The Mystery Basket

The Mystery Basket

Four chefs. Four wicker mystery baskets. One hot mess of ingredients. Welcome to Chopped, the Food Network fun house where four competing chefs attempt to make order from culinary chaos.

You know, easy stuff like “Whip up a little appetizer from shad roe, vodka, Cheerios, and pickled pigs’ feet. Time starts . . . now!”

Honestly, the fact that the competitors don’t freeze like deer in headlights or run away from their baskets screaming seems quite miraculous to me. But these cooks have got game. They make something from whatever they’re given and serve it up for judgment from appetizer to entree to dessert. Those who falter in the face of the mystery-basket ingredients are “chopped,” until one winning chef is named Chopped Champion.

Imagine coming face-to-face with Spam, macerated cherries, pork rinds, and peanut brittle and creating from them something (anything!) edible. But the contestants do. Episode after episode. The only ironclad rule is this: use every ingredient in the basket.

Watching Chopped I see that, where God’s sovereignty is concerned, I’m the mystery basket, presenting him day in and day out with ridiculous combinations of stuff that couldn’t possibly be made God honoring or useful. But somehow he consistently, miraculously does both.

Somehow he takes my stubbornness and my weak will, my cynicism and my smart mouth, my worst mistakes and my truest hopes, and he doesn’t just make do; he makes something beautiful and true. While I would surrender in the face of my rotten mess of raw material, he does not. He is undaunted by my lack of sweetness or my smelly sin. He rolls up his sleeves and begins to do what only he can do: make art from emptiness, harmony from dissonance, good from “Oh, good grief.”

What he never does is refuse to love or use me when I open the basket before him and surrender. He brings all of himself to all of me, and the result is a good and glorious mystery, indeed.

I entrust my spirit into your hand. Rescue me, LORD, for you are a faithful God.

Psalm 31:5