Love and the Burned Biscuits

There are so many terms by which I could have called this offering for this last Saturday in October.

For instance, I could have titled it, “What did you have for the evening meal?” Another title could have been, “Eating breakfast at the close of the day.”

There are so many impressive lessons of love and patience in this composition I found among the many items I pile together over the years. Sadly, this is one I did not register the source. I would like to give credit for instilling some warm memories from the past years of life. I hope reading this selection will bring back many great memories for each reader as it did for me.

The selection from which I borrow will not be used verbatim but will be modified with personal opinion and observation. Because of the extensive modification quotation marks will be omitted rather frequently from my composition today. But I will begin this treatment with an observation of a self-evident truth.

Rearranging the order of life’s events:

Without dispute we all recognize the natural order of events of life. In this case, by “natural” it simply means the order of domestic, social, educational and recreational endeavors we have observed and have come to accept as the way things should be. Do we not often see that families often rearrange the established order?

This recognition of the natural order is accepted in no greater area than the order in which we eat our daily meals. This order not only labels the naming of and assignment of time to the various mealtimes, it most often implies the makeup or content of the meals. Since we are discussing burned biscuits, it seems proper that we immediately say we are talking about breakfast, or the first meal of the day.

We associate the morning meal with eggs (any style), grits (for the non-Yankees living in our midst), gravy (either “thick” or “red-eye gravy”) and one of the popular breakfast meats (bacon, sausage, ham or tenderloin). I am getting hungry as I write these words.

After breakfast comes dinner in midday, and then in the closing hours of the day we will enjoy supper. Now before anyone calls or writes to indicate my ignorance, I know the proper term (some experts say) for the midday meal is lunch, and dinner is the proper term for the evening meal. Breakfast for Supper: The writer of the original composition related a practice often used by most families. He noted that in his younger days, his mother would on occasion make breakfast food for the evening meal. To this day, one of my most welcome events is the substituting breakfast food for the last meal of the day ( So it is with Coach Terry Weldon). This is more than a description of a menu for a meal; it is a lesson in love, consideration and recognition that some things (mistakes) don’t shake up the world.

The writer said he remembered one night in particular when his mother had made breakfast after a long and hard day at work. The mother placed a plate of eggs, sausage and extremely burned biscuits in the front of his dad. He wanted to see his dad’s reaction. All the dad did was reach for his biscuit, and smile at the mom and ask the writer how his day had gone at school. The young man did not remember what he answered, but he remembered his dad smeared butter and jelly on that ugly, burned biscuit. Without changing expression or saying a word, his dad ate every bite. As the youngster left the table, he remembered his mother apologizing to his father for burning the biscuits. The son also remembered the words his father spoke to the mother: He said, “Honey, I love burned biscuits every now and then.”

Later the youngster went to kiss his dad good night and he asked his dad if he really liked his biscuits burned. The dad put his arms around his child and said, “Your Mom put in a hard day at work today and she was real tired. And besides – a little burned biscuits never hurt anyone.” Lessons to be learned The youngster grew older and indicated he thought about that incident many times. He noted that life is full of imperfect things and imperfect people. And here is the lesson for all of us. He said, “(What) I have learned….is that learning to accept each other’s faults and choosing to celebrate each other’s differences is one of the most important keys to creating a healthy, growing and lasting relationship.”

And that is my prayer for all of us today…that we learn to take the good, the bad and the ugly parts of our life and lay them at the feet of God. In the end, God is the only one who is able to give us a relationship where a burnt biscuit isn’t a deal breaker.

Listen to someone’s wise words: “Life without God is like an unsharpened pencil—it has no point.”

“Don’t put the key to your happiness in someone else’s pocket – keep it in your own.”

So, please pass me a biscuit, and yes, the burned one will do just fine.