Why Do WE Do This ?

The story is told of a family who traditionally had a canned ham roasted with a glaze topping on it every year for Easter Sunday dinner.  Each Easter Mom and Dad would supervise an early morning Easter egg hunt.  Then Mom would go to the kitchen.  She would get out her roasting pan.  Then she would open the canned ham.  She scraped off that slimy gel that is the congealed juices from when the ham was packed.  She would get out the bowl of glaze she had prepared the night before. Then just before she put the ham in the roasting pan she would take a large knife and cutoff about one and a half inches from the narrow end.  She then put the two pieces in side by side, slathered on the sweet spicy glaze and put it in the oven to slowly roast and fill the house with aromas that would welcome the family back from church services.

After watching this procedure every spring for 15 years and being told each year not to put her finger back into the glaze mix after she had licked it.  The teenage daughter as she was helping Mom asked, "Mom, why do you always cut the ham into 2 pieces before you put it into the pan ?" 

Mom responded, "It is the way my mother did it."

At dinner that afternoon the teenager asked Grandmother why.  Grandma said, "It is the way my mother did it."

That evening visiting with great grandmother the question was repeated, her response, "What else could I do ?  My roasting pan was too short for the whole ham and I could not afford to buy a new pan for just one dinner a year." 

It is time for each and every member of God's family to be re-examining our traditions with the question:  Why do we do this ? 

His, thus Yours,

  Stuart