“The test of spiritual concentration is bringing the imagination into captivity.  Is your imagination looking on the face of an idol?  Is the idol yourself?  Your work?  Your conception of what a worker should be?  Your experience of salvation and sanctification?  Then your imagination of God is starved, and when you are up against difficulties you have no power, you can only endure in darkness.  If your imagination is starved, do not look back to your own experience; it is God whom you need.  Go right out of yourself, away from the face of your idols, away from everything that has been starving your imagination.  Rouse yourself, take the gibe that Isaiah gave the people (Isaiah 40:26) and deliberately turn your imagination to God.”  Oswald Chambers

Someone said in order to understand what we truly worship, we have to get to a place where there’s no stimuli, nothing to do, no one with whom to talk, no task to complete.  We have to get there, and then be still enough to observe where our minds go.  There, in that space, whatever our minds rest upon, that’s what we worship. 

We have spent several chapters digging around to better understand how our current cultural idols impact not only our daily lifestyle choices, but our spiritual lives as well.  The exploration of these idols has been highly convicting for me, and I hope there have been moments of learning for you as well.  As we move away from exploring idols by name and expression, I genuinely hope you’ve been able to glean something useful for your body, mind, spirit, or soul.  I hope you may be able to see more clearly what it is you worship. 

At the beginning of all this, I asserted that I would do my best to make these ideas practical.  We want to be people who can identify areas in our lives that need improvement, and then actually start improving upon them.  The book of James is one of the most practical books in the Bible, addressing character improvement opportunities while offering practical guidance for how to apply the principles.  He writes,

“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?  Can that faith save him?  If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” James 2:14 – 16

James encourages us not to just be hearers of the word, but doers, also.  He asks us not to simply wish to have wisdom, but to ask for it, to pursue it, to do something, every day to gain it.  James urges us to persevere under trial, to be quick to listen and slow to speak, to give up our place for others, to actively care for widows and orphans.  James is a book about acknowledging where we are, and then choosing, deliberately, to do something about it. 

Fam, that’s where we have arrived as well. 

So, let’s talk about food. 

FOOD

We worship food.  That might feel hyperbolic – but think about it. 

We celebrate birthdays with food.  “Congratulations for another year of life, what do you want to eat?” 

We get promotions and how do we celebrate?  With a fancy dinner out, of course!  And it’s lovely! 

Someone dies, graduates, or gives birth and how do we come around the family?  We lovingly, tenderly, carefully, make them delicious bites of food! 

We watch sports with food, we celebrate anniversaries with food, we gather around our friends and family with food.  From Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas, the Superbowl, to Valentine’s Day, to Memorial Day, to the Fourth of July, and Labor Day – every special occasion, holiday, or way to celebrate, grieve, or commemorate a life event is done with food. 

We are, perhaps, the most food-centric culture on the planet, and we’re just getting started. 

Food is also how many of us address our emotional needs.  It is how we mend broken hearts, how we grieve, how we comfort.  We have come to believe that food can, in fact, help us process and unpack complex emotions. 

We use food to greet a loved one home from a long time away. 

We use food as a way to date and get to know one another. 

We use food to lure people to business meetings. 

We use food to get people to come to church.   

So much about our relationships with food is beautiful and lovely and delights our senses and experiences, and that should be celebrated!  But at some point, we stopped using food for fuel and we started using it for just about everything else. 

To put it concisely, we stopped eating food; food started eating us. 

ADORATION AND NEGLECT

Our inordinate love of food is fascinating in that it tends to express itself in a very paradoxical way.  We either adore it or neglect it. 

When we’re neglecting food, we are ignoring the critical role it plays inside our bodies.  We simply eat what we want, when we want, regardless of the consequences.  When we’re adoring food, we’re obsessing over what we’ll eat, when we’ll eat, and where we’ll eat.  Food, and decisions around food, are predominant in the structure of a day.   

