Many of you know that I can't stand bananas. I can smell one from a mile away. I blame this banana hatred on my mother. She would pack one in my lunch nearly every day through elementary and middle school, and it would make everything else in my lunch taste like - you guessed it - banana. To this day, if I pass someone eating one I sometimes gag. One night I made the big mistake of eating one in front of my wife. She made fun of me the entire time I was eating it - all 45 minutes of it - laughing, moaning. Her face was red. At one point she couldn't even breathe. I'm serious!
I have to admit, it probably was pretty funny watching a grown, bearded man painfully forcing a banana into his mouth gagging and dry heaving over a 45-minute timespan. But this whole banana thing got me thinking. Is this how we treat the Bible sometimes...like a food that we get tired of? I've caught myself and others kind of mocking scriptures in the Bible. Maybe not intentionally, but sometimes we look at people who emphasize a certain scripture, and we take pokes at them. I've realized that as I do, I'm poking at that scripture, at that truth as well. And every time I take a poke at it, it becomes less in me. I know this because there are certain things I believed strongly in, but now...not so much. In some mystical way, I've decreased the power available to me in those particular scriptures.
Maybe we're not mocking them out loud, but we know deep down that there are certain truths that we don't fully believe or embrace anymore. They've become like a food we hate. We ate them for so long we just got tired of them. We stopped eating them for whatever reason. And so we find ourselves dismissing vital truths that we desperately need because of someone going overboard with them. Or we tried them for a while but saw no visible results.
Lately I've felt like God has been calling me to eat the banana again, and so I did just now...for real. And I didn't gag or dry heave once. More than eating the banana, I feel like God has been encouraging me to dig through those scriptures I've been poking at again, those I haven't been taking to heart, with a new set of lenses and a clean palate. And I encourage you to do the same.
So go ahead, eat what you know you should...I won't laugh.
I have to admit, it probably was pretty funny watching a grown, bearded man painfully forcing a banana into his mouth gagging and dry heaving over a 45-minute timespan. But this whole banana thing got me thinking. Is this how we treat the Bible sometimes...like a food that we get tired of? I've caught myself and others kind of mocking scriptures in the Bible. Maybe not intentionally, but sometimes we look at people who emphasize a certain scripture, and we take pokes at them. I've realized that as I do, I'm poking at that scripture, at that truth as well. And every time I take a poke at it, it becomes less in me. I know this because there are certain things I believed strongly in, but now...not so much. In some mystical way, I've decreased the power available to me in those particular scriptures.
Maybe we're not mocking them out loud, but we know deep down that there are certain truths that we don't fully believe or embrace anymore. They've become like a food we hate. We ate them for so long we just got tired of them. We stopped eating them for whatever reason. And so we find ourselves dismissing vital truths that we desperately need because of someone going overboard with them. Or we tried them for a while but saw no visible results.
Lately I've felt like God has been calling me to eat the banana again, and so I did just now...for real. And I didn't gag or dry heave once. More than eating the banana, I feel like God has been encouraging me to dig through those scriptures I've been poking at again, those I haven't been taking to heart, with a new set of lenses and a clean palate. And I encourage you to do the same.
So go ahead, eat what you know you should...I won't laugh.
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- Dave Stoltzfus