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A few years ago, after sharing lunch with a friend at an Asian restaurant, we enjoyed the ritual of opening our fortune cookies.
Fortune cookies don’t exactly qualify as dessert. They are lightweight concoctions of flour, sugar, vanilla, and a dab of sesame seed oil.
But the payoff, of course, is the little white slip of paper inside. Who knows what life-altering wisdom might emerge from a mere cookie?
My friend’s fortune read, “An important person will offer you support.” I’ve never been mistaken for an important person, but there I was, sitting in the restaurant, offering my support – empirical proof that these messages are apparently astonishingly accurate.
My own fortune read, “A new romance is in the future.” It occurred to me that my wife would not receive this as particularly good news.
Perhaps I shouldn’t pay all that much attention to fortune cookies, after all.
Most people are surprised to learn that fortune cookies have been around only about a century. They are not Chinese in origin, but are based on a Japanese-American recipe. An earnest effort in 1992 to introduce them to the Chinese mainland largely failed because they were seen as “too American.”
The world’s #1 manufacturer is Wonton Food Inc, located in the heart of Brooklyn. Wonton rolls out a breathtaking 4.5 million cookies a day.
A few years ago, Wonton began adding “lucky numbers” to those little white slips of paper. Some people routinely use them to gamble, and in 2005 a surprising 110 people won a share of the $19 million Powerball jackpot on the same day. A national investigation ensued. It revealed that all 110 people had played the same randomly produced lucky numbers on Wonton fortunes. Lucky, indeed.
More recently, the folks at Wonton have been adding something else. The reverse side of the fortune reads, “Want a second fortune? Go to SecondFortune.com.”
In other words, if you’re not looking for support from an important person and aren’t in the market for romance, you can always go fishing for a fortune that will really make your day.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a whole series of such “do-over” websites?
There might be SecondBoss.com, in case you’re looking for a more supportive manager. Or maybe SecondBodyShape.com, in case you’re disappointed with what your DNA keeps churning out. Or how about SecondTeenager.com – your chance to get an adolescent who won’t make you run screaming out of your own house.
It’s safe to say that a number of people think they’ve been dealt a difficult hand.
Can’t we reshuffle the deck and start over again? Shouldn’t I be able to take my chances with a Plan B fortune cookie?
Sorry, say most contemporary counselors and ethicists. Your life, your chromosomes, and your circumstances are what they are. So deal with it.
Christianity’s earliest theologian, the apostle Paul, wouldn’t disagree. We can’t get a whole new life just because we’re exasperated with the one we’ve got.
But that doesn’t make us powerless. We can choose to understand and appreciate the life we’ve got in a fundamentally different way.
Here’s how Paul put it: “I’ve learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances. I’m just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little. I’ve found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am” (Philippians 4:11-13, The Message).
We don’t need a second life. God turns out to be all we really need.
Which means that the life you already have, with all of its broken parts, is entirely capable of being incredibly blessed.
No matter how the cookie crumbles.