Try Something New
Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge 1/9/2019
Recently, my family and I went out to eat and we decided to try out a, “new to us” restaurant. We all love Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai food, but we each have our favorite dishes that we tend to order over and over again. My daughter is a big fan of green curry. My husband likes to challenge his palate with eye watering spice levels. My favorite is a certain Vietnamese comfort food dish called, Bun Tom Thit Nuong Cha Gio. But this evening we were all feeling kind of in a rut with our usual food places and so together we hopped into the car and decided that we wanted to go on a bit of a culinary adventure.
Since we all like sushi, the restaurant that we unanimously decided to try out was a Poke place. – A restaurant where they put all of your favorite sushi ingredients together in a bowl and dress them with a mysterious sauce. At the ordering counter, I looked over the menu with a bit of trepidation. — I wasn’t entirely sure that I was going to like what they were offering. It was risky to try something that I had never ordered before. But I was here for the very reason that I had decided that I was going to try something new. One entrée caught my eye. It had marinated ahi tuna, avocado, cucumber, sweet onion, mango, wasabi, pickled ginger, seaweed salad, spicy mayo and shoyu sauce. Many of these ingredients were familiar to me, I already knew that I liked tuna and avocado and mangos. But I wasn’t sure that I was going to like them all put together in this new way!
I gathered my courage together and I ordered it, but I made sure that I had plenty of water on hand for when it arrived. Since the dish involved seafood, this was not going to be a cheap experiment. After the bowls arrived, we said a quick prayer with our forks and chop sticks hanging in the air. We should not have worried. The Poke was absolutely delicious. Someone had the creativity and the boldness to take many good tasting ingredients and to mix them together in a brand new and wonderful way and we were completely blessed by it. All we needed to do was to take a risk and to try something new.
In this New Year, it is a good time for all of us to look at our faith lives and to take some of the best and most loved ingredients of our days and to try do something new with them. –Perhaps you like to sit in quiet prayer and meditation; or maybe you like to sing along to inspirational songs. It could be that this is the year that you want to volunteer to lead something new at your church or work to revitalize a ministry that is important to you. Whatever things that you find good and valuable for your life of faith and spiritual balance, what ever practices feed your eternal soul and your loving relationship with Christ, I would invite you to try to incorporate them into your weeks in a new and intentional way. This New Year, try something spiritually new. You may find out that you really do indeed like it.