Sage Journals published an academic article entitled Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook.  In the article, authors Wansink and Sobal explain that as individuals we make over 200 food decisions a day and are aware of very few of them.  This would indicate that food is of paramount concern to us, and so much so in fact, that we have little awareness of the influence, power, and energy we give it. 

After over fifteen years in the health and wellness space, I have observed that we tend to fall into a few categories when it comes to our relationships with food.  

The Enthusiast: We are really excited about eating well.  We know what macronutrient spread we will seek to achieve every day.  We know what we like.  We know what food makes us well.  We use food as fuel to help us perform at the highest levels and it’s possible that food has even become an object of how we achieve value, status, or identity. 

The Explorer: We genuinely want to eat well, be well, and thrive, but we have no idea how to do it when it comes to food.  We’ve tried every diet, every fix, every trend, but we just can’t seem to find a relationship with food in which we thrive.  We fight with food more than we eat it, and in doing so, think about food often, always, and insufferably. 

The Empath: Food is the way we cope.  It is the solution to our many emotions.  When we can feel everything, food can fix everything.  Food makes life easier, more peaceful, more comfortable.  It is a source of happiness and contentment when the rest of life feels unbearable.  The content, makeup, and nutritional value of food has one purpose alone: to help us process all the varied complications of life. 

The Evader: We know food affects us.  We know it’s doing something in our bodies because the doctor’s telling us so, but we don’t do anything about it.  It’s not fun to think about and we want to be able to eat what we want, so we don’t give it a lot of stage time.  One day something may have to change, but for now, we just want to eat what we want, when we want, how we want.  The consequences can wait for another day. 

Regardless of where we find ourselves within these categories, one can observe the elevated attention and energy we offer to food every day.  What’s so remarkable about this is that we no longer live in a time where we have to fight to find food.  Though much of the globe is dying of starvation, in our culture food is readily available at all times.  It seems a twisted reality that while half of the world dies of starvation, the other half dies of obesity.  This is the power food has over us. 

But I have to believe there is the very real possibility for us all to have healthy relationships with food.  I know we can become experts when it comes to food if we work at finding what works for us, and then apply it.  We can find the middle ground in which we make mindful choices regularly, without letting food consume our thoughts, energies, and outputs as they do now. 

The Expert: We understand which foods will make us well and keep us well.  We plan ahead, but we don’t obsess.  If we’re not in a place for food to be ideal, it’s ok, yet if we have the opportunity for ideal, we seek to achieve it.  We know what to do and have made a habit of doing it, so we don’t think about food nearly as much as we used to, and we don’t change our food plan based on how the day went, what news we received, or how well we performed at our jobs.  We choose to fuel our bodies well regularly, because we know that’s how we thrive, and it’s our choice to steward our bodies well. 

So what can we actually do to become experts? 

There are, I believe, some very practical ways to start improving our relationships with food.  It will look a little different for every person and every household, but I believe that the energy invested in this will reap a great harvest.  

PLAN

The number one way we can take back the power food has over us is to plan well. 

Pick the same day of the week, every week, to sit down with the decision-makers of the family and plan what the household’s meals will be for the entire week.  If you can cook at home, do that.  If that’s not an option, plan what and where you’re going to eat.  Make as many decisions as you can in one sitting while you have full stomachs.  If you try to create this plan, or shop for this plan, while you’re hungry, healthful decisions will fly out the window.  Believe me.  It’s how I ended up eating ice cream, macaroni and cheese, and pizza for a week. 

Then, it’s time to execute.  A plan is just a plan until you do something about it, so make it a priority to actually do it.  Write it all down, and then move your body to the grocery store.  By doing this every week, you can have food decisions made, groceries purchased, and the plan laid out for the entirety of the week.  By simply having the plan and executing it, we’re taking power away from food.  It will not fill our brains, zap our energies, or tempt us with unhealthful choices nearly as much as it does when those decisions are not predetermined. 

But, in order for this to work, we actually have to do it.  And actually doing the planning and executing of the plan, may be the only two things you can control.  So control them!  Even if the plan isn’t executed perfectly, doing the planning and the shopping and the prepping is already teaching us the habits of a healthful relationship with food.  And bonus!  We’ve just eliminated the 5:01 PM ‘what do you want for dinner’ conversation!  (Insert happy dance here.)

