Do you know that feeling of starvation mixed with not being able to find food? It sort of feels like your stomach being ripped out of your flesh. Awful, but that is about how we are felt one adventurous day.
The Outing
We don’t venture out every single day as a family; we have work and school to accomplish. When we do go out to explore it is a very long and exhausting day. Some days we have plenty of water and biscuits to keep the hunger at bay. Recently, though, we have only had plenty of water.
One Sunday we had a particularly uncomfortable experience trying to find food on severely empty stomachs. We arrived at our church meeting, which lasts three hours, and stayed after to chat with some new friends. It was now 5pm and some of us had not eaten anything all day.
Walking around Old City Chiang Mai we stopped at several places to look at the menu, but no one served what we really wanted, Western food. Jake wanted a great big, juicy burger. The children were holding out for a slice of hot pepperoni pizza. Forty-five minutes into the search we realized this was probably not the place to desire juicy burgers and hot slices of pizza.
We then came upon some of brightest yellow and most delicious looking bananas. These were what we needed to take the edge off of the hunger. For 50 baht we purchased eleven large, beautiful bananas. We found manna from heaven at that moment. Those bananas tasted better than any other banana we have ever had.
Sweet Reward of Bananas
Those bananas represent the sweet rewards that come when we work hard and wait patiently for the fruit of our labor to become bounteous. If we ate these bananas when we first set out on our quest to find what we really wanted, they would not have tasted so sweet.
About an hour after eating the bananas we found ourselves at a mall where fresh baked pizza was promptly devoured by all five of us. The pizza was very good and so was the ice cream that followed, but I will never forget those bananas and the meaning they represent for us.
Even in our most empty state we can find fulfillment and rewards for our work. Even though the children at that moment only wanted food, we were able to teach them that if they continue to press forward in work they will be able to have sweet rewards. Look for these teaching moments while you are out with your family. They will make the outing so much richer.