Just a Chocolate Pie

I am a woman with a big appetite.  

And not just for food.  For everything.  I love to devour things.  New information, new places, new stories, even new friends.  I fully take them in.  I want to feast in them.  To revel in who or what they are and let them carve out a place in my memories.

I love to live life.  My appetite for it has always been large.  Always has been and probably always will be. 

Now don’t get me wrong, food is definitely a part of it. 

I love food.  Love it.  Love everything about it.  Buying it, cooking it, reading about it, eating it.  All of it.  I could watch cooking shows from morning till night while reading through my cookbooks planning out the week’s menu.  (BTW, been doing this for YEARS.  If you’re not, you should try.  It’s a real time saver.)  I love the way I feel when I eat.  I love watching other people eat a good meal, even one that I didn’t necessarily cook. 

…but I love that too.  Man, oh man, do I love to cook.  The joy and satisfaction of watching people eat a meal you’re confident in is great.  Hearing my family “Mmmm” over a new dish is music.

It is very unusual for me to go a day without cooking.  Vacation is usually the only time I’m not hands on with meal preparation and even then, that doesn’t hold true if we’re visiting family. 

But it’s more than just sustenance.  Food has a spiritual quality for me; as it does for everyone.   I think that so many people just aren’t aware of it.  I’ve never understood people who say they don’t really care about food.  That they often forget to eat.  Forget to eat?  That’s like forgetting to breathe; it makes no sense to me.  You can improve a person’s mood and even better their day by given them good food.  You can give them an escape from the bad with good food.  You can improve the way your body feels with good food.  You can improve your overall health with good food.  Life is better with good food.

I was raised in a family that new that truth and lived it.  They cultivated our appetite for life just like they did for food.  Because just like life, food was an adventure.   Those appetites are connected.  They burn inside me.  They’re my pilot light.

My twins were born early, more than two months early.  Thirty weeks and six days.  I said thirty-one weeks once and was immediately corrected by the nurses.  That extra day is important and we didn’t get to claim it because they didn’t get to experience it.

Leaving them in the hospital might be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.  And the hard-ness kept right on coming.  Our first night home we had to race back up because twin B’s lung had collapsed and the air leaking into his chest cavity was starting to push his heart out of position. My FIRST night home from the hospital.  Nothing about their birth was right; nothing about it was good.  It wasn’t supposed to happen yet.

Until then, I had never been so worried and fearful about something that it became all consuming.  I had had maybe one gray hair but now I had a patch of silver.

I started to feel dizzy a lot, very little energy.  I made another appointment with my doctor after my six week check up because it just kept getting worse.  She was worried that it might be post partum depression but warned me it just might be the stress and fear I was living in.    

I was drowning.  And I knew it. 

And to make matters worse, I now had no idea how to interact with people.  I didn’t have the time or energy for small talk. You get tired of having the same conversation with the same variety of questions.  Mostly because you know that not everyone wants to REALLY know what’s going on.  They probably don’t want to see you have a meltdown in the middle of the grocery store because the infection in baby A won’t go away and he can’t eat and he’s still losing weight but because of the infection they can’t give him any food but if he doesn’t start getting nutrition soon the other areas are going to be affected but they can’t risk it because of the infection…and on and on and on. 

I was in our church’s gym for a potluck, honestly trying to avoid talking to too many people when a friend stopped me.  And if I’m being honest, she wasn’t even that close of a friend.  More like a really good acquaintance.   She asked the normal questions and then said something that nobody else had asked in the almost two months since the twins had been born. 

“Are you eating?”

I started to nod my head then had to stop and register the question.  I remember actually squinting at her and asked, “What?”

“Katie, are you eating?”  She gently put her hands on my shoulders and really LOOKED at me. 

The realization was surprising.  The dizziness and lack of energy suddenly made complete sense.  I wasn’t giving my body any fuel.  I hadn’t been eating.

“No.  I’m not.”

She nodded and told me I needed to.  That my babies needed me strong.  That I would need to be strong for when they came home…

Now, that I was focusing on it, I realized how little I truly was eating.  I tried forcing myself to eat and came across a second problem.  NOTHING tasted good.  Everything tasted like cardboard.  I finally understood how food could taste like ashes because it did.  It had no flavor to me.

But still, I tried and did end up eating more.   At least a little. 

That’s when I realized that my appetite was GONE.  Completely.   ME.  It wasn’t just that I wasn’t hungry.  I didn’t care about food anymore.  At all.  For myself or for other people.  One of my defining passions was just gone, the hearth completely cold, the furnace frozen.

