Walking With Christ

Do you eat? I do. I like to eat. I also like my food prepared a certain way. It has to stay on the stove or grill long enough but not too long. If it isn’t on long enough then it doesn’t taste quite right. If it’s on too long then it’s no longer food. There is a very small window. You can greatly increase this window by using a lower temperature, but that is a lot more difficult to wait for since it will obviously take longer. The process is the same, though. The heat slowly changes the original product. The heat causes chemical reactions in the food that change the taste and texture. Some foods, when cooked together, blend and merge to make the most amazing flavor profile.

Bread and butter is a perfect example. The wheat that grew in the field has already been harvested, ground down, combined with yeast (for a yeast bread), salt, and water. Without heat, this is just a gooey mess though. Add heat and magic happens. The ingredients change and take on completely different characteristics. Shape it or don’t. If you don’t cook it long enough it’s still dough. Too long and you get just a thick crusty brick. Take it out of the heat at just the right time and you have the most amazing bread ever. Few things in life are better than fresh baked bread with some butter melted on it.

After the bread cools, the form and structure is set. You can cut a slice and throw it in the toaster or in a pan to toast it. Add butter and again, magic. Toasted or not, bread is a key ingredient for sandwiches. If the bread is cooked just right the first time then the toasting process will produce something just as amazing, yet totally different, as hot fresh bread. It’s interesting to note that you can’t really make toast from raw dough. To get toast, you have to have bread first. That outer crust has to form and the inside has to cool and set up before toast is possible.

With all foods, the heat has to be applied in the right place, at the right time, at the right temperature, and for the right length of time to get the desired effect. If the food is left in one place for too long then it won’t be cooked evenly which can ruin the flavor. The food has to be evenly cooked so that no one part is burnt or raw.

Ok, I’ve carried the analogy far enough to make my point. Bare with me as I take a couple of liberties on a topic and pardon me while I abuse a metaphor.

We are in the frying pan (living on earth) and the fires of hell (the stove or grill) want to consume us. Only the keen eye of the master chef knows what foods need to be moved to what parts of the grill in order to make the final product come out perfectly. Some may not require any heat at all to be complete. Others may require a lot of heat, seasoning, and careful monitoring to make them palatable. Some foods, if not cooked correctly, can be lethal if ingested.

Life is a buffet and God is the chef. Some of us are salad. It doesn’t really take any heat to prepare a salad unless there is something in it that is cooked. Some of us are steak or lobster. We have to spend a little time in the heat for us to truly become flavorful. Too much salad might be healthy, but, man would that be boring. Life is a full buffet with more types of food than can possibly be imagined or sampled in one life. Each of us is a five-star dish prepared by the only true master chef.

A healthy diet is both a metaphor and a true physical reality. We are meant to interact with other Christians and we are meant to eat a variety of foods for the same reasons. God moves us around at His will because only He knows the true process to create the masterpiece dish that each of us will become.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.(ESV)

Tie this in with the message from yesterday and it’s just more proof that you can find God in anything if you are looking.

Here’s the key take-away. Life is a buffet and we are the food that is being prepared for the kingdom. Not all food is prepared the same way. Some food is best eaten raw (carrots) while other food requires much more time in the flame to be good food. The heat we go through is the experiences of life. Some of us will have far more experience or heat than others. That doesn’t mean that the dish is ruined. If we refuse to move out of the heat when the chef pushes us to one side then we can take on more heat that desired. Nevertheless, every one of us who hands our lives over to God will hit the table as the finest dish ever. Don’t judge the quality of the steak by how cooked the carrots are.