My Life as a Crepe Pan
So last week I wrote about my crepe class and how I’m learning to see life as a crepe. I saw so many beautiful parallels there. I haven’t been able to stop thinking (or talking) about it.
As a result of my talking about crepes, life and how much I want one of those high quality pans, a pan came into my possession, one of those amazing ones, as a gift.
It’s lovely, a nonstick surface to which nothing sticks. It is heavy enough to be used as a weapon and versatile enough to be used for absolutely everything. It is a breakfast pan.
But it’s a little warped.
When you look at it, you might see that it zigs where it is supposed to zag. It doesn’t quite look the way it’s “supposed to.” But it cooks like a dream (I, who do not often cook, have been cooking just because I want to watch this pan cook things). The warping does not change the excellence.
This pan is a bit like me.
There have been times when it felt like all people saw in me were the warped bits. This still happens, of course. But now, I find that many people (including me) are looking instead at the excellence of construction and seeing beauty and value in me. Like my pan, I am a gift, to myself and to those in my life, and I firmly believe that whether you are a chipped teacup or an outdated (vintage) champagne flute, or a chartreuse Kitchen-Aid mixer, you are too.
I find it hard to feel fearfully and wonderfully made here on earth sometimes. I live in a world full of warpings and dents and though I hear it said often, I’ve struggled to look at those things and call them beautiful, especially in me. All I see is the broken, and I don’t see much beauty in the broken, to be honest. I want it to be fixed.
But then I think, my pan could have been like all of the other pans. It could have been perfect and unblemished (and it wouldn’t have been mine). Like Mr. Knightley, in Emma (the 1996 film) I wonder if: ”Perhaps it's our imperfections which make us so perfect for one another."
My pan and I go together, two lovely things which have responded to pressure.
I believe that one day, God will make all things right. I believe that He will right the wrongs, and remake the broken things. Even now, I see that He is a God who takes warped things and forms them back into their proper shape.
Until then, I will delight in the hints of beauty and excellence in creation. Even the ones inside myself.