WOULD YOU LIKE FRIES WITH THAT?
You open the door and feel the rush of cool air. As you walk towards the line your focus goes up to the colorful, backlit reader board with perfect pictures of menu items. You watch as teenagers in uniforms and visors push various buttons and give various orders. You’re handed a number and in minutes your number is called and you take hold of a plastic tray full of food wrapped in colored paper and cardboard. Sound familiar?
Or maybe you’re experience has you driving up to a colorful box, where a voice calls out to you asking you for your order. The voice takes your request, barks out a total dollar amount and then gives you directions as to where to exchange your money for your food. We patiently wait in our car as the car in front of us seemingly has ordered everything on the menu, and we wish we would have just taken the time to run in and order. Finally, you’re handed your paper bag of food, and you’re back on the road.
The whole experience of buying fast food has become a routine practice for many people. I wonder though, has the concept of “fast-food” set a precedent for the way we live the rest of our lives? Has it set a precedent for our spiritual lives?
About three months ago I felt the rush of life. My wife and I had entered into the house-buying adventure, and between packing, moving, unpacking and working all at the same time…time was something we didn’t have enough of. It’s not all that uncommon. I mean let’s face it, we’re all busy. We have schedules to keep, appointments to make, practices to run kids too, homework to get done, and of course our weekly hour or two at church. It was around this time that I felt the nudge of the Holy Spirit, but wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be hearing.
Camp meeting came and it was during those services that I realized what I had been doing. I had been getting my spiritual appetite met by picking up my food at the drive-thru. I had gotten into a routine of “fast-food-faith.” Let me explain. I was quickly rushing through scripture just to get enough to keep me going to the next Sunday and the next Wednesday. I wasn’t starving my faith; I was just getting junk food to feed it. A fast food diet is not something your doctor is going to approve of, nor your body. Yet we fall into this habit with our spiritual lives all the time.
God desires that we would take the time to nourish our soul, not just feed it. Trusting our faith to a few bites here and a quick stop in there is not going to give us the blessing God wants to give us. He wants to dine with us, to talk with us and to hang out with us. I realized in that week that my efforts to feed our students, was limited to the fact I was dining on a fast-food faith diet. None of us can truly speak truth to others if we’re only taking in enough to satisfy our hunger. We need to stop and recognize our God loves us so much he prepares for us a meal. He wants us to sit at the table and spend time with him. What would our faith look like if we stopped “driving through” on Sunday’s and spent time each day feeding our souls with the Word of God? What if we took the time to savor the meat of Scripture? It might just allow us to recognize our 30-minutes-or-less lifestyle is not the way to live life.
When it comes to eating at the table God has prepared for us, the question becomes would you like seconds? That’s a much better question to have an answer for compared to, “Would you like fries with that?”
Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” John 6:35 (NLT)
