John wrote on Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 4:00 PM
Hey Dana
We’re at the
shore this weekend in advance of what could be a BIG nor’easter, with either
LOTS of rain and/or LOTS of snow. (Would you please pray and ask God to again
keep His protective hand on our place? Thanks.) The marsh grass is brown and
much of it is matted down after winter bouts of high tides and periodic ice.
We’re just sitting down to a breakfast of everything bagels, cream cheese, and
“Jersey meat.”
When you lived
up here, did you ever have Taylor Pork Roll? To my knowledge, it is popularly
available in the Philly/New Jersey region. It is a delicious, processed meat
product that still comes in a unique cloth bag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_roll But,
for many it falls into the category of Spam. (Personally, I love Spam, but
Carol won’t even let it touch her plate.) One of Carol’s grandsons has only
gotten Taylor Pork Roll when he visits us at the shore so he’s taken to calling
it “Jersey meat.”
Your comments
on sugar got me thinking. I know this is an odd request, but other than the Old
Testament (Leviticus 11) food laws, and Kosher today, does God have anything to
say about diet and good eating? I know that He said to Peter to disregard the
old food laws (see Acts Chapter 10). I’m not thinking of where Paul writes
about food offered to idols in 1 Corinthians 8. But there are so many diets and
diet companies it can be so overwhelming. The Mediterranean diet. The South
Beach diet. Jenny Craig. Ad infinitum. But, those
diets are important to those on them, and in some cases life changing. One
especially important diet is the gluten free diet.
There is a wealth
of on-line information to investigate gluten and celiac disease. It seems to be
showing up as a cause for more and more things. I'm not trying to turn it into
a whipping boy, or go-to disease, but more and more people seem to be having
symptoms of what could be celiac disease. http://www.healthline.com/health/allergies/gluten-allergy-symptoms#WheatAllergy2 Doctors seem to by-pass this as the cause for
so many other of the illnesses or diseases they (the doctors) are trying to
diagnose. We saw this with one of Carol’s daughters.
One of Carol’s
daughters had a skin disease and an almost open wound that came and went for
years on her leg. She worked in a well respected, regional, midwest hospital
and for years, doctors couldn’t find a cause and kept reporting it as
non-specific dermatitis. Well, through
an odd set of circumstances, (of course we know it was God) the daughter was at
a picnic and she pointed it out to someone. That person’s immediate response
was, “You have celiac. Stop eating wheat products and gluten for a month and
see what happens.” https://celiac.org/live-gluten-free/glutenfreediet/sources-of-gluten/ The daughter was desperate, so she stopped
eating the suggested food products. In a
month, her leg had begun to heal for the first time in years. So she got
tested, specifically, for celiac. She had it. And, since going off the gluten,
she’s not had a recurrence of the skin problems in years, unless she
unknowingly eats some.
(Note to blog
readers: Disclaimer: we are not
practicing medicine. Please see your doctor or nutritionist if you have some health
problem that just won’t seem to go away.)
Once that
daughter stopped eating wheat products and things with gluten, others in the
family began to do the same and it seems as if several others had celiac and
are now gluten free.
If you have
time, can you weigh in on this?
Thanks
John
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dana responded on Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 2:03 PM
John,
it's been a l-o-n-g week already and my time has been short. Below are
some thoughts I put together on food. Check it out and let me know if it
is all right.
Bon
appetite'
For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Romans 14:17 (ESV)
OK, before all you exegetical watchdogs get your dander up, I do know
that the above quote from Romans is part of a passage concerning, not so much
food in general, but the possibility of one Christian potentially hurting a
newer or weaker believer by exercising their freedom in Christ to eat or drink
or participate in something which poses no particular moral problem to them,
but could cause confusion or consternation on behalf of the weaker believer
over something they deem might be wrong for them. Not going to go down a rabbit
trail on that one…at least in this Blog.
But, the point is true, and we as Christians have to be responsible in
matters of freedom for us and how we practice that freedom among those who may
not be coming from the place where we are in our walk.
In
my adult life, I’ve spent 40+ years traversing the nation and in that time have
visited many churches of many stripes, and while the good congregants of all
those churches may disagree over whether free will or predestination plays a
bigger part in their salvation, or whether the rapture will be next week, (or
was it last week?), or whenever, the one thing they all seem to be able to
agree on is good eating.
While this must seem to be a copout, I honestly cannot promote one
denomination over another, regardless of theological persuasion, when it comes
to their cooking. Honestly, I haven’t
had a bad meal in any church I’ve ever visited, who was kind enough to provide
a meal. Let’s face it, Christians are
good cooks.
Bragging rights go to Christians over all the other religions as to
culinary expertise. And rightfully
so. Ever had fried chicken at a Buddhist
temple? Ever attended a pancake
breakfast at a mosque? I didn’t think
so. The people rest, Your Honor.
