fish & chips

I wonder if you were ever taken in by a scheming and clearly devious parent who, when trying to make you take foul tasting medicine, told you that if you put the gross liquid at the back of the mouth you wouldn’t taste it? Lies, all lies!! Today, of course, all children’s medicine, whatever the colour, tastes of strawberries. Children today huh – don’t know they’re born! It has to be said however that as a child I would scream the house down if I did not get my spoon of cod liver oil, I loved it!

I like food especially fish & chips with lashings of salt and vinegar, mars bars and treacle tart, all proven in my household to hold great and good health benefits! I think it is wonderful that we have all the various taste buds embedded in our tongues so we can get the full range of flavours, truly miraculous. I mean food could just be utterly bland and similar. I am glad that I am not a Boggle from Bewilderwood. They would have to eat mud stew to make them grow which leads to another one of those adult fibs. Eating crusts makes you grow and your teeth strong. Well, yes, at a push but what twaddle!

The problem of talking at all about food, of course, is that many people in the world go hungry even though there is enough to go round. Why can’t we just set aside political squabbles and the quest for power and domination and feed the hungry?

Jesus spoke about food in his stories and actions.  The Kingdom, he said, is like a woman who put yeast in the dough. It spreads through the whole lump.  Jesus on two occasions multiplied fish and bread. He also talked about flavouring. Salt wasn’t used in those days to bring out the fullness of my fish and chips, but for preserving foodstuffs. A few years ago you could buy ‘Bombay Duck’, which was a salted fish from India – just delicious - but alas available no longer unless you know different. The fish was preserved by the salt. Once that saltiness has been lost the salt no longer has any use. In Jesus’ day it was then used for road building and was literally trampled under foot. In Matthew 5v13-14 it says, "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men. "You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.

Let us be like salt that brings a Kingdom dynamic to the society that we are called to and that we are a part of. Just by living a Jesus lifestyle we become lights that shine, a church that cannot be hidden, one that people’s attention is drawn to like a city set on a hill.