Food is Life

I'm excited to announce, the PSALMS to God podcast is finally here. Find out why I chose a bread metaphor, how that relates to my obsession with food, and what that's got to do with...well, anything.

Season 1 Episode 0

¹Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. ²And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. ³And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. ⁴But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.Matthew 4:1-4 KJV

00:01:09	Hey guys, welcome to the PSALMS to God podcast! I'm so excited. So I've been trying to launch this podcast for almost two years now. I know that's a long time to be trying to do something. I have had so many ideas... They never really seemed to work out; I couldn't figure out how to get them to flow together. To be honest, when I came up with this idea, I had zero time, but I knew God was telling me to do a podcast, and I knew He had a reason for telling me to do it.
00:01:43	I think it took me those years to really just get in tune with what is was He was trying to show me. The biggest thing I learned during those two years was that even though I felt like I was doing all of these different things, they weren't actually different. So, at the time, I had three separate blogs because I thought I was talking about three separate ideas. I didn't think that they needed to be on the same blog, because I thought they needed to be in separated spaces because different people would be interested in the different topics.
00:02:15	But as I was trying to figure out how to structure this podcast, and how to make it accessible, how to link it back to a blog, I realized that no matter how unrelated these topics seemed, God is always at the center of the those topics, because He's at the center of my life—or at least I'm trying to make sure He's the center of my life. (I can't claim to be perfect at that just yet.)
00:02:39	Anyway, in the midst of that revelation, PSALMS to God was born. If you've already been to the website, then you already know that PSALMS to God is actually an acronym. It means Praising, Seeking, Appreciating, Loving, Magnifying and Surrendering to God. And that's exactly what the intention of this podcast has always been from the moment I had this idea. I want to praise, seek, appreciate, love, magnify, and surrender to God—no matter what the topic is. So don't be surprised if you start to see some of my other favorite topics pop up on the podcast, whether it be poetry or food, or culturally significant topics. They all are intertwined into the concept of placing God at the center of my life, so they'll probably all pop up on the podcast at some point in time.
00:03:32	Now, in the beginning of this podcast, I started with a quote from Matthew 4:1-4. This is a very, very important verse for everyone, but for me personally, because I am always hungry. Y'all, I'm always hungry, like always! Anyone who knows me personally, knows this to be true. It's so bad that my dad has made the statement that he would rather pay all of my living expenses (except my grocery bill), than to just pay my grocery bill. That's saying something; I just... I eat way, way too much.
00:04:12	Because I know that I'm always hungry, my life is basically structured around the fact that I'm always hungry. If you go to my job, I have a snack drawer. When I pack lunch for work, I pack with the expectation that I will probably eat my lunch before lunch and still be hungry at lunch. So, I pack extra food; I pack extra snacks. If you see me at the store, or at church, or I don't know—where ever, the bowling alley, the mall, it doesn't matter—usually, I have snacks in my purse. I have snacks at home. Sometimes I have snacks in my room because I wake up in the middle of the night hungry.
00:04:52	When I plan my budget, food is the first thing in my mind for the budget, it's the most important thing. I basically budget with the intention that I should be able to spend however much money I want to on food without thinking about it, and everything else should just fit in somewhere.[1] That's kind of crazy, right? That's really crazy, actually. But the reason I'm like that about food is because I'm a picky eater and I think it's important for us to be mindful of what we eat.
00:05:26	Photocredit: Unsplash.com/Anna Pelzer The Bible talks about our bodies being the temple,[2] and you want to take care of the Temple. If you go back and look at the Biblical description of the Temple, you can see how important it was, that it was holy; and of course, you want to treat your body in a similar fashion. Which means you want to be buying the best food to get the best nourishment and the best fuel for your body, so you can run at your optimal best. So this is why I put the most emphasis on food when it comes to me budgeting. Of course, that doesn't mean I should be hungry all the time or eating all the time, but I just wanted to throw out there why I focus on it so heavily when it comes to budgeting.
