Tobias Davis

So here it is, Christmas day, and I’ve got a few thoughts running through my head, keeping me from sleep.

Next week is my last week at the intern job I’ve had over the summer/fall, and a week after that I’ll be starting up another semester of school. Only two semesters left… I had so many plans for this summer, and almost none of them happened.

Today I realized more concretely, while planning the moving-back-to-school, that I was almost done here, and starting school will once again cut me off from my friends here. And as I thought more on this, I felt more and more alone. I’ll be living in an apartment with a friend, and I’ll still see most of these friends about the same amount, but during the semester I always feel so cut off and distanced. Probably because of the distance.

But general friendships aren’t why I’m still awake at 2am, it’s a very specific relationship.

And a real fear that I’ll lose the friendship by the cold forces of time and distance.

But when I say “lose”, I don’t mean how it’s normally meant. I mean that, by time and distance, and the inevitable changes about to occur in some of my circles of friends, that the relationship will be… Well, I guess maybe “lost” is the best word.

Set aside and forgotten.

Displaced with other interests.

“It’s a sad thing to lose a friend”, he said.

[Every year, around my birthday, I reflect on who I am, where I've come from, and where I'm going, and then I pour out my heart in this blog. This year is no different.]

Can you remember when you were six? Some people can, especially if they are still six, but my memory slips in and out and I can only remember bits and phrases. One piece goes like this:

My fathers friend, who was also my friend, died when I was rather young, and I remember going to the funeral. This man was a friend to many, and he brought happiness into many people’s lives, so there were many people there, and lots of them were crying.

I didn’t cry then.

As far back as my memory goes, I don’t recall ever being a person who cries easily. I felt pain, I was incredibly sad many times, but I’ve always been good at putting away my sadness, hiding my sorrow behind a stone wall. A barricade to keep people out.

“Good fences make good neighbors”

Only a short number of years ago, I met someone who I thought for sure I would marry “a promise in time, shadows of memories…” When that relationship didn’t work out, I was overcome with grief, but I did not cry much. I was silent for days, my heart was heavy in me while a called out to God, “save me or I perish”, but I did not weep.

Do you remember when you were six? Do you remember what made you cry then?

When I was younger, probably ten or twelve, I was learning math (Algebra) and it was so difficult that it made me cry. But even at that age I could see the golden treasure behind the veil, and I persevered, and now (years later) I’m wrapping up a degree in engineering.

But I didn’t want to talk about “perseverance”, I wanted to say that I wasn’t six then, I was much older.

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” (Mark 10:14)

Why does Jesus say this, that the kingdom of God “belongs to such as these”?

When I was six years old, I hardly knew how to read, if I recall correctly. The world was becoming a strange and dark place to me, I was becoming aware of what pain was, of why people cry, of right and wrong, of love, and of death.

A child hears everything you say, and is thinking about it more than you realize. Parents know this when the thing they said several days ago comes out of the mouth of their five year old, sometimes with comedic results.

I recently watched a movie where a young child is told that the sun is going to get bigger and bigger, eventually burning up the earth and the entire solar system, and it didn’t matter to the child that it would be billions of years down the road. What mattered is that, quite suddenly, the child realized a bigger truth, that everything and everyone around you will someday die.

Probably by now you are wondering what this is all about, because it sure seems like I’m going somewhere. And you are right, but I don’t think I can summarize in a nice simple paragraph.

You see, some things can’t be summarized into bumper-sticker slogans, or nice paragraph summaries. Some things in life are so deep, and so meaningful that to even try to put it in words seems to trivialize the very thing you are trying to say. But I will try to say it here:

The love of God is greater than tongue or pen can tell. If I were to fill the ocean with ink, and write all that ink onto paper, describing the love of God, I would drain the ocean dry and still be on the first chapter.

I did not go to culinary school. In fact, it’s my personal opinion that culinary school is mostly a waste of time (more on that later). Instead I worked for several years as a lower chef, and passively gained experience until I moved up the proverbial ladder.

Working in food service was fun but tiring, as a chef you’ll always be on your feet. Be prepared to have a tired back for quite some time, until the muscles get conditioned to the 12 hour standing up routine. The enjoyable part of food service to me was twofold:

1) You get to make things! Depending on what you specialize in and where you work, you get to make more or less interesting things. For example, if you work as a salad chef on a buffet line, you probably won’t get to make those cool plates and awesome cakes, but you can add a little personal flair by carving flowers and things out of tomatoes and radishes.

2) You get to spend time with people, in a very unique environment. It’s sometimes high stress, but a lot of “boring” time spent together, talking about any old thing. Don’t let this frighten you if you aren’t really a people person, you can also be pretty quiet if you want, but after you spend some time in the kitchen you’ll open up. It really is a blast.

The correlations are true:

1) If you don’t enjoy making simple creative things, food service probably won’t be something you enjoy.

2) If you work somewhere with un-friendly people, you will get burnt out really quickly.

Anyway … I loved making food (still do, actually), and I loved running the kitchen even more. I loved it enough to start putting a business plan together to start my own restaurant.

However, the one issue with food service is that it takes a lot of time, and is higher stress than an office job. From what I can tell, through experience and visiting other kitchens, this is true from the lowly fast-food shop to the high dollar restaurant extraordinaire. Food service is always a hurry-hurry-hurry, wait-wait-wait kind of job, so it’s not always high stress, but the peaks of stress can be pretty high sometimes.

In the end, I realized I could make a career using the intellect God has blessed me with, and realized I would rather do that than continue down the path I was on.

I suppose it was part of my “growing up” years, because I also realized I had gotten into food service passively. What I mean is that I didn’t actively pursue personal education of food stuffs, of how to run restaurants, but I had taken this career path because it was easier.

And that’s another thing: Food service doesn’t really give you much money per hour, so it’s really hard to justify spending 2-4 years at culinary school in the hope that you get a better job. Unless you are prepared to really go at it, culinary school is a high cost, low return investment.

Not that it wouldn’t be fun, because I’m pretty sure it would be, but you’d better count your fun-per-dollar and see if it’s worth it. I’d say 90% of the time it’s not.