Holy Food?

 

“I hear you all are having a donut sale next weekend,” the lady said to me.  “I always look forward to that – Mennonite donuts are SO good!”

“That’s our plan,” I said.  “We’ll be selling hole-y food at the gym as long as it lasts.”

“Holy food?”  The lady seemed surprised.  “Will your bishop be blessing the donuts before you sell them?  That would be a big attraction.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said.  “I just meant that donuts have holes in them.”

“Oh,” the lady seemed disappointed.  “Well, I’m sure with a doctor helping with them they will be especially healthy.”

I wasn’t too sure about that.  “They’ll be tasty,” I said, uncertainly.  “I’m not too sure about how much nutritional value they will have.”

The woman went on to talk about the quality of homemade food.  Even if Mennonite donuts weren’t vitamin fortified, they were still “a cut above.”

I have noticed that many people look for reasons to do unhealthy things and at the same time they find plenty of reasons why they don’t do the healthy things they know they should be doing.  They buy holy donuts from the Mennonites but completely skip the vigorous exercise that all of us should be doing to get into shape.

The Prophet Jeremiah had one of the darkest assessments of the human condition that I know of.  “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) 

The world around us tell us to “Follow your heart.” But is it wisdom to follow your heart?  Jeremiah would say “no.”  Following your heart will simply get you into trouble.

At a minimum, you need to have a basic understanding of what your heart desires and why it wants those things, because most of us are amazingly good at coming up with reasons why we should pursue things that are not good for us.

We call this “reason creation” rationalization.  Rather than asking the question about whether or not we can come up with reasons why we should do the thing we want to do, maybe it would be better to ask whether this activity will help us achieve our long-term goals.

If buying donuts doesn’t help us get healthy or draw closer to Jesus, then maybe we should leave them alone.  This, even if the donuts are holy, almost-healthy, Mennonite delicacies from Gladys, Virginia.