While I’ve never felt divine conviction over the sin of gluttony (don’t
worry, I’ve plenty of others to which divine conviction applies) I have to
admit, if the devil were to tempt me in that area, it would be a tough
resistance effort. I love food; pretty
much all of it. Well there are a couple
of exceptions. I would rather eat a four
day dead gopher on the side of the road raw, hair and all, than I would eat bleu
cheese. Not tremendously big on
asparagus either, especially canned. And
while I could lose my Southern citizenship for saying so, mayonnaise isn’t high
up on my list of favorite foods. Oh, I
don’t mind it in things like tuna fish salad or chicken salad, but to just
slather it on a sandwich…nah, none for me, thanks.
…and
for good reason. While I was in college
back in the early 70’s, I had a housemate who was a mayonnaise junkie. He ate mayonnaise on just about
everything. Once one of his high school
buddies was down for a weekend visit, and they were watching a football game on
TV. When it came time for a snack, I kid
you not, they took a bag of chocolate cookies and a jar of mayonnaise and made
“Oreos” out of them. They ate the whole
bag of cookies that way. If that wasn’t
a sin, it should have been.
One other time, I was taking the Philadelphia Teen Challenge men’s choir
on a trip across the upper mid-western and western US of A, holding services
for churches that faithfully provided financial support for our home chapter.
When we’d arrive, the churches always had a big spread for a gang of road weary
travelers upon which to chow down. At
one stop, in Iowa, if I remember correctly, or maybe it was one of the Dakotas,
anyway, we were happily eating, when I was approached by the sweetest,
kindliest little grandmother of a lady who offered me a plate of her “special
dessert.” Had I refused, I felt sure a plague of Biblical proportions would
befall me.
This dear, saintly lady handed me a plate of what I recognized to be a
neatly cut square of lime Jell-O, with a glob of what I thought might have been
whipped cream sitting on top. When I bit
in to it, to my utter shock, dismay and horror, I learned that said whipped
cream was mayonnaise. I couldn’t see my
face, but I am reasonably confident that it was turning a shade of green to
match the Jell-O. They say that “honest confession is good for the soul.” I certainly hope so, because when that nice
grandmotherly lady so sweetly asked me if I liked it, I lied like a dog.
Deliberately. Unashamedly. I’m banking
on the Lord’s mercy on that one.
Yes, food is an important part of our lives; without it we’d die. And, it is a major part of the social fabric
of most, if not all churches. It would
be safe to assume that the majority of fellowship taking place in American
churches includes, if it is not centered around the sharing of a meal. Our Lord dined with His own disciples, and one
such meal, we regularly commemorate as one of our most fundamental sacraments. So Christians and food sort of go together.
Now while I love food, and I love the fact that my Christian faith is
shared by a lot of good folks who share that love, I’ve had to make some rather
extreme changes to my eating habits.
A
recent physical revealed that I was “pre-diabetic.” My blood sugar was higher than my medical
professional thought was healthy. As my
wife had recently been placed on a diet completely devoid of sugar and starch
(for different reasons) I decided to do the diet with her.
Now aside from the stressful fact that I had to give up just about all
food (and food that I dearly loved), I encountered something else altogether. Two or three days into this diet, I
encountered an almost soul crushing depression.
It was like yesterday everything’s OK, and today I want to crawl in a
hole and die...miserably. It was like the
black, creeping death. Nothing was
good. Everything was bad. All hope was gone; the best I could muster
was dangerous desperation. This lingered for two agonizing days.
The freaky part was as I was trying to rationalize my present
circumstances, I could find no reason for my depression. Times were good. My relationship with the Lord is a blessing.
I have a great wife and family. I’ve got
tremendous friends. I enjoy my job. I’m not getting rich, but I’m eating (well, I
was) and keeping the lights on. It’s all
good. But there I was, stranded on the
bottom of the world, with no place to go but down.
Sharing my plight with someone close to me, turned on a light! Sugar withdrawals! Oh my, I hadn’t thought of that. But I was convinced by their statements of
description that they were absolutely right.
There was no other explanation.
This led to another revelation, and one which I had to reluctantly
face. If what was the cause of my recent
overwhelming depression was withdrawal from sugar, then that meant I was an
addict. The good news was that in a
couple of days, I was back to normal, and suffering no signs of depression or
doom or despair. It left as quickly as
it came…thankfully.
But that opened the doors for some serious
soul searching. I never considered
myself a sugar junkie. We seldom have
dessert as part of our meals at home. I
do not drink soft drinks. About the only
time I indulge in candy is if there is any left after a holiday, and there is
not much.
However the more I looked into this, the more I begin to find that there
is sugar in EVERYTHING! Hours roaming
the aisles in our local grocery stores reading labels confirmed that just about
every food product other than table salt contains some form of sugar. If it contains any ingredient that ends in
“-ose” then it’s sugar. Even my summer
baseball game food of choice, the venerable hotdog contains sugar. Hotdogs?
Yes! And, it’s not just sugar I
had to watch, my doctor alerted me to a little noticed part of the label which
read total carbohydrates. Sugar, and
starches, which turn into sugar in our bodies after being consumed. Double whammy!
