Author: toddrivetti

Growing up we enjoyed my mother’s rhythm of making sauce every Saturday. We could smell it throughout the house as it simmered for hours in order to be ready for our Sunday meal. Sunday was primarily set aside for church and our church community. So I suppose that’s how I’ve ended up thinking about the connection between meatballs and Christian community…

I try to make spaghetti sauce once every three weeks. It takes about 12 hours to make my sauce. I usually start at around 6:00 AM with water and a large variety of tomatoes (crushed, diced, puree, and paste). To the water and tomatoes I add black pepper, salt, onions, parsley, oregano, basil, garlic, and crushed red pepper. All of it simmers together for about 8 hours (thoroughly stirring every 15 minutes). A big part of making sauce is the process of making the meatballs.

After this long simmering session, I begin to put the meatballs together. I mix ground beef with Italian bread crumbs, salt, black pepper, and onion. I roll the meatballs together and place them on two large cookie sheets and bake them in the oven for 35 minutes. After removing them from the oven, I place them in the sauce and let them simmer together for the remainder of the cooking time (about 3 more hours). This final 3 hours has both the meatballs and the sauce delivering flavor back and forth, with both being changed by the other.

One of the big questions is always the balance between the sauce flavoring the meatballs, or whether the meatballs primarily deliver flavor to the sauce. In my opinion, the sauce should be the driver for flavor, with the meatballs providing the secondary flavor back to the sauce.

I think certain aspects of Christian community function a lot like the combination of my meatballs and sauce over the last three hours of the cooking. Both the individuals and the community as a whole affect each other. The extent of that effect often varies depending upon the nature of the community and the individuals involved. All of this is very complex.

I believe that a healthy Christian community should flavor (affect) the individuals in that community more than any single (or small group of) individual(s) affect the community. And yet, the community needs to nurture the gifts of individuals in order for them to add flavor back to the community.

Bad sauce cannot be fixed by good meatballs…in fact, bad sauce can almost ruin the best meatballs. In the same way – bad community can be very damaging to a person’s soul. On the other hand, really good sauce cannot fix bad meatballs – it can help (but the meatballs need a miracle from outside the sauce…maybe the analogy is breaking down a bit at this point…)…the meatballs need more than what the sauce (community) can give them to completely fix them. Tasting/Discerning the sauce is a critical skill (wisdom) for those engaged in Christian community. Adjusting behaviors (ingredients) on the fly is important (see 1 Corinthians 11)…

Matthew 5:34-37 says, “But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” This small section in Matthew seems to be emphasizing the importance of using words well. It reminds me of a lesson I learned early in my career.

I spent 25 years working in various capacities in commercial real estate. For 14 of those years I worked with several other colleagues advising foreign institutions on their acquisitions and dispositions of office properties. During a particular meeting with one of our clients at the beginning of my time advising these clients, the man in charge of things for the client was unusually restless as we delivered our analysis and opinions regarding an office building that we recommended for purchase. I was in the middle of explaining our reasoning as to why they should buy this particular building when this man interrupted me. He stared at me and said, “Do you think we should buy this building?” I said, “Yes, I think it’s a good building – it makes sense to buy it.” He said, “But why do you think we should buy it.” I started to explain different features in the cash flow projections that we had put together. I talked about different things regarding the location relative to what I thought the purchase price should be. I spoke about the tenants in the building and their strength in terms of creditworthiness. Finally, in frustration, the man slammed his hand down on the conference room table and yelled “But if it was YOUR money, would YOU spend $100 million dollars on this building at this corner?” He stared directly at me, almost boring a hole right through me.

I paused and swallowed hard. I had been talking in abstract terms, almost in a detached way. I wasn’t communicating how invested in this situation I was with him. His slamming the conference room table jolted me into awareness. The words I was using felt empty to him. I didn’t really show that I too had skin in the game beyond the time I put into analyzing the building for purchase. By concentrating so intently on the data and analysis, I had failed to make clear that I was truly bringing my whole self in what I was doing that day.

I think in all situations, our words need to reflect our very being. They should capture our whole selves. To do that, they must be chosen well. And in most situations, less is better than more.

I love to sing with people whose voices are not trained. Especially those who do not necessarily always hit the right notes. Why? Because, in those situations people are usually unconscious about how they sound. The true way they feel about what they are singing bubbles out and spills all around them. It’s hard to know how someone feels about what they are singing if that person’s voice is trained or well practiced because their concern with hitting the notes properly seems to keep the emotions they might feel from oozing out into the open. Often it sounds as if the person’s emotions are not engaged because they’re thinking about the mechanics of singing rather than the song itself. It seems as if the related feelings corresponding to the music that might have been generated never come to life. Nowhere did this difference show itself more than during Sunday night church services when I was growing up. There, you could hear the various voices throughout the congregation rise to the ceiling when folks singing would lose themselves in the feelings of the songs.

