In his book Down from Troy, surgeon Richard Selzer starts out with memories of his youth. He had great admiration and respect for his mother. In a brief aside, he had to admit she was unable to cook anything without lumps. Mashed potatoes, applesauce, oatmeal, all had lumps. "To this day," he said, "I have some problems facing those foods."

Even for the greatest of cooks, part of the adventure of eating is a few lumps along the way. That should make us think... We want this homogenized, completely smooth dish to be apart of our thinking and believing, as well. We want things to go down smoothly, and not everything does.

At the heart of the faith, even for believers, there are some lumps. The biggest one for many of us is Jesus' teaching on forgiveness. In our creed we say, 'we believe in the forgiveness of sins." Every Sunday, we ask not only for forgiveness of our debts, but we pray that we will forgive our debtors. Do we really believe that? Or is that a lump we disguise in different ways?