I love all kinds of Asian food. Chinese, Thai, Japanese: it’s all good. I love it. You know what happens to me after I’ve had some? I want more. I easily could eat it for lunch every other day and not get sick of it.

Last week, I went to a Chinese restaurant. Actually, let’s be more honest. It was a Chinese buffet. My love and appreciation for Asian cuisine is broad and deep enough to appreciate it when it is well-made and when it isn’t—that the variety of lukewarm food may be an exciting and tantalizing lunch in and of itself. So this buffet restaurant isn’t the same as The Great Wall in Lansing, which, to be fair, isn’t terribly good itself, but is addictive, friendly, and comforting. So I like it. This one will have to do, of course. After I was done eating, I opened my fortune the way my good friend Chris taught me: you think of a question, break open the cookie, and the fortune will address the question burning on your heart. This is what my fortune said:

“You have a way with words. Write a book.”

Of course, this is a long-time dream of mine. And the older I get, the more I recognize that it’s a long-time dream of a lot of people’s.  I’ve made plans to write and even outlined chapters for an idea that I thought would be great. I just haven’t done it. My fortune has been pressing on me lately.

I went back to the buffet today. I couldn’t stay away. It calls to me and I am helpless to its sirens. After eating I was given this fortune:

“You are cleaver. You should write a letter.”

The back-to-back themes impressed me. I couldn’t believe it. “Someone’s trying to tell me something,” I thought as I pulled out of the parking lot. As I drove over the bump of the raised pavement and pulled onto the main street, a different thought occurred to me: God just downgraded me. God wanted a book, and since I hadn’t done anything, he gave me something I should be more able to handle: a letter. A stupid letter.

To be fair, I have longed to write something: a novel, book of poetry, or a collection of short-plays were the playground of my yesteryears. More recently, it has been the theology of preaching or postmodern Christianity. And yet, I’ve sat on my hands, staring at the TV.

After complaining about this second fortune most of the way home, the similarity between the fortunes resurfaced.  And the more I thought about it, the more I liked this new fortune. A letter doesn’t have to be something out of Pride and Prejudice; especially in light of differing expectations. Perhaps the cookie is thinking more along the lines of an Epistle. What is much of our Scripture but letters to the church about God? In this light, a letter isn’t so stupid.  Perhaps letter-writing is a pretty good calling after-all.