Apprentice 2 Jesus

I received this from my good friend Kevin Senapatiratne. We meet once a month with two other pastors and he recently wrote about the “spirituality” of meeting for burritos. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

The Spirituality of a Burrito

Is there really any spirituality in a burrito? I would like to think so. I have been a pastor in MN for the last ten years. The last year and a half I have been traveling and speaking to churches on the importance of prayer. But once a month I participate in a spiritual discipline involving a burrito that has helped my walk with Jesus.

Once a month me and three other pastors travel from as far as 45 minutes away and converge on a Q-Doba in the Twin Cities. I risk getting in trouble using the name but it is the chance that I am willing to take to try and get a free burrito. For two years now Pete, Dan, Bill and I have met once a month for lunch at this fine establishment. I would change their names to protect the innocent, but that might imply something that may not be true. There is no agenda at these meetings other than to determine who is responsible for buying the community chips. Although there is no set discussion point much gets accomplished. Each meeting is different in the conversation but the value is still great. I just never know what I am going to get when I pull into the parking lot.

Last time we met the talk turned to our craziest wedding stories. Pete trumped us all by telling of a lady who caught her hair on fire after walking by a candle. Another meeting Dan waxed eloquent about the condition of the Royals baseball farm system. Bill has been know to share such stories as when he made beef jerky as a side gig with its various subplots. During summer months it is great there is seating outside where we can enjoy the breeze as we sit and talk for hours. The latest addition to our routine is to move our meeting after lunch to the ice cream shop a couple stores down. We discussed with the manager how she now has the great beginning to a joke about 4 preachers walking into an ice cream shop.

There are some months that this is the only time that we see each other with one scheduled exception. Each year near the end of the summer we head to a local golf course that gives a free round of golf to pastors. To say that we then head out and play a round of golf would be way too generous. We would rather say that we spend our time looking in the woods for golf balls and then periodically take some shots. The first time we did this we began with breakfast and headed home in the dark.

How is it possible that I consider this a spiritual thing, or even that it helps my walk with Jesus? Yeah, we do sometimes share in a talk about the Bible and I hope that we are giving a positive impression of Jesus to the manager of the ice cream shop. But, it is much more than that. I have learned from this group in a fresh way about the spirituality of friendship. Even in those times when the deepest thing discussed was Dan’s comparison between the book and movie of Forest Gump, I drive away with a refreshed enthusiasm for God and the assignment He has given me.

Maybe when God told us to relate to one another in love it isn’t just when we are talking about the book of Leviticus that we are blessed in our soul. Maybe when Pete shares about the ski trip he is about to take or Bill his side job as a drafter I gain something just by being with them. As I travel around to churches one of the things I am learning and teaching about prayer is that God wants to be with us even when we have no agenda. What I am learning from this group is that God wants me to be with His people even when we have no agenda. So even though I may never find the verse in the Bible that speaks about burritos; the word of the Lord for me is, “Taste and see the burrito is good.”