I wrote this article for the base newspaper, published yesterday. My family is very familiar with this story. Too familiar!

I like to bake and my efforts in the kitchen generally produce something edible. However, I remember one time in high school when my efforts at making chocolate chip cookies resulted in disaster, all because I forgot to include a key ingredient: flour. I didn’t realize my error until I pulled out the first batch of cookies from the oven. Without any flour to hold the dough together, the butter, sugar, brown sugar and chocolate chips in the cookies had all melted together and came out of the oven looking like a sheet of brown glass. Of course my younger sister HAD to be in the kitchen at that moment and she HAD to inform the rest of my family about what I had done. To this day, I still hear the story about how I’m so absent-minded that I forget to put flour in my cookies.

I thought about those cookies as I talked with a Sailor in my office recently about spirituality and addictive behavior, and about how our addictions hinder our spiritual growth and render us incapable of receiving from or giving to others the love and grace we all need. I’m a firm believer that we are all spiritual beings. We all hunger to be loved, to be whole, and to have a purpose, mission and destiny that extends beyond ourselves. At our deepest level, we all desire (often unconsciously) to allow others and God to speak in to our lives, to live as ones who don’t believe the world revolves around us.

Even so, we all also suffer from addiction. We may not have a problem with alcohol or illegal drugs, but we all have the capacity to become addicted to various ideas, behaviors, things or people. These addictions equal our attempt to assert complete control over our lives, by creating our own meaning and satisfy our desire for love, when in reality we have allowed the addictive behavior to control us and isolate us. When we think that by our own actions we can live the “good life” apart from needing anyone else or God, we become like bakers who dismiss the need for flour and fill up just on the “good stuff,” the sugar and chocolate chip cookies of our lives.

Yet, sugar and chocolate chips do not a whole cookie make. Spirituality is the flour that holds our lives together. I am convinced that our well-being and capability to make course corrections depends upon our ability to recognize our need for others and for God. Moreover, I know that in my own life, I find true meaning and joy only when I am able to freely love God and my brothers and sisters, and am no longer enslaved by my love for those things that are ultimately insignificant. It is my prayer then, that we all may find true peace and freedom on our journeys as we seek that which is ultimately important. Remember, you are loved and you are never alone.