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I love food. I guess that would be an obvious statement to anyone who knows me; but I do. I can quite honesty say I am involved in a passionate love affair with food, which has been quite scandolous at times. Food has quite honestly shaped by life. From my daily schedule to my monthy budget, food and the consumption of food has a huge influence on the way I go about my day.
What’s more, there have also been individual meals that have changed my life as well. This one time at a very popular chain resturant I had a sandwich that came on a Ciabatta bun. The main attractions was a grilled chicken breast, but it was what accessorized the chicken breast that made it life changing. Melted brie, prune chuntey, slided apples, spinach. The simple ingredients of positive life change. This is how food changes lives, and shapes entire cultures.
You can see food in two ways. My brother, the kineseologist would see food as the essential fuel for your body. The gasoline for the V-8 engine inside of you. Food is divided into fat content, calories per serving, disected down the grams of fiber, iron, potasium and protein. How to eat, what to eat, and when to eat it. The formula for a healthy life style. Then…there is me. To me food and formulized charts do not intersect. I know that fat makes food taste good…everyone does. I know that cheese can make anything that normal tastes bad, taste good…everyone does. I see food as an experience. Food has the ability to bring an entire family fued together at one table, something even the UN cannot do. Food can spark the beginning of a life long love relationship, the beginning of a successful business partnership or cement a friendship that will years later be classified a “best friendship”. Food is the essential pause in an otherwise hecktic day. Food makes you forget about how crappy you are feeling, how screwed up things are and how far you are away from home. Either way, food is essential to a healthy lifestyle.
I think about that as I read the Bible. I guess there are also two different ways to read the Bible. You can take it apart, verse by verse, analyse it and break it down into its parenthetical structuring and rebuild it hermenutically until you have each Greek or Hebrew verb in its original context. The problem with that is it leads to viewing the whole of Christianity on a flowing grid chart. The entire Christian experience ends up in formula, it ends up in rules, ending up in regulations, ending up in obligations, ending up in sitting in a church Sunday after Sunday with no real idea of why you are there outside of obligations, regulations, rules and forulmas. Reading the Bible is simply reading the rule book. It’s devoid of life, of love and most of all relationship with the Author.
Christianity, all along, has been about the relationship with the Author. Memorizing verses of Scriture, while all good, as I have found it, has really been about skimming over love poetry and only ever reading selected lines, until I get to the bottom and realize that the poem was exclusively written for me.
, Chad
