Throughout my travels around the world I’ve learned that one of the best ways to feel like myself is to cling to what I know. For instance, it makes absolutely no sense to sleep with the covers on when the temperature causes your skin to melt, but I’m used to sleeping with covers. So I sleep with a sheet – even if it’s only draped over one leg. I never ate McDonald’s before the World Race, but now that I’m in countries with no recognizable restaurants, I find myself eating double cheeseburgers and feeling like I’m home.
Yesterday morning my squadmate Jen looked at me with longing in her eyes and said, “I want a grilled cheese sandwich.” My mind flashed back to making grilled cheese in my kitchen back home, and suddenly I was filled with a yearning for the sandwich like I’ve never had before. “We’re doing it.” I said to Jen with a determined look upon my face.
Rarely on the race have we had access to a kitchen, let a alone a grocery store. It just so happens that for the time being we have both. We ventured over to the grocery store and found ourselves staring at the cheese. It was $3.50. That’s an entire day’s worth of meals for one of us.
“What do we do?” Jen asked with panic in her voice.
“I, uh, I don’t know.” I stammered. A knot began to form in my stomach as I tried to brace myself for disappointment.
Just then I noticed my other squadmate Chelsea scanning the aisles. I asked if she wanted to join our grilled cheese party. “Sure,” she said as she continued browsing. Then I asked Emily. And Melanie. And it came to be that we could afford the cheese after all.
We purchased the rest of the ingredients (tomato soup included!) and walked back to our place of residence. It was early in the day, and we had decided that the grilled cheese should be saved for dinner. So all afternoon we waited – our stomachs grumbling and our hearts excited.
Six o’clock rolled around, and even though we had planned for 6:30, we began to prepare our feast. Jen pulled out the pots and pans, and I gathered the soup, bread, butter and cheese But wait…where was the cheese?
I looked frantically for it by myself – not wanting Jen to worry.
“Do you have everything?” she asked as I took out everything in the refrigerator for the third time. “Uhhh…the bread and butter is on the table.” “Oh, okay. Where’s the cheese?”
I turned slowly toward her, and as our eyes met I could see the horror fill her eyes. “It has to be around here somewhere.” she said with a shaky confidence. She scavenged through the refrigerator as I had just done. She looked through all the grocery bags that I had just looked through. She asked everyone I had asked.
We began to lose our cool. We started accusing people – did someone leave it at the checkout counter? Did someone, heaven forbid, steal it? At this point I’m not so sure if it was the cheese we were so keen on finding, or if it was just the longing for something familiar.
In all the chaos I was reminded of a World Race blog I had read earlier that day. It was about how God cares about the details of our lives – and how he provided nachos for a racer who had wanted them the entire duration of her trip.
I felt silly, but I grabbed Jen and told her we needed to pray. We clasped hands and pitifully cried out to God about our lost cheese.
Not a minute later Melanie ran into the room with her hand in the air. “I found the cheese!” Jen and I looked at each other with gaping jaws, and then we did that whole squealing and hugging and jumping up and down thing that girls do when they’re excited.
That night as we sat down to a delicious meal of one grilled cheese sandwich and seven spoonfuls of tomato soup, we were reminded of how our big God cares for even the littlest things in our lives.
