Archive | December, 2010

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Welcome back for Part 2 of our discussion on balancing nutrition and priorities. Read Part 1 here.

This past week I was preparing burritos for dinner. I was frustrated and fretting about the need to prepare my own homemade tortillas. I wanted to…but energy was seriously lacking. So I went to the store. I bought white tortillas. And you know what? I felt free! I felt truly free to eat and enjoy this food without fear. Our burritos were delicious filled with home cooked beans, meat, cheese, guacamole, fresh salsa and sour cream! And we all loved it!

There is freedom in Christ, my friends (Galatians 5:1). There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and that includes your food choices (Romans 8:1-2). Fear is slavery. God designed food for our enjoyment. He gave Peter permission to kill and eat. God had made all these food items clean through the blood of Christ (Acts 10:13-15).

This means that when done in a spirit of thanksgiving, we can enjoy the glorious flavors of God’s creation with joy. We love going out to eat and rejoicing in the flavors of Thai and Mexican food. This is part of delighting in the beauty and diversity of God’s creation.

“Whatever you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Cor. 10:31).

Is God being glorified through your fear and striving? Than food and health is distracting us from this higher calling.

So I often buy canned tomato soup, boxed cereal, small yogurts, and minimal packaged foods here and there. Why? Because it makes my homemaking a bit more simple, makes my husband happy, increasing the joy in our marriage, and I do have more time to enjoy my kiddos. I no longer fret about it. It works for me in this season. My husband and my children are happy. There is peace. I want to keep my eyes on the Kingdom. Investing in the souls of my children, serving and loving on my husband (even if that means white hamburger buns and small yogurts for work that he loves!), and giving first to the Kingdom.

I wanted to include this helpful list of guiding questions that Natalie at Guarded for the Gospel shared. These are invaluable. They should be asked consistently when we feel our heart striving, feeling anxious, or overwhelmed.

These practical guidelines will help guard against health/nutrition becoming wrongly prioritized, over and above loving God, family and friends:

1. How does my husband feel about our family’s health and our current diet? What is his opinion about investing extra time/money in this area?

Listen, and really value his thoughts! Unity is so key.

2. What is our current budget? Am I submitting to it?

Do NOT overspend for the sake of healthy food and in doing so, dishonor your husband! You may have nourished his body by putting a super-nutritious meal on the table, but you might be kinda like a Big Mac to the financial “arteries” of your marriage. (You are clogging it up, slowing it down, and working against him if you are overspending your budget!)

3. Does my hubby have food preferences? Am I being thoughtful toward them?

If your budget + your health agenda = lots of beans…

…but your husband does not like beans, then CHUCK the beans!

If he likes meat, figure out how to work meat in your meals! This may be A LOT OF WORK. But if he knows you want to make meals that are enjoyable for him and healthy, he will be more on board with you.

You won’t be gaining any support if you disregard his preferences for a meat-and-potatoes dinner, and serve him tofu served on mixed greens, with flaxseed dressing and pine nuts.

A true story from our house: My husband recently told me, “Spinach is a leaf. It does not belong in my drink. Put it in my salad!”

Yup. Green smoothies are a cool idea to me. Next time I’ll make them during the day!

4. Do my eating habits prevent me from spending time with other people, when I will be forced to eat foods that fall outside of my own ideas of health?

Jesus hung out with lepers. He did not think his own health so important as to avoid contact with people who could possibly jeopardize it.

5. Does my family’s spiritual/emotional health ALWAYS come first?

Baking bread and making homemade butter is NO excuse for not teaching scripture to your children, praying with them, playing on the floor with them, or having time to relax and talk/listen to your husband.

6. Am I keeping LOVE as my first priority? Am I always thinking through how to best order my time according to LOVE, not merely our diet?

These are truly convicting and yet so freeing at the same time. I pray the Lord would bless and keep you and allow you to keep this balance through His grace. Pursue health and wholeness first and foremost through Jesus Christ! I encourage you to make healthy food and lifestyle choices, use whole grains, natural sweeteners, and food as close to the original source as possible, but don’t become enslaved to it.

Try not to go to the opposite extreme of abandoning all and making yourself sick, but rather do not worry about non-organic produce, parabens in your body products, or feeling guilty if you didn’t soak your grains, or fretting that every stomach ache or dry skin issue must be linked to a food allergy. Do your best with the resources God has entrusted to you, guard your heart against fear, and enjoy the freedom you have in Christ!

