food

i'm currently reading South by Ernest Shackleton, his memoirs from the failed voyage of the (poorly named) Endurance in an attempt to land on and then traverse across antartica. fascinating stuff. i've read some excerpts from his memoirs before, but never the entire thing. shackleton was quite the chap, well worthy of the knighthood he eventually received (and i'm only halfway through the book). he had a keen sense of how very important food was to maintaining the morale of the men once adversity had overtaken them and they were stranded on an ice floe, as well as understanding how far a man will go to feed his appetite. he writes the following:

when one is hungry, fastidiousness goes to the winds and one is only too glad to eat up any scraps, regardless of their antecedents. one is almost ashamed to write of all the little tidbits one has picked up here, but it is enough to say that when the cook upset some pemmican on to an old sooty cloth and threw it outside his galley, one man subsequently made a point of acquiring it and scraping off the palatable but dirty compound. another man searched for over an hour in the snow where he had dropped a piece of cheese some days before, in the hopes of finding a few crumbs. he was rewarded by coming across a piece as big as his thumb-nail, and considered it well worth the trouble. (p. 112)


now that's my kind of crew! see, my eating habits aren't that unusual after all... they're just out of place and in the wrong century. it takes hard work and a lack of sustenance to make you really appreciate food. for instance, today i forgot to bring my lunch with me. i had already made up some tuna fish last night, so it would be easy as pie to make a sandwich before i left this morning, but in my early-morning state of befuddlement i walked out the door sans sandwich. i did have a few granola bars, which were able to stave off the giant until i arrived home, but once i got back to the apartment i devoured what might possibly have been the most delectable, delicious, and scrumptious tuna fish sandwich ever made by human hands


sometimes, it's good to go without, if only to remind us of just how good we really have it


that's why fasting is such a brilliant idea. not only does it remind us of just how delicious food is, and how necessary it is to survival, but in the right context fasting also can remind us that it isn't all about the here and the now. we should hunger and thirst after righteousness far more than we do after physical food


i know that's not the case with me. i'll admit it, i'm ruled by my stomach. one of the first phrases i learned in latvia this summer was "ya hachu yest," which roughly means "i want to eat." i didn't learn "jesus loves you," or "His grace is greater than your sins"... nope. i want to eat.



what do i want more, food or God? i know what the right answer should be... i'm just not sure it's the real one



(yet)