And I had no idea how to fix it or if I could.  Not only that, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.  My babies were lying in a room being kept alive by machines and other people.  What did it matter if I didn’t have an appetite anymore?

Soon after, a wonderful older couple from church made us dinner.  They brought it to the house, talked about what it was, assured me that they were praying for the whole family, and left.  No small talk.  No hanging around.  Very much operating under the knowledge that I wasn’t in a position to ‘entertain’.   This was the first dinner brought to us by someone that wasn’t in our age bracket.  By a couple that had been pouring themselves and their love into every task and conversation and action for years AND had some life experience of their own.

That is important to note.

I walked over to the containers, to get it out for my husband and son, trying to prepare myself to force more food into my body.  I opened a lid and thought for the first time in forever, “This smells good.”

Roast pork loin with a BBQ sauce, green beans, potatoes, homemade rolls, and a chocolate pie. 

My husband and son inhaled it.  You could see how delicious it was.  I tried, I really did, and I was able to eat some of it but again, I could barely taste it.  It turned into…STUFF in my mouth.  Not food. 

I tried a piece of the pie.  And the sense memory of that bite is still so strong.

I felt the texture on my tongue.  The true texture.  Creamy and smooth and thick with crunchy pieces speckled throughout.  I chewed and the crust burst across my tongue, spreading the custard.  This food felt like food in my mouth.  And then I tasted it.  Chocolate with crunchy, toasted butter. 

“Mmm.”

I finished my piece. 

And then I wanted another.  So I had another. 

For some reason, my husband didn’t want any of it.  The sugar lover was turning down dessert.

The next day I caught myself thinking about that pie.  So I had another piece.

And then a few hours later I had another. 

Then another. 

Over the next 24 hours I ate that entire chocolate pie all by myself.  I remember it so clearly, giving up on decorum and taking the whole pie plate to the couch to finish it off.  It made me HUNGRY.  For the first time in almost two months.  I didn’t want to put food into my body just so it could have fuel.  I wanted to eat.

Then I felt full.  I felt sated. 

And I felt a little flame start flickering inside me again.  It woke up my appetite.  And my body wanted it back.  All of it.

Not long after that, I cooked my first meal for my family again.  Not just prepared something to eat, but a MEAL.  I started sleeping better.  More energy and more joy.

Soon after that, my twins came home.

So…I was still drowning…just in a different way. (A good one this time.)

I had always been passionate about people using their gifts and not denying their passions but until that moment I was ignorant of what that could truly look like.  And even how intentional it could be.  I told Barbara the impact her (and Tommy’s) meal had had on me and it tickled her pink.  I cried explaining that her pie woke me up; it gave me my appetite back.  She smiled and said she was glad, they had prayed we would be blessed, she said how incredible it was what God would use to bless and help someone else.   Because to her, it was just a little dinner she had made to help, just a simple chocolate pie.

But to me it was defining.  It helped me to start healing.  It lit my pilot light.  It took awhile for it to be strong again, but it was burning. 

I had thought my appetite for feasting, for life, was big before.  This expanded it tenfold.  Because I KNEW now just how an item of food could nourish someone’s soul, could set them on the path for psychological and emotional healing, as well as physical. 

I still love to cook.  And I love to cook for others even more now.  This has become my mission. It put me on the path of acknowledging just how spiritual food is and embracing that passion in me.  Every meal provided, big or small, is prayed over. 

I pray during the making of it. 

I pray during the delivery of it. 

And I pray as I’m driving away from it. 

I pray that God will use it.  That God will bless them.  That it will be comforting and nourishing and healing to their whole bodies. 

It doesn’t matter that they never know.  It doesn’t matter if it’s something elaborate or something frozen from my freezer. It doesn’t matter even if it’s KFC instead of homemade.  I make sure it will taste good and beyond that, it’s no longer in my hands. 

So many think food is a small, common blessing but when you’ve been on the receiving end you know just how WRONG that thinking is. 

Think about that the next time you are lead to doing something ‘small’.  The next time you’re quick to dismiss something, saying “it was nothing”.   

Instead smile and say, “I’m so glad it blessed you.”  Or “I’m so glad it helped.”

We don’t get to think of that or anything else as ‘nothing’.  We don’t get to determine what will or won’t be used by the Lord.  We don’t get to determine what is small work and what is large work for the Kingdom and for others.  You don’t get to decide what is worth using and what isn’t, what is a gift and what isn’t.  Neither does the world.  

Because to the world it was just a piece of chocolate pie, to me it was a wakeup call, a match that lit my appetite again.  And it hasn’t stopped burning since.