What – and how – you eat matters …

The Lord’s Supper (“Communion” or the Eucharist) is the most important “meal” of your lifetime.

But it’s not your only meal.

It usually is the only meal we consider to be sacred — but that’s probably an enormous mistake.

To live — to fuel the magnificent human bodies God has crafted and supplied us with — we must eat to get the nutrients essential for living, and the energy for existing. But many (most?) people have a general — or even a blatant — disregard toward how they fuel their bodies.

Instead of seeing their nutrition as a core component to being good stewards of their bodies, or as “sacred” meals, we make our diets the content of jokes, like:

“Diet is the penalty for exceeding the feed limit.”

“The cardiologist’s diet: If it tastes good, spit it out.”

“With dieting so commonplace, wouldn’t it be wise to add ‘through thick and thin’ to the marriage vows?”

“According to this nutrition label I am a family of four.”

“A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.”

Our approach to nutrition is more often guided by:

• A desire for pleasure over the practicality of what our bodies need.
• Placating desires and emotions rather than processing them in a rational and healthy manner.
• A habit of indulgence over a practice of self-discipline.

All of that comes with a cost, something millions of people around the world give little thought to … until trouble arises.

And trouble will usually come, at least eventually, with a sustained disregard for nutrition.

James Snyder highlights that truth with a personal story he originally titled, “Eating healthy is for sissies”:

As a youngster, I often heard my father say things that later turned out not to be on the true side of the table. So I guess that is a father’s prerogative, and I probably have done the same thing many times. But I don’t want to research that aspect of my life right now.

One that he said quite often was, “Eating healthy is for sissies.”

At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I did know that good old mom worked very hard to make sure he had healthy food to consume. So she did her job, but he did not fare well with that. He always ate in the opposite of healthy, and that just was the way he was.

Later in life, he had diabetes, high blood pressure, clogged arteries and finally, several heart attacks. Then he died.

According to him, these things had nothing whatsoever to do with his eating. They were just things that happened and he had no control over them.

No matter how sick he was at any given time, he always found it in himself to enjoy a dessert with lots of sugar in it. His favorite dessert was the one he was eating at the time.

I had not remembered that for the longest period until several weeks ago, when I had my first heart attack. Who knew I even had a heart! And, what did my heart have against me that it wanted to attack me?

My main artery was 90 percent clogged, and the doctors called it the “widow maker.” That was something relatively new to me.

I spent about half a week in the hospital having a stent put in to help the main artery. The nurses took more blood out of me than I knew I had. Count Dracula would have been jealous.

One nurse, I called Nurse Porcupine because she had more needles than a porcupine had quills. It took half a dozen attempts to find an artery that had blood in it. Both my arms are black and blue and have the appropriate needle marks in them.

My stay in the hospital was only three days, but felt like an eternity. Its experiences like that make you appreciate your own home and bed and lazy chair. I was so happy to get home.

Then I again thought about my father. He spent most of his time in the hospital during the last few years of his life. I am not quite sure how he made it through those experiences, but he did. Then I thought about his healthy diet remarks.

According to him, a diet consisted of what he wanted at the time. All this cautious eating was far beyond his modus operandi.

I remember once he spent two weeks in a hospital to have his arteries cleansed and purged, or whatever they call it, and when he came home, his idea was, “I’m healthy now so I can eat whatever I want to eat.”

It did not take long until he was back where he was before he went into the hospital.

Thinking about this, I had a dire option before me.

I could take things as my father did in a very hap-hazardous way and not take my dietary routine seriously.

On the other hand, I could take my health and my eating habits seriously.

My first impression is to go along with my dad. After all, dads are never wrong, right?

Not to criticize my father, who has been gone for over a decade, but he did not really take his health seriously. He assumed it was just a given that he could eat whatever he wanted with no consequences involved.

As the situation is, the biggest obstacle in my decision concerning my health and eating habits is the Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage. For some reason, she has taken my diet quite seriously as though it was hers.

The quandary I am in is that she is the one who supervises the culinary activities in the house. I have been barred from the kitchen for years because of an incident that happened a few years back, which I am not comfortable getting into right now.

Being in a health-challenging situation right now, I do not have many choices. It’s either eat what the Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage has produced or starve. Starving is not the particular exercise that I enjoy.

I must admit my wife is a marvelous cook and makes very delicious meals, which I am assured, are most healthy. From my point of view, if it does not have broccoli, then it is delicious.

Her healthy array of desserts is mouthwatering.

Therefore, I can do my own thing and be in a lot of trouble or allow the Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage to do her thing and be in charge of the dietary activities in our home.

In pondering this quandary that I am in, I realized a wonderful verse in the Bible. “And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God” (Ecclesiastes 3:13).

Instead of getting all caught up in some ritualistic eating habits, I believe from God’s perspective he would want me to enjoy my life. But, of course, as I realize now, enjoying life means that I take care of my eating habits to the glory of God.

And to that final paragraph, let’s add an “amen” and this:

“Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body,” 1 Corinthians 6:19-20.

March is national Nutrition Month. Let me encourage you to use this national emphasis on nutrition to examine your own eating habits, and consider how your personal nutrition can be “sacred meals” that help you better steward the physical body God has gifted you with.

Scotty