The God of Breakfast

I often overlook breakfast. Breakfast feels pointless in the grinding, everyday routine that must be done before I’m off to work. Slowing down to sit and eat something seems a waste; I could be getting ready, or reading a book, or writing emails, or sleeping. In the rush of an ordinary Monday, breakfast is trivial, so I skip it. The problem is, I love breakfast. I love lazy Saturday mornings, the smell of bacon wafting through the house, scrambled eggs and scallions and toast piled up and over-buttered. I love homemade jam and sausage links and potatoes. I love having my family around, everyone in their pajamas. We’re all still sleepy, unready, waiting on a new day to show itself. Breakfast is the most real, raw moment of the day — and I often reject it. 

I have been reading the book of John, lately, and noticing all the things Jesus says about Father God. I never noticed how bound up Christ is with his Father. I always thought of God the Father as distant and aloof. It’s cliché to even say it; I have read many books on our view of the Father and how it affects our view of the world. But I never noticed, until now, how it affected me. I have served a God of dinner parties, of perfection and wine and cutlery and nice formal-wear. I am planning my own wedding right now, and I find myself itchy in this world of events. I hate dressing up. I hate big crowds. Yet, the most important date of my life is supposed to start with both of these things, despite my discomfort. I am supposed to want fancy things and a good time. I saw God in this way, too — I thought he wanted me to want the perfect nights, the tidy life, the controlled, atmospheric party. This is the distant God I thought I served. 

But what I am learning is how bound up Jesus is with the Father, and how messy and uncontrolled and gentle that is. Jesus says himself that he can only do what he sees the Father doing (John 5:19). This means that all of Christ’s life is a reflection of Father God. Father God is a God of mercy and humility and justice, as we see in the Sermon on the Mount. He heals internal and external wounds; he takes a loaf of bread and turns it into seventy loaves. He is abundant and extravagant with love, turning water into the best wine. He refreshes, he weeps, he laughs. He is the God who created humans — so why have I always thought he despised my humanness? He is a God of the raw and the vulnerable. 

In John 21, when Jesus is resurrected and the disciples are still confused about it all, Jesus shows up on the beach while the disciples are fishing. The men hadn’t caught anything yet, and Jesus reveals his abundance again when he tells them to throw the net to the other side of the boat. Upon obeying his order, they catch all the fish they could need. Peter topples overboard to swim to Christ, and the rest of the disciples row in the boat. Then comes my favorite part: “When they got there, they found breakfast waiting for them — fish cooking over a charcoal fire, and some bread.” Jesus invites them to add their fish to the meal, and then says what might be my favorite line in all of Scripture: “Come and have breakfast.”

 Jesus does throw a lot of dinner parties in Scripture. God loves a messy, abundant wedding or feast. But when I think about Jesus, and now when I think about the Father, this breakfast story is the one I gravitate toward. The disciples are tired; they are not at their best. Still, Jesus prepares breakfast for them. He meets them at dawn, at the beginning of a new day, unkempt and un-showered, and he makes them a morning meal. This is the Father I want to serve. Not a fashionable, orderly, sophisticated God, but a God of mornings and bedhead and beach fires. I serve a God who sits each day with us as we wake, just waiting for us to slow down, to see him, to say hello. He waits through each night to wake us, and each morning he restores us. He meets us in the mundane and the basic, and he says to each of us as we wake: “Come and have breakfast.”