Week 3, Day 2: Food

As someone who loves to cook, and loves to eat, food always plays a big role in my celebrations of any kind, especially holidays.

It's not necessarily the same foods each year, though I do look forward to Jim's pancakes at our annual Sunday School class Christmas brunch. And the holidays just wouldn't be the same without some of my mom's homemade peanut butter balls or some of Renae's sausage biscuit bites at her annual Christmas open house.

But it's thinking about, preparing and shopping for, and then cooking and serving and eating food that's especially significant to me. Holiday food takes into consideration more than just sustenance. It's an opportunity to consider others' tastes and to share; it's an opportunity to be a little extravagant and to give thanks; and it's a way to bring in all of our senses - hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, tasting - as we experience the joy of celebrating.

Jesus also used food as a way of celebrating, but also remembering and looking ahead, when he broke bread and drank from a cup. He took ordinary food, food the disciples would serve to each other again and again, and he made it holy by connecting it to himself. This wasn't so that the disciples would eat bread and drink wine only in church. But so that each time they ate bread and drank wine, wherever they were, they would remember Jesus, both his sacrifice and promise to return.


That's what I want my holiday food to be like this Advent: not something I eat only on a special day or two. But food I eat all year that reminds me there's something more than eating and drinking. So that even while I am eating bread, I might remember that man does not live by bread alone.