Giving God Our Best

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)

The other day I overheard a friend mention that it is so much easier to simply pick something up at a drive thru or supermarket, than to prepare an entire meal from scratch. How true. Although I preach that anything is fine in moderation, (1 Corinthians 10:23) consuming primarily convenience food will ultimately result in an inconvenient, unhealthy lifestyle.

At one time, in a previous church, our assignment was to read through the Bible in a year. Being competitive by nature, I zipped through it (just like a drive-thru) within 9 months. I hardly digested a thing. During the past several months however, during our Wednesday night Bible Study, we have traversed through the smaller books of the Word; Philemon and Jude, verse by verse. Those books finally came alive to me! I savored them!

Savoring our food, similar to enjoying the Bible . . . restores our heart! Who doesn’t remember the comfort of kitchen memories as our Mom prepared dinner each evening? I realize in this day and age, everyone’s extremely busy. Who has time to cook from scratch anymore? For the sake of our families however, we must overcome the convenience of picking something up as we race home from work!

Choosing convenience food provides far less healthy nutrients for your family. Fast food is loaded with fat and fillers and grocery store packaged meals are abundant in chemicals, dyes and preservatives. Nor does it exhibit any discipline either. And temptations abound in the grocery store! It’s so easy to purchase additional items as we select an entrée on our way home from work. “Oh look, apple pies are on sale too!” Bad choices are made when we’re tempted.

Grabbing something from the store demonstrates an apathetic attitude for our children to emulate as they grow. It also instills a reliance on others, which unfortunately demonstrates laziness as well. If our children fail to learn how to cook, they will eventually initiate the same habits we’ve taught them: Why cook when we have drive-thru’s?

If you absolutely hate to cook, start out by instilling the same habits you do to reach any goal: visualize, strategize and ultimately initiate a goal plan.

Begin with small goals: teach your children how to create a nutritious salad, scramble some eggs, bake a sweet potato, pound a chicken into schnitzels or make a healthy pizza. Give them a sense of pride in what they create.

Some dieters even incorporate convenience foods into a dieting strategy. They rely on a packaged food program to lose weight, that’s all well and good until they reach their goal and go off the diet. Then what have they learned and what do they do? We certainly wouldn’t want to consume only those selected meals for a lifetime, would we? The only good thing about a packaged meal plan is that we learn to visualize portion control. But we certainly don’t learn how to cook healthy meals. Even prepackaged meals in the grocery store include an enormous amount of sodium and preservatives for shelf life and eating the same meals over and over again makes us stale. That’s not enjoyable.

How similar to savoring and enjoying the Word of God. The Bible is the Sustenance we build on for an Abundant Life. If we only read the same passages over and over again, we’d grow stale and stagnant. By breaking the Word down into smaller chunks we savor it. Savor both your Bible and your life.