Tiny Devotional for Saturday, 05-27-2023

A great good morning to all my friends and neighbors in Internet Land! And to family members who have dropped by, I forgot to fix the clothes drier.

A sated man loathes honey,
But to a famished man any bitter thing is sweet.
Proverbs 27:7, NASB

“Eat everything on your plate; there are children starving in _____ who would love to have what you are turning your nose up at!”

If your parents were raised during the Great Depression, you may have thought that was a part of saying grace.  Along with the contempt of the six-year-old for carrots, it has the virtue of being true.

It’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. To illustrate that, we have to go along with Rosalynn Carter, then the First Lady, to a refugee camp in Thailand in 1979. 

“...please eat, baby, please eat…” she whispered, 
as she tried to get the emaciated infant to take the bottle. 

She was doomed to failure, because the whole truth is that extreme deprivation produces the same reaction as extreme provision: loathing, at the sight of food.

In perhaps his last letter (II Timothy 4), Paul talks about the spiritual analogue of physical starvation. The consequences are just as lethal to the spirit, as physical starvation is to the body: good food is abandoned, in favor of that which brings no nourishment.

 It’s not something that happens overnight, and the best way I know of preventing it from happening is to compare what we are offered with what we KNOW is good:

  • Do justly
  • Love mercy
  • Walk humbly with your God.

If we aren’t getting that spiritual food, we need to change where we are eating. 

Or, we can prepare to die from starvation.


Peace be on your household.

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