Try this recipe. Make a nice fresh salad with Romaine lettuce, those tiny cute tomatoes, oil and vinegar dressing and a little pepper. Don’t add salt please. Everybody knows that salt is not good for you. Sprinkle some sesame seeds and maybe a bit of smoked salmon to add flavor. Then take a sugary, cream filled donut (chocolate icing if you like) and place it on top of the salad. Sounds good doesn’t it. Makes my mouth water. Go ahead and enjoy this concoction of self denial and self indulgence at the same time.
The problem with either swing of this dietary pendulum is that it tends to go to extremes. Along with these extremes, I become judgmental of people who are not eating or thinking as I do. There are the yogurt eating yoga people and the beer bellies who burp. I deny that I want to belong to either group, but they both have some appeal to me.
Paul recognized this when he wrote: Galatians 5: 16-17 I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.
I become intolerant and critical of what I perceive as your moral failure not because you fail, but because I fail to recognize the moral failures in which I still indulge.
We divide ourselves into political, social, civic and even religious groups of salad or donut eaters. The truth is that neither is a perfect food. Any habit, custom, opinion can be taken to extreme.
The take home message to me is that I must keep a balance in order to recognize that I am human. I must keep a balance so that I am not intolerable or intolerant of the humans around me.
My advice, put a donut on your salad.
Better yet: Psalm 34:8 ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good’.