Lessons From a Milkshake

 

If the perfect food scored 100 on the food scale, I think milkshakes would come in at about 95. I like them.

But even milkshakes come with complications. Suppose, for instance, that you’re driving home late from somewhere and you stop and get a milkshake, as I’ve been known to do. There in the darkness of your car you insert your straw in the lid of the concoction and you suck.

Nothing.

So you suck again–harder. Still nothing. So you pull again and again. Finally you get a tiny taste of the marvelous liquid. You summon up all your strength and suck so mightily that your face implodes. Still nothing.

Clearly this calls for another strategy. So you tap yourself on the back of the head to make your face pop back out and there in the darkness of the car you take the lid off the milkshake and decide to drink it the caveman way. Bottoms up!

Only it’s thick and you can’t see in the dark. So you turn it up and tap it against your mouth. Nothing. So you tap harder … and harder … and finally the whole thing comes sliding down, baptizing your nose and mustache in the sticky stuff.

At least you get a little in your mouth.

Course you could always just use a spoon, if you have one handy. But if you eat it like that you may as well order plain ice cream. And you usually manage to drop some on your dress pants in the dark which gets you fussed at when you get home.

So I would score it like this. If a milkshake starts out with a value of 95, you have to take away 20 points for the guilt factor. (You know that voice that’s saying, “You’re gonna get fat if you eat that. Can’t you just feel your arteries clogging? Blah, blah, blah!”). Then you take away another 10 points for the sticky mustache and ten more for the frustration of sucking at the stuff without any results. Subtract ten more points for the trouble you’re going to have because you have to take your pants to the cleaners to clean away the milkshake droppings.

Your 95 point milkshake has dropped to 45 points. Brocolli on the other hand has just the opposite results. It starts out at about 10 on the good-tasting scale and ends up with about 50 points because of all it’s healthy attributes. I’ll spare you the story of how it happens.

But I ask you, what kind of scale is it when broccoli scores better than milkshakes?

Let’s be honest. If we’re going to get something good in life, we have to put up with some inconvenience on the way. We have to work hard. We have to trust the Lord, even when it seems things are not going according to plan.

“If you falter in times of trouble, how small is your strength!” (Proverbs 24:10).

Sometimes it easier in the short run to roll down the window and throw the stubborn milkshake away. Get rids of a problem but it doesn’t do much for my sweet tooth does it?

In any good thing that God has for us to do there will be times of frustration, discouragement, and times that you will honestly ask, “Is it worth it?” Yes, it is worth it. Stay in touch with the Lord. When the situation gets harder, call out more and more for his help.

Eventually the milkshake will melt enough to enjoy it.

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