The Classic BLT . . .

I’d say my second-favorite sandwich is bacon, lettuce, and tomato on wheat bread with low-fat salad spread and a little salt and pepper. Mmm. With a healthful mix of low-sodium turkey bacon, romaine lettuce, and organic stem-on tomatoes, this second-favorite sandwich is packed with natural vitamin C, beneficial fiber, and complex, energy-producing carbs. Delicious!

“Now just a minute!” you say. “Second-favorite sandwich? So what’s in first place?” At the risk of being accused of unduly influencing you to stray from any of your New Year resolutions, I hesitate to tell you. But, seeing that most resolutions never see the light of March, much less make it to Lent, here goes: My all-time favorite sandwich is also a BLT. However, to reach top status, it must be made with white bread, regular bacon, iceberg lettuce, and home-grown Better Boy® tomatoes. Oh, and both pieces of bread have to be slathered with Duke’s real mayonnaise. Classic!

And there you have it. I’m not proud of it, but you did twist my arm. And, since I’m writing this just before lunch and my stomach is starting to growl, I should let you go.

Oh wait. I remember why sandwiches are on my brain! Someone at church last week commented that I now had a “sandwich family.” A little slow on the uptake, I asked, “What’s that?” It was, I learned, a family where a middle-aged couple’s elderly parents and their grown children live with them. (I know—who are they calling “middle aged”?) All I can say is that being a sandwich family is pretty cool—I get to play with my grandkids every day.

So, if you really pressed me, I’d have to confess that the rankings of my favorite sandwiches have been rearranged. First is still the classic BLT, but giving it a run for its money is my delightful new sandwich family. I’m afraid the healthy BLT is now a very, very distant third.

Okay, lunchtime!

Apples of gold...

It came as a simple suggestion: “Have you thought about working on that novel you started a few years ago?” Frankly, I was surprised that Chuck Thompson even remembered such a thing. After all, it was almost 20 years ago that I had scratched the writer’s itch and typed a few pages of a story. I remember thinking at the time, How hard can it be? A plot here, a few characters there; throw in a twist, add a resolution and, voilà, a novel!

Well, let me tell you how hard it was: VERY! First off, the characters didn’t cooperate. They’d run off down any number of rabbit trails, and retrieving them and making them behave was beyond me. Then the plot veered off course, meaning that although it was fiction, what I was making up was supposed to make sense! Imagine that.

I never did get as far as the twist. What I did was give up. Seems that old itch cleared up really fast once I found out that serious writing required heaps and heaps of time and effort.

Back to Chuck’s suggestion. He didn’t know for sure, but I think that he had a pretty good idea that I was in a funk. What’s funny, though, is that I didn’t even realize I was in one. But, the minute after I had hung up the phone after our conversation, it was as though the sun suddenly shone after weeks of overcast and drizzle.

I pulled out the old manuscript (I just had a paper copy) and read it over. My, my, I thought, things have really changed in 20 years! What—no cell phones! This will never do. I busily began rewriting, adding, moving, deleting. Before I knew what was happening, I was totally immersed in the story. My creative juices were pumping, I was reenergized and, truthfully, I itched all over!

The Bible says that “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver” (Proverbs 25:11). Chuck didn’t know it, but he gave me a very valuable gift. Not that anything will come of my novel—that’s not the point. Chuck’s simple gift untied and set free the “me” that God intended me to be. That’s what a little encouragement can do. It doesn’t cost anything, but it can mean everything.