Liver Pate
I come by it sorta naturally. Ignorance that is. They say, ignorance is bliss, but I suppose that only goes so far. When the rubber-meets-the-road, so-to-speak, oft times one needs a bit more grip for traction to make it through this side of the veil. After all, excuses only go so far when one tries to explain why they do what they do. Let me share a case in point.
My friend was moving. Clear across country was her destination with only the shirt on her back and a car load of stuff. The price was too high for a moving van, and so she ditched her stuff. A car can only hold so much and when the rubber literally met the road in this case, she needed every inch to count for something.
Overboard she tossed some items, sold others, and flat out gave away many more. Left behind were a few things for the next tenant and out of the kindness of her heart, she gifted me with several items to take care of if she were to ever return. Her plants were now mine, but once home, I noticed she’d placed a few more treasures round and about my vehicle. Amongst those items were a few canned goods.
“Venison & Lentil Pate” is what was written upon one deep purple and gold can. With a price tag of $3.59 I was thrilled. Never before had I splurged on such an item, and began wondering how it would taste upon a cracker or two served up.
We like venison in our house and since hunting season had just come to a close, it sorta seemed like a seasonal item perfectly timed for such a time as this. I placed the rich looking can of goods amidst my other items and promptly forgot all about it. Until…
One day, when I was making homemade soup with venison burger I’d cooked up the night before, I began thrashing through my cupboard in hopes of finding something that might enhance the taste. A large can of crushed tomatoes caught my eye. In it went. A can of chick peas was next up, some squash, broccoli, and venison burger. Spices rounded up the rest of it, but as I combed the cupboard for more, the beautiful purple and gold can caught my eye.
As a gluten-free consumer, I am careful and began reading the ingredients. Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary, and as I visualized it adding texture to my soup, paused a bit more wondering if I should actually douse this in soup… or save it for something more savory. I’m not exactly a master chef, but the little I knew from TV shows and fancy people, had me visualizing the pate as something served up as an appetizer.
I hesitated longer than usual, not wanting to waste such a delicacy gifted. Should I toss it in the soup? Or not? Some of the ingredients looked rather unusual and so I thought I’d lose the taste if watered down. The venison broth would do just fine. Beef liver, sweet potatoes, salmon oil and the likes of many other goodies seemed almost too good to be true.
Suddenly, my eye noted some words that read, “Grain-Free.” Wow! This is really fancy stuff continued my train of thought. And, after reading it several times, I noticed one final line in fine print towards the bottom of the can.
“FOOD FOR DOGS.”
And there you have it. I’d jumped to conclusions once again by simply looking at the packaging. I’d presupposed something that wasn’t and had I not paused for full disclosure. In other words, I was wrong.
Food for thought and now food for the animals upon the farm. We are fresh out of dogs but my best guess is that the cats will love it and love me a whole lot more…at least until they finish it. Then, they will want more of the same as I readily disappoint when coming with their crunchy bits of plain ole cat food.
May 2022 find us all pausing a little more readily and not be consumers of our own presuppositions. It might just turn out that we were, after all, wrong and there’s nothing wrong about that. There nothing wrong, of course, as long as we don’t toss what we thought into a pile of soup, mix it up, and serve it as food to a whole lot of others.
In Ephesians 4:25 it says, “Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak truth each one of you with his neighbor for we are members of one another.”
Timothy was reminded in 6:20 and if Timothy was, how much more may we glean from it… “O Timothy, guard what as has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called ‘knowledge’. Amen.
