.

On the flip side, a lot of marketing and branding is simply repacking the same old crap in a different form to keep the profit machine moving along. Eggs, oatmeal, and toast may not consistently sell, but "NEW!! OATMEAL BREAKFAST CAKE!! EAT ON THE GO!!" does. Until people get tired of that, then it's repackaged as "Simple. Hearty. Classic: Eggs Oatmeal n' Toast" and resold as something new. Same ingredients going down the same gullet, but "new" nonetheless.

I've been getting down on myself a little bit during Lent for not praying every morning at the same time in the same form, consistently, like the military man or monk I always wanted to be. But I realized that I have in fact been praying, and pretty consistently, albeit in a variety of ways rather than just one. Some days I do wake up early and sit at the kitchen table and read. Some days I end up listening to the Word on audio in the car. Some days I'm kneeling by my bed in prayer, and other days I'm taking a walk through the woods on my lunch break and just spending time with the Lord. So, prayer, yes, always...but not always the same.

As long as the ingredients are there, I think the way you serve it up is a matter of personal taste. Some people like their eggs scrambled, some fried, some hard boiled. Likewise, some are drawn to contemplative prayer, some charismatic, some praise-and-worship, some oral. And some people (like me) seem to benefit from mixing it up from now and then.