Swiss Miss Night
Midwestern Farmlands
If you’ve ever gone on a long driving trip through the Midwest in the summer, vast fields of corn and soybeans surround you. Crops planted in perfect rows mesmerize you. I didn’t fully appreciate their beauty when I lived there. Driving in any direction outside of my hometown meant riding through those fields.
The Best of Times
My most desired destination was my aunt and uncle’s farm. Their farm was sheer magic. Besides the welcoming farmhouse and my loving aunt and uncle, there was a tractor, a barn, corn cribs, silos, haystacks, mulberry trees, a country lane, an outhouse, an empty dwelling nearby that kids called “Spook Farm,” and best of all, my cousins. My cousins could make me and my siblings laugh like no other. It was the best of times.
I doubt today if the antics and jokes we cousins shared would be found by others to be funny, but we laughed until our sides ached. When my family arrived at the farm, we kids retreated to the farmhouse basement while the adults chatted, only coming upstairs for food so that we could return after the meal to create more hilarity.
Other farm memories delight my heart. My aunt once created a picnic lunch for us to eat while sitting between rows of corn. Pheasants flew nearby. I recall the smell of field corn drying in corn cribs while we buried each other up to our necks. Attempts to climb up the windmill brought scolding, but haystacks were open game. We held piglets after they were born and watched my uncle feed cattle. Adventures abounded.
Summer Night in the Playhouse
One night we cousins begged my aunt and uncle to allow us to sleep overnight in a small farm building they converted into a playhouse. Our aunt left a warehouse-sized box of Swiss Miss–an instant hot chocolate drink mix–on the counter in the kitchen for us. With no portion control given, we drank it late into the night. Many trips to the outhouse happened. I’m not sure how much sleep any of us got, but it didn’t matter.
In all of the delightful memories of the farm, the Swiss Miss night stands out to me because of what it represents. All parents should set healthy limits for their kids. If unrestrained drinking of hot chocolate happened everyday, it wouldn’t be good for us. But to have a special night set apart where we could enjoy abundance without fear of repercussion felt lavish. It seemed to be part of the playfulness.
Experiencing Grace
The Swiss Miss night was perhaps my first experience of grace. God’s grace. The boundless love and grace of God cannot be earned. It is given as a gift. If you’ve lived in a performance-based environment, grace feels unfamiliar. Grace is what our hearts long for because we can never do enough good to earn favor with God. We know intrinsically that we are lost without grace.
Receiving unbounded hot chocolate while doing nothing to earn it unleashed something deep in my heart that summer night on the farm. I don’t know if my aunt forgot to set a limit for us, or if she just remembered what it is like to be a kid and how much fun it would be for us to have all the hot chocolate we wanted. But she didn’t shame us the next morning when she noticed we used most of the packets in the box. She laughed instead, delighting in our childish indulgence.
God understands our weakness. He gets that we are human. When we believe we must earn God’s favor, we miss His delight in us. Oh, that we would bask in His grace so that we might live in the glory of His pleasure.
Psalm 103:13-14 “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.”
Photo by Kitera Dent on Unsplash
Questions to Ponder: How might experiencing grace affect you after you’ve lived in a performance culture? What is it like for you to offer grace to someone?