The Blessing of an Egg Sandwich

Email Devotion Week Of Lent 5

By Brendan Armitage

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” (James 1: 2-3)

It’s buttery.  Just eggs and bread, mind you, but good quality of both, and fresh.  Somehow, in one’s back pocket, it retains a bit of the warmth with which it was made, earlier in the morning.  Of course, after a good bit of work, it’s a bit squished as well, but it eats wonderfully.  A bit of home in each bite, no matter how hard the work or the weather.  Warms you right up in the best sort of way.

It’s an egg sandwich.  A proper British egg sandwich.  Not the afternoon tea sandwich of the upper classes, but the sandwich that goes out hot with you wrapped and in your back pocket, as protection against the cold and the damp.  With the simplest of ingredients, it punches above it’s weight class in my book.  My father’s father came over on the boat from Yorkshire after The Great War.  When he and my dad would go out fishing or grandpa would work at the steel mill 6 days a week (or during the war, seven), there would always be an egg sandwich.  Not as part of his luncheon, mind.  Just something to eat as a snack to let him know he was loved at home.

Our Lord is out in the desert right now, as are we.  In the middle of Lent, the weather’s up and down, and our Lenten discipline’s a bit flagging as we soldier on toward April 1.  Into that gloom and fading hope of Spring ever arriving, I hope you have in your back pocket an egg sandwich.  Something that gives you a foretaste of the feast to come.  It’s the simplest thing to be exhausted by politics , that arthritic back, the presentation at work or by your attempt to lose that 10 lbs that really will make your summer…yet when we pull it all away, what is left is the best of ourselves.  A smile from a friend or a quick text/DM/Snap, letting you know you’re not alone.  Your whole church is in this with you.  We’re all looking for a foretaste of the feast to come, and we all have for each other an egg sandwich.  A little bit of your church home, that’s waiting with you to come out of the desert and celebrate Jesus’ victory over sin and death.  Be that egg sandwich for someone, won’t you?  That little bit of warmth that lets them know you care?  We’re almost there.  Just a few more weeks of Lent.  See you in church.