YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GONNA GET

Forrest Gump's mama was right: "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." That is unless your box of chocolates is a Whitman's Sampler. Then all you have to do is read the lid. You know what you're gonna get.

Given a choice, I'm not sure which I'd choose: knowing or not knowing. Life would certainly be easier if we knew what we was going to happen to us. Boring, but easier. Maybe even more frightening. Yet even if life were a box of chocolate-covered caramels, my favorite, I'm not sure life would be any better. Even the best of the best all of the time will soon lose its appeal.

Given a choice, (which I do not have, thanks to my loving wife) my breakfast would be eggs and toast with a side order of bacon and waffles and a donut for dessert. Lunch would be a hoagie -- any kind. Dinner would be pasta -- again, any kind. And even if all that food were good for me -- low calories, low fat, etc. -- having the same meals everyday would become a punishment rather than a pleasure.

When I was in seminary (twelve years’ worth), we had basically the same menu every two weeks. To this day I can almost recite that menu from memory. Even if the food was fabulous, mouth-watering, which it was not, it would have lost its appeal before the end of the first semester of high school. And it did. Meals simply became another scheduled event -- like classes, study halls, chapel, play, and so forth. Life was more endurance than enjoyment so rigid was everything. We knew what we were gonna get.

As a result even those important parts of my training lost something in the process. Because everything was so rigid, so scheduled, so German (my seminary was founded by a Bavarian Monsignor who loved to wear his army medals), so Whitman-Samplerish, we all could not wait until we got out.

Sounds like a prison, doesn't it? Those of us who spent twelve years there -- high school, college, theology -- are called "lifers" by those who came only for theological studies. But life is a prison if it is filled with sameness. Fortunately, for those of us who are not prisoners, it is not.

And yet, even in sameness, even in prison, life can be, if not exciting, still very liveable and enjoyable. To paraphrase Forrest's mama again, "Life is as life does."  We make it exciting. We make the meal enjoyable, even if it is leftovers, even if we have it every other Tuesday. We make the class worthwhile even though the professor is simply reading, or having the class read, the text. We make the most of the Eucharist even though it's 6:30 in the morning and we'd rather be in bed.

What we do with our life, what we do with that box of chocolates, is what is important, not what life does to us. The tragedy is that so many of us allow life, what happens to us, what life does to us, to override everything. "It's fate," we say. No. It just happens to be a bittersweet chocolate. But the next piece may be a caramel. Go for it.