Wednesday, August 27, 2008

She hit the nail on my head

As I mentioned, I'm reading the book "Love to Eat, Hate to Eat" by Elyse Fitzpatrick. It's a book about various eating issues and how they can be resolved by looking to God for the solution. I'm slowly making my way through it. It is a Bible study in addition to the book, so there are study questions in the back. (I said that with a hint of whine so that you realize there's a LOT this book requires of me...lol.)

Anyway, I was reading it tonight while lulling Jacob to sleep, and she started to talk about why we do what we do. She gives a couple of examples of "ungodly desires" that might make us want to have an eating issue (in my case overindulging). She writes:

Recently I reread C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy series. In the second book, Perelandra, I discovered another key to the problem of sinful eating. The hero, Ransom, finds himself on one of the floating islands on the planet of Perelandra. He is hungry and happens to walk through a grove of trees that have fruit hanging from them. This is how Lewis describes Ransom's experience:

"He picked one of them and turned it over and over. The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment's hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution to all flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men....As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason...was all in favor of tasting this miracle again; the childlike innocence of fruit, the labors he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all seemed to commend the action. Yet something seemed opposed to this "reason."...He stood pondering over this and wondering how often in his life on earth he had reiterated pleasures not through desire, but in the teeth of desire."

Lewis captures the heart of sinful pleasure-seeking - the desire to experience some form of pleasure just for the sake of trying to greedily recreate the episode, rather than for its given purpose. Is it wrong to eat food and enjoy it? No, certainly not. If that were the case, the Lord wound not have blessed us with the capacity to taste. It is wrong to eat only when the purpose of that eating is simply to experience the pleasure of the crunch or the sweetness or the temperature in spite of God's good provision. It is the heart that says, "I know this is more than I need, and that I'm harming myself by having it, but I love the pleasure of this experience more than I love the pleasure of doing what pleases the Lord, so I'm just going to go ahead and satiate myself."
Ugh. That's me all over the place. I must say, this is a REALLY good book for any Christian who is dealing with a food addiction/problem. This is the first book I've read that has no diet rules or guidelines. Just biblical truths. Although it is hard to read at times because it points out my errors SO WELL. (I like to believe I have no errors a lot of the time!) j/k. ;)

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