It’s one of my favourite stories, so I’m glad it’s apparently true. The Vienna Beef company makes a certain kind of hot dog that is bright red, and it has a particular smoky flavour and a particular snap when you bite into it. It was very popular, so they made it in exactly the same way year after year, decade after decade.
Eventually the company became successful enough to upgrade to a new facility, where everything was streamlined and efficient and top of the line. But they knew better than to mess with success: The hot dog recipe stayed the same.
Except it didn’t. The hot dogs produced in the new facility weren’t as good. The colour was off, the texture was feeble, and the taste just wasn’t the same; and nobody could figure out why. They hadn’t changed anything—not the ingredients, not the process, not the order of operations. It was a hot dog mystery.
They finally solved it by painstakingly recreating how they had done it in the old factory—and it turned out that, at one point, the processed ground meat was slowly trucked from one part of the factory to another, through several rooms, around corridors, and on an elevator. It seems that this arduous process, which everyone assumed was nothing but an inconvenience that ought to be streamlined away, was an essential step. The meat got warmed slowly as it went, gradually steeping in the smoke and moisture of the rooms that it travelled through. When they made the production more efficient, they eliminated this part of the process. And that ruined the hot dogs.
The secret ingredient, it turned out, was time. I thought of this story as I sat chatting with an old friend, someone I’ve known online for over two decades, and we only met in person for the first time last week. When we first got to know each other, we were in the thick of having babies and wrangling toddlers, both fairly starry-eyed about the possibilities of how to build a Catholic marriage and raise a holy family.
Now we both have several adult children, and our “babies” are almost as tall as we are. We talked about what we expected our lives to look like, what we were so sure about, and how differently things have turned out. We talked about our struggles and also our successes, and how we seem to know less and less as time goes on.
And we talked about how sometimes, the secret ingredient is time.
We have been through so many shocks and disappointments, insanely unlikely successes, and unexpected twists and turns in life. We’ve seen massive efforts produce very little, while inexplicable coincidences yield oceans of grace. Sometimes, the only thing that seems to make the difference is time. Things happen over time to people, to families, to relationships, to hearts, to souls; and those things will not happen until enough time has passed.
Something is taking place in that time. It’s not just the mindless tick-tick-tick of the clock as you wait out your sentence, hoping and wishing that some magical turn of events will be waiting for you at the end. Things are happening, but not necessarily things that you yourself are bringing about. Sometimes, just like with that hot dog meat, you don’t need to be adding anything, or doing anything to the mix, or putting it through any kind of process. You just have to be staying with it and keeping patient, and other things are making little changes come about.
This can be true for marriage, true for our relationship with God, true for our relationships with each other, true for people just working out issues in their own lives while the people they love hang back, pray, and hope for the best. But the secret ingredient is time.
Not to say that it’s the only secret ingredient. Sometimes it’s appropriate and necessary to make a stand, set boundaries, kick up a fuss, make big changes. Reassess, get help, do research, switch things up. Sometimes that’s the answer!
But if you’ve already done everything you can think of and you just cannot figure out what the problem could possibly be, try stepping back and letting the secret ingredient do its work. Time is going to pass anyway. Might as well be hopeful while you wait.