I’m not a big fan of middle-of the-plate food. If we go out to eat, I want a good portion that goes right to the edge of the plate, not a lonely morsel in the middle surrounded by a sea of empty porcelain. If you pay to eat out, you shouldn’t feel the need to stop off for snacks on the way home, and the kind of place I like has waiters that don’t wince when you ask for ketchup.  

My palate may not be sophisticated but I do like food and in June Tracey and I found ourselves in a wonderful Thai restaurant in Ambleside where the portions were good and the company even better (I have to say that of course, but it’s true). It was a lovely meal but for me the highlight, the moment of culinary ecstasy was a dessert that had a delicious warm doughnut exterior but on the inside it was packed with creamy ice-cold ice cream.

This dessert was a thing of beauty that Sunday night to match the Lakeland hills that surrounded me and the fact that all these months later I am still remembering it with a smile is a reminder of the importance of celebrating simple moments of life.

About twenty years ago I cited an American minister in a sermon that was all about the importance of simple pleasures. Unfortunately, I can’t find a record of who he was, but I will repeat his words below because they speak rather more eloquently than my ice cream doughnut of the transformative potential there is in celebrating simple things:

During my first year in theological school I was in despair about life, my own included. One cold, dreary Chicago day during the worst of it, wandering aimlessly along 63rd Street, going silently crazy, I suddenly, without intending or willing it, turned and stepped into a fresh fruit bar and ordered a glass of orange juice. 

I drank it unthinkingly, then tasted the juice, the pulp. And slowly something happened. The orangeness of that orange juice, its sweetness and sunfilled-ness, the feel of it going into my throat and into my body, awakened me. I remember mumbling to myself how those oranges were doing good by me, actually caring for me without my asking, and the least I could do was say — if not “thank you” — at least “okay”. 

Maybe if oranges could be such a pal — zinging good things through me — why not other things? The sun, the air, the sidewalk, the music pouring from the bells of Rockefeller Chapel across the midway. I finished my orange juice, walked back to the Meadville Library, wrote an A paper on Luther and the Anabaptists and went on into the ministry.