Something I Ate...

I was just trying to avoid throwing food away. So I ate a couple of out-of-date items I found in the fridge, purchased over the holiday period when our home was a hive of activity. 

I should have rejected them both. I didn’t particularly want them. I just felt guilty throwing food away.

I spent the night vomiting, violently, and now, two days later, still feel a bit on the queasy side. Enough said.

The Bible regularly identifies the Word of God as food for the soul. We are to eat it, read it, chew it over, allow it to feed our souls with good nourishment. Most of us spend much more time chewing on words which don’t feed our souls. Some of these words are like fast food, pleasing to taste but lacking nutritional value. Others are poison, not just failing to enrich but positively making our spirits sick. 

The news is sparking with stories of sick people doing unspeakable things to others. We live in a culture of sound-bites and alarmist headlines, and many react without taking time to really chew over the facts of situations and allowing God to speak into them.

The antidote to sick thinking is healthy living, healthy food. We need to watch what we eat.

Still in the Pits

This might be a bit of a google myth, but in my hunt for recipes for wild cherry jam I came across a few comments about the pits.

Someone suggested cutting a few cherry pits in half and popping the inner kernel into the jam, as the inner kernel contains arsenic and gives a slight almondy flavour! There was a warning not to be too enthusiastic here but to be careful how many you put into the pot. 

I read that after I’d accidentally swallowed one of these pits – very tricky to suck the cherry off the stone without sucking the whole lot down your throat. Hopefully I won’t be poisoned slowly over the next few days or weeks...

So the question is, why not just add a little almond flavouring, or even a few chopped up almonds, if you want your cherry jam to have a hint of almond? Why tinker around with arsenic? 

Sometimes in life we hanker after a hint of the exotic. In this busy world where we are often so harassed, we long for inner peace and calm and we are persuaded by popular culture and celebrity practices to try out ‘new’ ways and mutter ‘new’ words. We flirt with crystals or palm readings, fashionable eastern religious ideas or meditations, without recognising that there is a hard kernel at their centre which can poison our spiritual beings. 

The Bible is really clear about who God is. In the book of Isaiah, God asserts several times that he is the only God, there are no other gods, that he is the God who created heaven and earth, that he is the Lord who loves his people. And he warns us off idolatry, flirting with other ideas of god. Because he knows that at the heart of idolatry is a kernel of poison which we may not notice until we’ve swallowed just one pit too many.