You think you know someone.

Five years – truly, has it already been five years that we have spent morning, noon and night working side by side? How many meals, how much laughter, how many truly delicious accomplishments we have achieved together only to arrive at this Easter morning and have you, the oven I’ve grown to trust, inexplicably burn the bacon beyond recognition?!! The betrayal runs deep.

Now, hopefully there aren’t any readers who are questioning the underlying necessity of bacon in the life of the believer. If so, go read Nehemiah 8 and then come back. I’ll wait. A large platter of bacon, crisped to perfection, is my weekly gift to my people, the reminder of all the wondrous things we mortals can experience this side of paradise.

Over the years, I have moved through many different seasons and methods of bacon prep. In the newlywed years, I attempted bacon on a paper-towel-ensconced plate in the microwave. This works better, I admit, if you hadn’t thought it a brilliant idea to register for large, square dinner plates that, when placed in the microwave, aggressively prohibit the rotation mechanism, thus producing bacon that is highly, almost toxically cooked on one end and raw on the other.

I then spent multiple years employing the electric skillet on the countertop method, which was largely fine but had two predictable problems I never seemed to entirely stay ahead of: I buy cheap griddles (yes, that technically makes me the problem, so make it three predictable problems) and they always seem to have large dead spots in the center, thus requiring a complicated mosaic of fatty meat scattered about that can cook approximately three pieces at a time, and the grease catch always has a tendency to break, which I consistently fail to notice until the grease has dripped all across the counter and floor, leaving an exciting patch for walking on days after the bacon has been consumed.

Then I was introduced to cooking bacon in the oven and, dare I have the hubris to say, I shall never go back? It has now become a part of my own personal Sunday morning liturgy. To get the family up and out to worship without a stressed atmosphere, I wake up an hour or so before the rest and go cook bacon. Later, when everyone is up, I pop the already cooked bacon back into the now cooling oven to warm it back to perfection and voilà – eat the fat! This was my plan on Easter morning…

And then the oven betrayed me.

Now, if ovens could speak, mine would probably say (and for some reason, I hear this in an Australian accent), Whoa now, Missy, I am not the one who broke the pattern, you did! You acted the dingo (again, Australian) and left the oven on for too long and you did not pay close attention when you warmed the bacon back up, which is why your family had to eat LIMP TURKEY BACON on Resurrection Sunday! At this point, obviously, I would push random buttons on the oven that would make it stop talking and probably clean itself. Ha, and so there.

But then… I would have to acknowledge that the oven, while unnecessarily preening and self-righteous and sporting a cooler accent than mine, was correct – I assumed the bacon was safe. I stopped paying attention. Smoke always ensues when we stop paying attention.

It is really no different in our daily walks with Christ. We have areas that we let our guard down (you know the one, that guard we are told to keep up with unceasing vigilance because our adversary the devil roams about like a lion seeking one to destroy?). We feel safe, spiritually, and fail to pay attention to the faint aroma of singed flesh that is beginning to permeate our relationships, our thoughts, our homes. One such example that leaps to mind for me is that brief window of time at the end of a long day when you and your spouse finally get to go to bed. How many thoughtless words have been spoken in those last moments of the waking hours? How many misunderstandings could have been avoided, how many apologies would not have become necessary, if we were to go to bed, spiritually, with a knife under our pillow, ready to spring to the cross at the first sign of temptation?

Because that is the only recourse when you light God’s good gifts on fire: Christ. He is your only protection, your true security, the only place you can and must turn again and again in the midst of temptation, of failure, of opposition, of smoke. Some kitchen fires… some relational fires… leave an aroma in the air that lasts for days. I spent a solid 48 hours haunted by the Easter bacon. But with each acrid whiff, I am given the choice to turn, and return, to the Gospel and put my hope in His unfailing protection. He is not done handing out bacon. So, I cannot be done standing guard, in His grace alone.