Real Food

The Lovely Joanne is out of town this week on a business trip, and I must cook for myself, so I'm looking in the refrigerator for what there might be to eat. Since we cooked several large meals last week, there were leftovers that I've been eating to save time cooking. Of course, I have to sniff the food first, since some of it has been around awhile and might be spoiled.

Jesus didn't have a refrigerator, so he understood about food spoilage. In fact, he said at one point, "Don't work for the food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you." (John 6:27, if you want to look it up.) So, was he talking ptomaine, or pushing antioxidants, or what?

Well, Jesus had just fed 5,000 people with a few biscuits and some pickled sardines. That must have wowed the crowd, because they followed him around the next couple of days hoping he'd repeat the feat. They wouldn't listen to what he said about eternity, but they did want him to start up the manna-from-heaven miracle again, so they wouldn't have to work for food any more.

So he tells them not to spin their wheels working for physical food, because it will just spoil anyway. Why was that? Could have been several reasons, I suppose. But basically, he was working on people to stop looking at merely physical things and begin looking at the spiritual. He did that a lot, because people back then were, in the main, looking for just the physical and didn't realize there was more to life.

Oooooops, I do that sometimes too, and so do lots of people I know. Maybe even you...well, okay, not you, but somebody you know. Really well...

So, is there a cure for not seeing the spiritual? I think it's the same way you get to Carnegie Hall -- practice, man, practice. But it takes spiritual eyes; you have to ask God to help you see the big lesson behind the little one in front of you, the spiritual thing that the physical thing stands for. He's created a lot of physical stuff that gives us windows into the spiritual world; so why not use them to understand him better?

'scuse me, there's something boiling over on the stove....