00:06:11	But physical food is actually immaterial. I know, I was just talking about how I'm always hungry and how food is so important, how did I get to this point? Well, Jesus is showing us this. He's been fasting for 40 days! Y'all, I can't even imagine fasting for 40 minutes,[3] so I know He was hungry! And now, here comes the devil, trying to get Him to turn these stones into bread so that He can eat. Y'all, it's Jesus—of course He can turn the stones in to bread and eat if he wants to, He's Jesus. But, Jesus knew—and He actually goes all the way back to the Old Testament and quotes Moses—He quotes Deuteronomy 8:3 when He's saying "man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedth out of the mouth of God." Jesus is reminding us that it's the spiritual food and the spiritual nourishment that we provide to our body that is the most important thing.
00:07:09	So, this habit that I have of structuring my life to accommodate the fact that I'm always hungry physically, should be replicated in my spiritual life; and that's even more important. I should be making sure that I always have spiritual food on hand. I should be always ready with something spiritual—whether I'm starving, and I want a complete feast, or whether I just need a nice simple meal, or if I just need a little snack, just a little taste to have something for the moment; I should have that type of arsenal for my spiritual life, too. I really wanted to imitate this concept in the podcast. I've been trying to balance my life, so that I'm making this kind of structure in my life as well—that I'm, reading the Bible daily; that when I'm in these moods or moments that I know I should be praying that I stop and I get the right scripture or I get a moment of prayer or something to realign me in tune with God. And you know, maybe I would call that a snack or something to put me back on track. Sometimes, I need more and I need to be in the Word a little bit longer, to savor it and to wrap my head around things and let God speak to me. Then of course, there are times when I need to spend a long time just reading and researching and digging and understanding what it is that God has out there for us.
00:08:42	I had this idea to kind of mirror how I'm trying to balance my personal life into this podcast, and so I would arrange the different episodes as what I like to call, crumbs, slices, and loaves. The reason I went with that is kind of a bread metaphor, because the Bible is always talking about bread—breaking bread together,[4] as well as, the bread of life.[5] In John 6:35, Jesus tells us He is the Bread of Life, that when we consume the spiritual bread we never hunger. That's because that spiritual bread—which is Him, which is the Word of God—it leads us to salvation and to eternal life. So, if I do this right, I won't be going around saying I'm always hungry, but in the same sense, I should always be hungry for the Word.
00:09:35	I liked this whole theme of bread, like I said, because it's also about breaking bread together and I want to be able to break bread with you guys. So, sometimes on this podcast, we'll just sit for the little crumb. We'll do something short and sweet; we'll get a verse, we'll just meditate on how that applies to life—maybe have some short thoughts on it. Other times I will dig in a little bit deeper. I had this idea—I found my old high school yearbooks and I was looking at the superlatives for the senior class. Which, I thought that was really interesting to think about how or favorite biblical heroes would have been seen in a superlative light. I want to go into some information on those people and how their lives relates to today through the superlatives—I know that sounds crazy but just stay tuned and you'll see that I'm not crazy.[6] I think it's going to be really cool actually. I just want to bring their stories into modern day conception and let us see a bit more about them, and maybe try to see them in us and us in them. So, that will be what I'm calling our slices of bread. And then once a month or so, I think we should have a deep feast. I'll bring in a friend and we'll have a conversation about a topic. We'll just try to dig really deep into that topic. This season I want to talk about the fruits of the spirit. I think they're really important to defining our faith and defining who we see God as and the character of God. So for those episodes, each episode will focus on a particular fruit of the spirit.
00:11:17	Because I anticipate a lot of information being discussed in some of these episodes, and because I always want to hear your feed back, I'll post transcripts with references and maybe even some footnotes with after thoughts I had after filming the episode on the blog. You can always find the latest episodes under the podcast section of the website, but I'll give a direct link at the beginning and end of each podcast as well.
00:11:44	I hope that you are as excited as I am. I hope you'll join me. Don't forget to subscribe to get automatic updates and I can not wait to talk to you again. In the mean time, visit the blog and view this episode at www.psalmstogod.com/foodislife.

Footnotes and References

1. A more accurate overview of how I budget for groceries is this: Typically, I don't pay attention to prices in the store, I just decided what I want. Over time, I have analyzed my average grocery bill, and I a lot about $50 more to what I expect to spend. After setting that, then I determine how much I can afford in rent, cable, lights, etc.
2. 1 Corinthians 6:19–20
3. This is definitely an exaggeration. I've done 4, 24-hour fasts (but it's probably accurate to say I began struggling about an hour into the fast).
4. Acts 20:7
5. John 6:35
6. At least, I hope!