After
spending literally hours in the local food mart reading labels like I was
combing an ancient map for buried treasure, it shocked and saddened me to see
all the things we couldn’t eat and stay true to our diet…and that was most
things. We’re about down to grazing,
which, on the bright side, will help in the lawn care department this summer.
All
of this got me to thinking about the verse:
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within
you, whom you have from God? You are not your own,
for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your
body.”
1
Corinthians 6:19-20 (ESV)
Most of the times Christians tend to only apply the above verse to just
smoking and drinking and getting tattoos.
Our body is a temple, so we shouldn’t put anything into it that which
isn’t thought to be befitting Christian behavior. That notion is quite subjective, and whatever
is the particular boogey man of choice gets lumped into all the things we
aren’t supposed to do because of the body/temple idea. The problem is that the
boogey man substances changes church to church, region to region, until we
reach the point of absurdity and we cannot eat or drink anything. To keep our “temple” pure we ultimately have
to die of dehydration and starvation.
I
know that is silly; I stretched the point intentionally. But if we’re going to be so quick to ban
tobacco and alcohol as things which defile the temple, why don’t we feel the
same about the food we eat and the poisonous substances it often contains? Before we go further, let me state for the
record that I don’t subscribe to either tobacco or alcohol being definite
instruments of defilement. I like what Jesus said in Matthew 15:11, “…it
is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of
the mouth; this defiles a person.”
(ESV) That’s not to advocate for
the use of alcohol or tobacco (see the quote from Romans at the beginning of
the article), but I am convinced that humans, and that includes church people,
consistently do much more harm to their bodies with a knife, fork and spoon
than they do with a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer. Just sayin…’
Not meaning to preach, but diabetes is a
serious disease, and in “most” of the cases it is most likely preventable, and
thankfully in my case, I was given the opportunity to make said corrections
before it was too late. Diabetes can
lead to all manner of detrimental health issues like blindness, amputation,
coma, and death. And yet that is only
one of the negative health concerns that come primarily from improper diet. Had your cholesterol and triglycerides
checked lately?
The point is, since our bodies are the
temple of the Holy Spirit, if we’re going to avoid substances such as alcohol
and tobacco (since they are the handiest to vilify) shouldn’t we also be
somewhat careful to not defile the temple by eating or overeating things we
know will harm, sicken, and, if not regulated, kill our earthly temple (or
overly expand its boundaries around the middle)?
Now, I don’t intend to typecast out our
Seventh Day Adventist friends and brothers in any way, but most of the ones
with whom I’ve been associated, ate pretty good, and by pretty good, I mean
healthy. It was a big thing with them. Also I don’t want to institute an
eleventh commandment in that “Thou shalt not eat…or Thou shalt eat….” I’m in no position to preach about eating
habits. But they (the Seventh Day
Adventists) have allocated a lot of thought into what constitutes healthy
eating, and isn’t there something we can learn and appropriate from that
without becoming legalistic about it?
Lest the rationale often usurped and
misunderstood from the account of Peter from Acts 10, when God provides food
for Peter, who refuses to eat it because it is to him, unclean, and, God tells
him to not call what He has made clean, unclean. This shouldn’t have to be said, but I’ve
heard it interpreted that as long as a Christian says grace over their food
prior to eating it, that it somehow consecrates the food, and makes the unclean
(spiritually speaking) clean. Nice try,
but gratefully acknowledging the provision of poison doesn’t make it any less
poisonous. Not that God provides poison;
He provides that which we need to procure food, which, 99.99% of the time is of
our own choosing.
One of the fruits of the Spirit from
Galatians 5 is self-control. That
doesn’t just refer to not drinking too much.
It applies to every aspect of life.
Nothing in excess is good for us.
And that means food as well. Let
us strive to keep the old “temple” in as good a shape as we are able. Read some labels, and use some common sense
when it comes to what we eat. If we are
healthy and vibrant, we’re in a better condition to be useful in the Kingdom.
You wouldn’t pour molasses in to your car engine
in place of motor oil (more than once) would you? Would you use gasoline to
water your vegetable garden…why? Could
it be that they are not designed to live or perform well with those substances? Likewise our bodies are made to run well on
certain kinds of food, but on the other hand, there are lots of foods that
should be mostly avoided, and if consumed, done so in fairly strict moderation.
Anybody out there know where I can get
some manna?
++++++++++++++++++++
John adds a PS just before
publishing on March 12
I am just now writing someone who
struggled with a severe medical problem for years, until they learned of a
nutritional “cure.” That reminded me of
Naaman in 2 Kings 5:1-16 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+kings+5%3A1-16&version=NASB He was looking for some spectacular miracle
befitting someone of his status. God’s cure was pretty mundane. Again,
the disclaimer, we are not doctors or in the medical profession, but
after years of living life and seeing a few things, sometimes nutrition, i.e. a
change of diet along with reasonable exercise, may bring about the long, hoped
for, positive results.
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