Matthew 13:33 reads – “He told them still another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough’.” That’s a lot of dough for one woman to knead. Whenever I read this parable I think of my grandmother. During the Depression in the 1930s she rose most days between 3:30 and 4:00 AM to bake bread for a nearby boarding house where railroad workers lived. She usually baked three days per week and during the other days, she did the laundry for the boarding house – by hand with a washboard. My grandfather had constructed an outdoor brick oven that was large enough to bake a dozen loaves of bread at a time. She often baked about forty loaves of bread. These loaves were not the small loaves that we normally buy today in a grocery store, but were large, in the shape of a tire. The muscles in her hands, arms, and across her back felt like a man’s when she hugged me when I was a child. The amount of flour that the woman in the parable mixed is ridiculous; but so was the amount that my grandmother mixed during the early morning hours of her long days.

I’m a schedule guy. I love to think about my schedule, control my schedule, make adjustments to my schedule, and know well in advance what I’m going to try to accomplish on any given day. On the first Saturday after we were married (a very long time ago…) – I hovered over my wife with my face near her sleeping head and said, “What’s your schedule today?….hmmm?…what are you gonna to do? When are you getting up?” She was not happy…. She fumbled for words and mumbled something about, “Isn’t it Saturday?…I don’t have a schedule on Saturday…”…and then as she gained more consciousness, “Why would anybody have a schedule on Saturday?” Needless to say, I’ve had to make some changes in how I approached living with her. Thankfully, I had that adjustment period to prepare me for what was coming.

For the past four years our son Daniel has suffered unbelievably with chronic migraine headaches. These headaches can be triggered by a variety of causes including a flare-up in his allergies (he’s highly allergic to many things – especially dust), fluorescent lights, sharp changes in barometric pressure, and colds or other viruses. When these migraines hit, they often serve to bring on violent episodes of vomiting. These episodes tend to move in a cycle which can be very difficult to break. He takes medicine to lessen the chances of the migraines occurring; however, we try to minimize the amount he takes in order to lessen the side-effects.

Bottom-line, Daniel misses a lot of school. And when he’s in school, he often needs to leave early when a migraine hits. Thankfully, we’ve been able to structure our lives so that we have the flexibility to care for him, drive him to and from school at odd times, and adjust what we’re doing on the fly to deal with whatever his body delivers to him on any given day. We’re not sure how long it will take for Daniel to learn to manage this condition. Or, if he will continue to grow out of it (this year is much better than last year). But until that time, I’ll need to continue to live with a larger amount of flexibility in my schedule than I want. In a way – I need to treat every day like my wife’s idea of Saturday :)… I love the amount of time I get to spend with our son (hopefully he likes it too)….But the continual changes are something that’s required patience on my part…and some days I handle it better than others…

When I was 20 years old, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I worked on a construction site in Grove City, Pennsylvania. We were building an addition to a General Electric manufacturing facility. I spent the days doing a variety of tasks as a general laborer. During one of those days I was tasked with removing concrete from around a steel column that had been set at the wrong height. It was a column intended to support a robotic inventory management system. We needed to re-set the column to the correct height. Unfortunately for me, one particular column was located in such a way that I couldn’t maneuver a jack hammer into place to break up the concrete holding the column. The only way to break up the concrete around the column was to use a sledge hammer to strike a long steel pin that was held by hand and wedged against the base of the column. It was my job to hold the steel pin, while another worker name Bill swung the hammer, hitting the pin with all his might. Bill was a large African American man who possessed strength that I’ve only observed in a few other men. Coupled with that strength, he owned cat-like coordination in all his limbs. As we got prepared to start our task of breaking up the concrete, Bill began to chuckle. He looked at me and said, “Are you ready?” I eyed him warily and said, “Yeah.” He set his feet, left foot forward, with the right foot slightly to the side and began to bring the large sledge hammer fully around in a wheel-house manner. His eyes were wide and a broad grin shaped his face. His face moved into a more mischievous smile as he began to say “Only hit a man once.”  Thud/smash went the hammer against the steel pin I was holding with my gloved right hand. “Only hit a man once” Bill said again, with evident enjoyment as he continued to smile even more broadly. He did this again and again, four, five times. Finally the pin broke the concrete free. Bill, broke into a full-throated laugh at the look of terror on my face. He smiled and said “Killed him,” spun on his heels, dropped the sledge hammer and walked away shaking with laughter. I stood there frozen in place for what seemed like several minutes, recovering from the worry that I was about to lose my whole arm if he had missed the pin.

When I’m working out on the stationary exercise bike, I face the parking lot of the shopping center. The gym sits next to the Virginia state liquor store in the middle of the shopping center. Those of us addicted to the endorphins we get from our exercise get our fix in the same space as those addicted to alcohol. Our bodies tell us what we need, and we go and get it in the same shopping center.