Oatmeal, anyone?

Oatmeal is not my favorite breakfast food. In fact, I prefer just about anything with chocolate in it. Chocolate chip muffins, chocolate chip pancakes, hot chocolate to drink... That would be my ideal kind of breakfast. But this weekend, at a wonderful wedding, I heard a touching and true description of human love that likens it to oatmeal... Or rather stirring the oatmeal.
The image comes from the book We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love by Robert A. Johnson.
"Stirring the oatmeal is a humble act—not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To 'stir the oatmeal' means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity to everything. Like the rice hulling of the Zen Monks, the spinning wheel of Gandhi, the tent making of Saint Paul, it represents the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary."
May we all have our own moments of stirring the oatmeal love, even if it happens while we're making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or mowing the lawn. God is there in those ordinary moments; it's up to us to see him there.