I will end with this sweet quote by Sheri from the comments on Part 1. She put it so well with this illustration:

I just heard Elisa Morgan from MOPS international speak and her key phrase was, “She did what she could,” from the story of Mary anointing Jesus with perfume. To sum up her talk, God only expects us to do what we are capable of doing, not what someone else can do, or doing or giving to the point of wearing yourself to the ground making you useless. Its a good thing to remember in all aspects of life.

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With the bombardment of choices for us mothers to make in regard to our health and nutrition at the table and in our lifestyle, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep a proper balance between our pursuit of nutrition for the health and wholeness of our family and the reality of what we can truly manage. I have been noticing an increased obsession with health and food in my generation that has been concerning, especially among young mothers. We don’t realize that something is being sacrificed at the idol of health.

As I have been part of this real food movement over the last few years, I have come from truly enjoying learning new things about our health and food choices and eager to serve and provide the best for our family, to becoming obsessed with worry (what are these ingredients and what can they do to our body?) and frustration over our food budget and what the long-term impact of our decisions could result in. Now I’ve come to a place of peace. I have freedom because I am letting go of control. After my original writing of Can Natural Living Become an Idol? several months ago, and the positive response received from others going through similar struggles, I wanted to add further help by giving some principles from which we can achieve peace and balance in the wave of food and health decisions.

It can be so frustrating researching every food product and finding such a mix of opinions and research going both ways. Should you soak or not? What products are really safe? With the expansion of the internet, there is just no end to resources saying the pros and cons of every food and body product item in your home.

Reality came home for me when a close family friend died of cancer this past summer. She had been the leading example in my life of the ultimate Nourishing Traditions follower. My eyes were opened. Health will not save you. It truly cannot preserve one day of your life.

We need to be careful that we don’t elevate health so high that we expect it to keep us from the kind of health problems our parents’ generation suffered because it will not save us. Fear is a deadly enemy. It is consuming. It entangles. It takes our focus away from the importance of demonstrating Christ’s love to a hurting world.

As mothers, we are extremely susceptible to comparing ourselves with others standard of health and nutrition. To become overwhelmed because we cannot afford all organic products. To stress because we have so much to learn. Health and nutrition cannot become our “functional Savior.”

Dear sisters, let’s step back again. Let’s review our priorities. What does it come down too? The importance of love. Loving the Lord with all our hearts and loving our neighbors as ourselves. I love how Natalie at Guarded by the Gospel shares it here,

So what should my be priorities be as I shop and cook and eat?

First, and ultimately, our pleasure is in God, in Jesus Christ. Psalm 16:2 says, “I say to the LORD, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.’” Jesus said God’s greatest commandment was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.” (Matt. 22:39) God deserves his place. Anything that supplants our total and ultimate love toward him is…an idol.

How do I know when I’ve made an idol out of something?

My whole life revolves around that one thing.

I plan around it.

I obsess about it.

I freak out if it’s taken away from me.

I think about it all the time.

My relationships revolve around it.

I think it makes me ok, on track.

And…(Here comes the hard part) …When it causes me to break the second greatest commandment, “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Funny how idolizing something (breaking that first commandment) makes you break the second too!

I have made an idol out of nutrition (or whatever!) when I continually elevate it as a priority above loving the people around me the way I would like to be loved.

Let me say that serving healthy wholesome food for your family is important. We want to be healthy and fit for the Lord’s use. We are responsible as do the best that we can. It is an act of love, but when you are spending so much time in your kitchen, planning, shopping, preparing, that you miss those moments of loving on your little ones, then we have missed the boat. When people start saying that parent’s who feed junk food to their children don’t really love them, we are going too far. What’s more significant in the kingdom? The physical or spiritual food we serve?

When our family dinner times are lacking peace because we are constantly trying to get our little ones to eat this healthy food which they may not enjoy, then something needs to change. I didn’t like my veggies as a child, but did I suffer much? No, I love them now and the striving and fighting isn’t worth it.

“Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things (food, shelter, the essentials) will be added unto you.” (Matt. 6:33).

Natalie continues, 

Always cooking and eating healthy food will not make you truly healthy. Having a heart full of life-giving, generous, lay-down-your-life love will.

“Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.” (Mark 7:18-20)

True health and wholeness can only be experienced through Jesus Christ.

Check out part 2 here…