A Lamb Burger, Fish & Chips, and the Ache of God

We met for lunch in Prosser. Just two men, a former boss and a stubborn friend—stubborn because I’ve decided we’re friends and there’s nothing he can do about it. It had been a year since we’d truly talked. Not a text, not a check-in, but a real conversation. So we did what old friends do—we ordered greasy food and sat on a porch to let the sky listen in.

He had a lamb burger. I had fish and chips. That detail probably doesn’t matter, except it does. Because that’s how real moments happen—in the small things. In choosing lamb over beef. In drizzling malt vinegar over battered cod. In porch railings, flapping napkins, and the way the sun made everything feel like a low hum of grace.

We talked about work and calling. About the strange, beautiful mess of leading schools and loving people who are hard to love and being loved when we’re the hard ones. He’s a principal now, at a private school, and I’m still doing my best to live with some kind of purpose. And like gravity or yeast or the way silence falls in a chapel, the conversation turned to Jesus.

Of course it did. He’s in every part of each of our lives. Sooner or later, the talk always bends toward Him—how could it not? The older I get, the more I find that conversations about life are conversations about God. Whether we name Him outright or not, He lingers there in the space between sentences. In the smiles. In the shared silence.

We talked for hours. The kind of talk that doesn’t need agendas. Where you can forget how long it’s been since the last one, and yet nothing feels missing. Like old friends who pick up mid-sentence, because the sentence never really stopped.

And then came that moment. The one I can’t stop thinking about.

It was the end. Not of the friendship. Not even of the conversation, really. Just the end of that day. The end of that laughter. The end of that exact constellation of sun and breeze and shared space. You could feel it. Not just in the check being dropped or the polite shifting of chairs, but in the soul. A kind of ache. Maybe he felt it too.

I think we both knew something holy had happened. That we’d brushed up against something bigger than us. It wasn’t dramatic—no dove descended. No one wept. It wasn’t that kind of sacred. It was quiet. Weighty. A moment thick with what theologians might call presence and poets might call ache and what I, for lack of better words, will call God.

It was, I think, a sacrament.

We often imagine sacraments as bread and wine, oil and water, but sometimes they look like fish and chips. Sometimes they sound like old jokes. Sometimes they feel like the ache of not wanting a moment to end because, for once, you were exactly where you belonged.

There, on the porch, as the day began to exhale, I felt it. A stillness. The kind that makes you want to whisper, even if no one’s praying. The breeze paused. The world hushed. And I felt seen. Known. Beloved.

It’s hard to let my guard down. Harder still to let the mess of who I am just hang out in the open. (Figuratively, of course. Literally, I don’t have much of a choice.) But that day, that moment, was different.

Friendship like that—where you're not impressive or entertaining, where you're just you and that is enough—is rare. And when it happens, when someone meets you there and doesn’t flinch, it is nothing less than holy.

So maybe the next time you’re sitting with someone, and the air gets quiet, and your soul feels like it doesn’t want to leave, pay attention. You might be standing on holy ground.

Even if you’re just sitting on a porch in Prosser, licking ketchup from your fingers.

Because God is in the lamb burger.

And in the ache.

And in the friend who doesn’t let you go.