With Thanksgiving less than a week away, it seemed a very appropriate time to introduce you to a friend of mine who is very passionate about animals and food, and thinking faithfully about both.  Leslie Strovas, who finds her home with her family in the Northeastern U.S., began her blog All Things New: A Christian Conversation on Food with the following very thoughtful post, "An Introduction to the Conversation" ...

Converse

• verb: to engage in a spoken exchange of thoughts, ideas, or feelings; talk
• adjective: opposite or contrary in direction, action, sequence, etc.; turned around
• noun: something opposite or contrary (definitions collected from American Heritage Dictionary/Dictionary.com)

Since embarking on my food journey I have strived to find writings - either contemporary or classic - with a Christian theology on food but to my dismay and complete surprise, I have found very few.  (Perhaps I have not looked in the right places?)
 
This surprises me because I am convinced through my observations of food in the world, personal experience and reading of Scripture, that food, although physical in nature, is profoundly spiritual in essence.  It is the primary vehicle for sustaining physical life and for bringing fulfillment and satisfaction to hunger or desire.  The themes, metaphors, parables and teachings around food, hunger and desire in the Bible are rich with meaning, wisdom and deeper holiness for the believer!  And yet, I hear almost nothing preached from the pulpit, written in books, studied in small groups or proclaimed by the apologist about what, how, why and with whom we eat.  How can this be?  Was food not the very trigger for Adam’s and Eve’s - and all of humanity’s - fall from Grace?  Do we believe this was a coincidence?  Are we today so immured in God’s grace that we are immune to the temptation of our first parents?  Why is no one in the Body of Christ talking about this?
 
Temptation is often the subtle and pernicious combination of a real need and a possible doubt that creates an inappropriate desire.  Being both essential for sustenance of physical life as well as beautiful and pleasurable in its appearance and taste, food is in its essence a good thing; God Himself created it and proclaimed it to be so.  But if temptation was then, and is now, subtle it is because our enemy is also subtle, and he is cunning.  He knew then, as he knows now, that all that was needed to cause us to turn our hearts from God and to give birth to an inappropriate desire in us was to bring doubt to our minds about God’s true heart and intentions towards us, to artfully sow even the tiniest fear in our own hearts that we were alone in the universe, that God did not really care for us, that in fact, He was holding out on us, using us for His amusement and His own selfish purposes.  After all, if God’s intentions and heart were true, why the command not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, especially when one could see how wise it would make one?  And so, tempted, we reached for and ate the forbidden and fatal fruit of life on our own terms, gaining not only independence from God’s seemingly oppressive and selfish rules, but from His holy and life-giving presence as well.  
 
And so it goes today.  Our enemy continues to tempt and we, yet doubting God’s provision and heart, fan the flame of inappropriate desire and reach for the deadly food we were never meant to eat.
 
Yet, we are the Church!  The Lord Most High dwells within us.  We have His living Word to teach, discipline, exhort and guide us.  We have LIFE Himself as our greatest treasure to fulfill and satisfy our deepest needs and desires.  As such, our Christian walk and the life that stems from that walk should be compelling, confronting and converting the world.  But to the casual observer of our appetites, marriages, work ethic, health, financial and creation stewardship, we look for all the world, just like the world.
 
There must be a conversation about food in the Church and what it means in the Christian’s life because:

• The Body of Christ and the individuals who comprise it are God’s redemptive hope for the world; and
• through our own calling to holiness in all areas of our lives - including our food - we are being prepared to be used by God in compelling, confronting and converting ways for every good work in and for the world; and
• without holiness through faith we cannot hope to please God, let alone help fulfill His purpose of bringing His will to bear in this world as it is in Heaven. 

Let the conversation begin ...

Many thanks to Leslie for allowing us to share this reflection, which was originally posted at All Things New: A Christian Conversation on Food (©).  We look forward to sharing more from her in the coming months!  In the meantime, especially with Thanksgiving days away, be sure to check out her post "Food as Celebration." 

Thanks to Leslie as well for reminding me of the "Grace" image, sometimes known as "(Our) Daily Bread," which I can vividly remember hanging in my grandparents' dining room.  You can find out more about the piece's compelling history here.  Image courtesy the state of Minnesota (public domain) and Wikipedia.