Fixing the Pecan Pie (not a story about pie)

A cool analogy popped into my mind last night. I was doing some self-reflection, and I suddenly thought of a funny story involving my friend's father. Several years ago, he made a pecan pie one night, to serve at a dinner party the next day. It came out of the oven and it looked delicious. However, at 2am that night he awoke suddenly as he realized he had forgotten to add the butter! He looked at his beautiful pie, thought about what to do, and then decided that he was not going to throw it away. Why give up on something that could be so good, so delicious, so perfect? So he grabbed the right amount of butter, melted it, and slowly poured the liquified butter over the top of the pie. His hope was that it would sink in and taste just as good as if he had included it originally. 

As I was doing some self-reflection, I was wondering if it was too late to to add a key ingredient to my life. Was it too late to significantly change what had already been formed in earlier years? I was stuck in a thought pattern that was not beneficial to me in any way... but just waiting on the outside was something completely different, something that could really change my life for the better. Something that was trying to sink into my thoughts and my outlook, much like the butter was sinking into the pie. Would it work? Was there hope?

I kept thinking about how we can get stuck in certain thought patterns and behaviors, even after we've outgrown them and they are of no use to us anymore. Maybe these thoughts and behaviors stem from things we were told as kids, maybe they are negative thoughts that we replay in our mind over and over, maybe they come to us through society or our culture. But if they are no longer useful to us, why don't we cast them off?

Think about people who have gone through trauma. War veterans. Domestic violence/child abuse survivors. They are often stuck with certain thought patterns, PTSD, survival techniques, things that probably saved their life when they needed those skills and techniques. But once the trauma has passed, once the war is over, once the spouse leaves the unsafe home, these skills and techniques are no longer needed. The tricky part is unlearning all that they have learned about the world and about life. What once saved their life in the war may now hinder the life they are trying to live when they return home. For domestic violence survivors, they succeeded by overcoming the challenges at home, but often they fall into similar experiences or continue to choose partners that also abuse them. Why? As humans we are often creatures of habit... Does this mean we are really stuck? Or is there hope that we can unlearn these habits, these patterns, that are so debilitating now that the storm has passed?

We want to cast off this old, outgrown thinking. The bible tells a story of a blind man who left the old behind as he ventured forth for the new. "And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus" (Mark 10:50). He left behind what he was used to, what he had been stuck with, when he met Jesus. And he walked away, seeing.

But while we want to throw off the old ways of thinking for the new, we don't want to throw away ourselves. Audrey Hepburn puts it nicely: "People... have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone."

As for the pie, it was delicious. It really turned out all right, and it was able to absorb the butter very nicely. It wasn't a "throw-away" pie; it was a beautiful masterpiece, just like us.