Meal time is a time to enjoy the good food that God has given us. It is not necessarily a time to analyze and study the various phytochemicals and antioxidants and minerals and vitamins and fibers and sugars and complex carbohydrates that make the food so beneficial to us. It is not a time to discover new things or to delve deeper into the scientific aspects of how the substances in the food interact with each other and with our system to go where they need to go and do what they need to do. Meal time is simply and beautifully a time to taste and savor what I know God has made for me – not what man has made – and thereby trust that it is just what I need. Furthermore I can simply trust that as I internalize it, all the billions of wonderful things that need to be done in me will be done because God made living things to work that way. To a dead person, food means nothing. But because I am alive, it means a lot to me. I can taste it. It sustains me. Granted, it is useful and important to pay attention to how different foods help me, and to even document it and share it with others, but that is not the only reason I eat. If it is, then the success of the meal is evaluated by the wrong criteria and could actually appear to be an unprofitable endeavor, resulting in discouragement and frustration and even doubts about the nutrition content of the food.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

“O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. O fear the LORD ye his saints: for there is no want to them that fear him.” Psalm 34:8-9 “…the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you that believe not.” – see John 6. I had been thinking of my time in meditation on God’s Word to be a time to discover truths and find answers to questions and “get insights” while forgetting what came first: how good it is to simply enjoy the LORD, because he is good! Because I had begun to merely look for exciting new information, I was evaluating my time with the LORD by the wrong criteria and the time actually began to seem unprofitable. When the LORD showed me the above analogy between physical food and spiritual food, I saw my mistake. It is the Person; the name; the character; the presence of the Lord revealed to me that makes meditation most meaningful! There is no match for the Lord! Yet this has not always been possible; I needed spiritual life to taste spiritual things. “One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple.” – Psalm 27:4