Bay Leaf in the Stew

My mother was a master chef when it came to beef stew.  I can close my eyes, let my imagination take me back to the dinner table in our home in Alfred Station and almost taste the meat and veggies swimming in thick yummy gravy:  onions, celery, carrots, potatoes, peas, green beans and beef flavored with bay.  Yummmmm.   My grandparents spent the summers living in a tiny travel trailer behind our house and often ate dinner with us.  When the menu included stew a major competition among my three siblings and I occurred.  We did not want the bay leaf to end up in our portion of the stew.  My grandfather’s rule about bay leaves:  who ever had the bay leaf in their bowl washed the dishes and we did not want to wash the dishes!
 
So how does 4 kids not wanting to wash the dishes relate to living a faithful Christian life?   Sometimes, often in fact, Jesus asks us to do something, to go someplace, or to talk with someone, and we do not want to obey.  We say we will obey and then invoke the ‘dishwater diarrhea’ tactic:  delay - avoid – distract with the Godly activities we really want to do.  Jesus encountered people like us: people who delayed - avoided – distracted rather than obeying Jesus’ call to follow him.  Here is a scene from Luke 9:
   
57 As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”58 Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”59 He said to another man, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”
 
What is the bay leaf in my life, in your life?  Where are we struck with dishwater diarrhea?  Is there something Jesus is asking us to do right now we are resisting?
 
Oh, by the way, the bay leaf is the ingredient giving the stew its yumminess.  Could it be obeying Jesus’ bay leaf will provide the excitement and delight in our Christian life?