Reading through Psalm 103.
…Lord, I want to be thirsty for your truth. Parched until it touches my lips and flows into my being….
But should I compare your truth to a liquid? Or maybe something else? Hmmm….
“Milk and meat.” Both sustenance. Reflecting maturity–ones is for babies and children, and meat is for when you are older.
But milk is a liquid. It gives instant satisfaction–an in and down, and quickly reaches the aching organs crying out for satisfaction. But, even in it’s richness, it doesn’t satisfy for long because it lacks a weight to it. It’s more easily ingested, but also quickly dispelled. But meat takes time. It takes time to take in, cut into pieces first with a knife, and then with our teeth, breaking it down into easily-processed parts. Its bits and pieces then slowly make their way down, and then takes hours to fully draw every bit of nutrients and protein from it. There is so much more to be gained from it, but the time it takes to digest it proves that.
Abba, mature my heart enough for the meat. I don’t want to encourage my appetite for milk–for the instant gratification that leaves me hungry hours later. I want to hunger for the rich things of you, to be satisfied only with a meal and not a milkshake. I want to look with joy at the process of taking in the meat–to not groan at the work, or sigh at the lengthy heart-preparation process.
Everything about eating meat takes more time.
Milk? You milk it from an animal….and you’re good to go. Maybe some slight purification that needs to happen in case you’re paranoid (which probably ends up stripping it of essential nutrients), but it’s truly a source to mouth sustenance. It’s given directly to the person, with little or no effort on their part.
But meat? There is a death required. You have to catch the animal. Then take its life. You have to drain its blood. You have to remove the skin, and clear away the natural surroundings so you don’t contaminate the meat (organs, dirt, etc.). Then, you have to cut the meat from the bones–separating it from the rest of the body. This can be done before or after cooking, but it is key. Then you have to cook it–bring it to an intensely hot temperatures for a certain period of time until the meat has transformed from raw to ready, changed from bloody to juicy. Then you can cut it up and THEN it can go into your mouth. And no child can go through this process. It is done by someone older and mature until the child can learn to do this for themselves. Learning to get and prepare your own food takes work and discipline, and our society has been told that we don’t had to go through the hard work if we don’t want to. Markets with butchers are great, but freezers filled with machine-prepped meat and shortcuts of boxes and bags and abound. We’re taught that our effort spent in preparing that which we need to survive is a waste of our time.
Digestion is even different.
Milk takes between 5-7 depending on the person.
Meat takes 24-72 hours depending on the person.
I don’t say all of this as a nutritional rant. I say it as a spiritual one. Check out 1 Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 5 if you don’t believe me. Christians weren’t made to spend their lives consuming spiritual “milk”.
Abba, you made me for meat. You created me to be satisfied, filled with good things, for taking things in and processing them thoroughly. Please don’t let me linger at a stage simply because I’m lazy or unwilling to mature. I want to live out my full potential, even if that means growing up a little and having to put some effort into learning and into daily preparation. I want to lay down my convenience for the sake of my alimentation.
Free me from thinking that convenience is always my friend. I ultimately want to be and stay satisfied. You know the best way to go about that in every sense of the phrase.
I want you to train me to cautiously second-guess man-made conveniences. Not in the paranoid sense, but in the not-wanting-to-miss-out sense. I don’t want to sacrifice whole satisfaction for the sake of convenience.
MyExposedHeart 