Take of Little of Everything

I received a humorous email from a friend for the holidays, that was chock full of “Holiday Eating Tips”. The first tip was to leave buffets with carrot sticks and find one with more caloric and fattening foods. Another reminded us not to snack before going to a party in an effort to control our eating. The whole point of the buffet at a party is to eat free food. The idea of buffets is to get to pick what you want and to leave the rest and to indulge, indulge, indulge.

As the wife of a pastor, there are unlimited eating and fellowship opportunities. We can pick and choose and still eat for much of the holiday season for free! However, sometimes I think this mindset is carried with us to church as well. We go and listen to the sermon or we hear our Sunday school lesson, but we only keep what we choose. We pick out the bon-bons, but we leave the carrots. We chew on the love of God and pass on some of the commandments, because we want only the part of Christianity we like and are comfortable with. We don’t want to have to change our lifestyle or open our eyes to search our souls.

Remember as a child, when your Mom would go through the buffet line and fill your plate, she gave you a little bit of everything while you stood back just hoping she would leave the peas and give you more the fluffy gelatin salad? That is how we want life to be. I’ll take the child when it’s a baby, pass on the toddler years, take only the good parts of the teenage years and take the credit when they receive their senior awards. I’ll take the cute sayings and pass on having them return a half-eaten Snickers bar to the grocery store. We want our relationship with God to be like that. We adopt a buffet-style version of God, just taking what we like, but leaving the rest. As a baby Christian, this can work for awhile, but then comes the time to study the word, discern the meaning and begin to live the life God intends for us.

He asks us to love our neighbors, to not covet and to forgive our enemies. These are just a few of things that can be hard to take on the buffet. Yet when stacked against the gift of His Son and eternal life, it takes only a small portion of our plate. The peace and comfort we receive from taking a portion of everything from the buffet, of choosing to eat at God’s table and by helping others to fill their plates is well worth having to eat our vegetables.

Luke 14:15 reminds us Blessed is the man who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.

So as I muddle through this holiday season, from feast to feast, from buffet table to buffet table, I think I will try to remember how Mom used to fill my plate when I was child. I think I will try to take just a little bit of everything.

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Donetta Garman is the author of "Growing Up Ugly" (Tate Publishing, 2008) and a wife of a rural church pastor. She resides in Osceola, Missouri with her husband of twenty one years, Gar Garman, on an idyllic spot in the Ozark foothills.
© 2008 Donetta Garman - All rights reserved. Used with permission.