Spaghetti and Chicken

One of my favorite dishes from my past was Spaghetti and Chicken.

My mother would par-boil chicken "on-the-bone," as my grandson Jackson calls it, and then simmer it in a homemade tomato sauce until it was incredibly tender.  The chicken would be flavored with the sauce and the sauce with the chicken.

She would make a huge pot of spaghetti and when the chicken was cooked she would add the sauce to the spaghetti until every strand was perfectly covered and seasoned with that wonderful sauce. The spaghetti would be put on a platter and the chicken reunited with it.  It was a comfort food and it was delicious.

I was thinking about this dish today and remembering how I loved to watch the spaghetti cook in the pot.  There are approximately 448 strands of spaghetti in a pound (yes, someone somewhere actually counted!) and likely my mother cooked at least a pound of spaghetti for our family.

Even if each of those 448 strands in my mother's pot of spaghetti were a distinctly different color, I would find it impossible to keep up with just one strand.  There is no way I could keep my eye on it as it swirled and danced around in the pot.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information estimates that 105 billion people have lived on the earth, of whom 5.5% are alive today.  If I could not keep up with one strand of spaghetti out of 448, it amazes me that our Lord can keep up with 105 billion people!  He not only knows where we are in our "pot,"  He knows everything about us.  He knows our thoughts, our hearts, our joys and our sorrows.  And in some way I cannot fathom, for those of us who are His trusting sons and daughters in Christ, He works all things in our lives together for good.

Now if we were programmed robots, I can see that might be easier, but we are not.  We are humans with wills that cause us to do good and evil.  We have choices to make and we make them.  The Lord takes our choices and somehow works them "after the counsel of His own will."

How much infinitely greater than us He must be!  His knowledge must be unfathomable,  His judgments past understanding.  It is no wonder we will spend all eternity exploring this infinite being and after ten thousand years, proclaiming as the old hymn says, "We have just begun."

"O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  

How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!"  

Romans 11:33