The Big Blue Bag was back today at Reardan Presbyterian Church, and it was full, so heavy that Craig pre-positioned it up front for me. As the kids came forward I told them to take an item and find a seat. “Everything in the Blue Bag is edible, but not all things are helpful. All things are edible, but not all things build up strong bodies.” First boy to dive into the BBB came up smiling. “Marshmallows!” he exclaimed. As they settled in with their prizes - cans of soup, beans, peas, peaches, oatmeal, cereal, almonds, stalk of celery - I asked who could name nutrients. “Almonds,” said Tyler, looking at the can of salt & vinegar almonds in his hand. I said I was looking for more general categories, like protein. “Fiber,” said Sean with a smile, holding the box of eponymously named high fiber cereal. I gave up on my survey and listed key nutrients as protein, fiber, minerals and vitamins. “Can you tell how nutritious something is by how big the can is?” I asked. “Who has the biggest can?” A young girl in the front row held up her family size baked beans and I said we’d have to look at the label and figure out how many servings it has. I asked everyone to look at the label and see who had protein in their item. I pointed to the young man with the label-less celery. “We can find nutrition information about things without labels, but one good guideline is anything with no packaging it usually better for you,” I said. (Afterwards, I realized I should have said naked food is better for you . . . but on second thought, maybe it was just as well I didn’t think of that earlier.) We checked a few labels. Interestingly, marshmallows do lay claim to a gram of protein, probably from the gelatin used to hold their shape, but nothing else. “But they don’t have any fat, I can eat a lot of these,” said my young man clutching the marshmallow bag. I dug out the canned tuna, which no one had taken out of the bag. “This has 20 g of protein and no sugar, and you’d have to eat a LOT of marshmallows to get 20 g of protein and that would be a LOT of sugar,” I said. Then I read 1 Corinthians 10:23-24 where Paul used food to teach a lesson to the people of the church in Corinth when he said: “All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor.” A neighbor is anyone who is not you. If you have a friend who is diabetic and has to be very, very careful about sugar, would you offer her marshmallows to eat at your house? Smart kids, of course they all said no. If you are older and know better, and want to be a good example for little kids about what are good foods to eat, would you eat lots of marshmallows or help them learn what is healthy? Of course they’d help their brothers and sisters be healthy. All things are lawful, but a good test of whether they build up is if they hurt someone else. If your choice of food or music or movies or video games hurts someone else who is weaker than you, then maybe they aren’t good choices for you either. Just like marshmallows do not help build you up physically, some choices in music or movies or video games will not build you up spiritually. Be as careful with what you put in your head as with what you put in your mouth. Lord, if our choices will build a barrier instead of a path to God for our neighbors, then help us to rethink our choices. Thank you for Your Word and it’s teaching. Amen Postscript: The young boy with the marshmallow bag came over to me at fellowship time in the church hall, and told me he learned that marshmallows aren’t healthy. Then we compared our plates – we’d both taken some vegetables, crackers and cheese in addition to cookies and a cupcake. A good balanced snack. We high-fived :-)
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 00:38:40 +0000
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