Moving On From Noodles

I had an epiphany last week.  I was feeding my kids what they ecstatically call “cheesy noodles”—a.k.a. good old macaroni and cheese from a box.  I ate a forkful from the pan and stopped.  I realized, with shock and horror and some satisfaction, that I no longer liked this food.  In fact, it doesn’t appeal to me much at all!

Then my mind went back to all those summers growing up when my mom required us to cook one meal per week as part of our regular chore list.  One of our favorite meals to prepare was box mac-n-cheese.  We liked to make it because it was both easy to prepare and because we loved—and I mean adored—eating it.  My mom would often be busy working with her gardening or sewing while we partook of these meals.  “Would you like me to save you some?” I would ask.  Gently her no would come back.  She once said she didn’t really like this food.  How can this be? I wondered.  In a Peter-Pan sense of losing one’s childhood, I vowed that I would never give up my love for macaroni and cheese.  I could not fathom life without it.  

So discovering last week that I have outgrown my childhood food love was in some ways a letdown.  It was a betrayal of my innocence and simplicity.  The feeling you get when you watch your toddler master some brand new skill or suddenly fit into a whole new shoe size.  There is pride in the accomplishment along with a twinge of sadness that growing up is inevitable.

But perhaps my greater astonishment in leaving behind mac-n-cheese was the sense of rightness that accompanied the departure.  I realized that what I have now discovered—grown-up food—is infinitely better than what satisfied me as a child.  Now I love to eat warm crusted goat cheese and roasted asparagus and made-from-scratch pierogies.  The culinary world beckons, and I am delighted to discover new and delectable edibles from around the world.   

The parallel here is to our spiritual “taste” in food.  A couple times in the New Testament (see I Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 5) there is a contrast between “milk” and “meat.”  The trouble seems to be that those requiring milk didn’t even know what they were missing!  They had stunted their spiritual palate.  C. S. Lewis uses the famous analogy of “an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”  The encouragement here is that even the things we love about God and His word can still be deepened as we grow in Christ.  Unlike my noodle analogy, we will not “dislike” what we loved as young Christians; rather, they will cease to satisfy us and we will crave more complex and deeper relationships with the God of the universe.  We will understand Him more fully (though never completely), and we will  . . . grow!   

And this progress in spiritual culinary understanding is good and right.  Let us not cling to our childish loves but embrace and seek to grow in Christ as we live each day.  It happens slowly and gradually until, one day, we look back and see that the progress has been being made and we are no longer the spiritual children we once were.  As Paul said, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (I Corinthians 13:11).

O taste and see that the Lord is good:

blessed is the man that trusteth in him.

O fear the Lord, ye his saints:

for there is no want to them that fear him.

The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger:

but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.
Psalm 34: 8-10