Planning is simple, it doesn’t cost anything, and it won’t take much time.  It is, by far, the most important step in beginning to right our relationship with food. 

OCCASION

We’ve spent some time in this chapter discussing how food is incorporated into our daily culture.  We use food to occasion much more often than we use it for fuel.  And though job promotions, homecomings, birthdays, funerals, games, and gatherings are all natural places for food, it may be prudent, for a season, to choose alternative ways to commemorate occasions while we reorder food’s place in our lives. 

There are many ways to express a sentiment, show support for someone, get to know one another, celebrate, and mourn.  Food doesn’t have to be central to all of these occasions, but in our culture, it usually is.  For instance, we could make these occasions movement-centric instead of food-centric.  

There are many ways to celebrate a birthday or go on a date or gather as a community that don’t have to be centered around food.  Instead of dinner or cake or a coffee date or doughnuts, we could go roller skating or bowling or rock climbing or surfing or hiking or paint or go to a concert.  If someone loses a loved one, we could offer babysitting or help with the ceremony or donate to a charity or start a 5K to honor the departed.  When gathering with a community we could do a service project together, plant a community garden, walk around a neighborhood and pray for it. 

The possibilities to occasion outside a food-centric atmosphere are limitless.  And though having food be a part of an occasion is not at all a bad thing, we may consider shifting the focus of our occasions while we work to better understand our relationship with food.  These small adjustments will affect how we relate to food, and it may be suprising how little we notice that food is not the central feature at our occasions anymore.  I wonder if we’ll even miss it at all.      

WORSHIP

It may sound like a stretch, but I think we have a beautiful opportunity to worship God through our relationship with food. 

First, consider the space that opens up in the mind when the household’s meals are planned for the week.  Every decision already made and prepared for is going to free up energy, time, and if you’re cooking at home, money!  We just took the 200 food decisions we make every day and eliminated them entirely.  What relief!  What freedom!  What margin!  And all because we planned our food.  Creating this space and eliminating the ancillary distractions from the day is what allows the margin for rest, quietude, and stillness.  This is the great space we need to go out to the hills and commune with our Lord. 

In addition to the practicality of creating space, time, and energy to worship, reordering our love of food also allows for worship through practical stewardship.  No different than the act of tithing, we are called to steward the gifts God gave us, and caring for our bodies through what we eat is an essential part of stewarding them.  I believe that through planning and preparing your food you may find yourself standing at your counter prepping your food and feeling affirmed that what you’re choosing for you and your family is a God-honoring choice.  And this can become worship.  Not worship of the food.  Not worship of your own dutiful behaviors.  But simple, meek, gentle, lowly worship from children of God who are doing practical things to honor Him with what we’ve been given. 

So often in our walks we try to improve qualitative character things that are difficult to measure.  Am I being more patient? Am I any more loving?  Am I growing in my relationship with the Lord?  Am I parenting in the way I should?  These are admirable aspirations that are terribly hard to measure. 

But food is one of the rare spaces that can be measured.  How many meals did you plan and execute this week?  How many healthful choices did you make?  How many times did you choose something that allowed you to enter into stewardship or worship because you knew you were honoring God by your choices? 

When we are able to relate to food in healthful ways, we’re not just making a good choice for our bodies.  We’re also making more fiscally sound choices, we’re managing stress, we’re creating margin, we’re making stewardship practical, and we’re more mindfully engaging in worship.  If we can start to make these small adjustments, we may begin to reorder food to its rightful place – a place of enjoyment; a place of gratitude; a place of communion; and a place of simple fuel. 

It doesn’t have to happen all at once.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.  And it doesn’t have to look the same for everyone.  But it won’t happen if we don’t do it.   And that is up to you. 

So pick a place to start.  It’s time to put down the shovel and get our hands dirty. 

Nic Ford