Connection to Creation

Let me shake some of the cobwebs off my writing.  It has been a while since I sat down to put “pen to paper”.  I used to write about architecture exclusively while in school. Sometimes I analyzed the design intent of projects like Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house and the floating levels.  Other times, I looked at the impact of the development of glass on the way people were used interior space.  Everything was always tied to design, buildings, and the way we (as society) worked with it.  It was always something I was actively studying, like really studying.  Reading books, and papers, going to lectures, all that good stuff. 

Now as I sit down to write, I am diving into a topic that I both have known for years but feels fresh and new.  For lack of a non-food verb, I have been marinating in the wonder of the connection between God’s creation and us through food.  God’s creation story has been a part of my faith story since my early days of Sunday school.  We were taught from a young age that God made the world and then gave it to Adam and Eve.  Except for the tree of life, God gave them all the food from the Garden of Eden.  In that moment, God built our connection to His creation through food. 

My faith has been a part of my life for as long as I remember.  Sure, there are times it has ebbed and flowed.  The relationship with the Lord being (unfortunately) more one-way on the giving street at times, but that is not to say we haven’t always been in relationship.  As for food, you can mostly likely relate how food has been in my life since day one. 

God is at the root of all of it. And He did it on purpose.

The connection between the two has shown up stronger than ever recently.  Faith and food.  Both involve your participation – through declaration or study and through eating or digestion at the least. Both involve someone else – God and a cook, or farmer, or well…God.  See that last bit, is where my brain started really firing off lately.  God, He is at the root of all of it.  He makes the food, and He gifts the talents of cooks and bakers.  He did it on purpose.  He designed the experience of us needing to consume something to continue to be fueled, just as He designed our relationship to be about engagement with Him. 

Isn’t that beautiful?  We did not need to have such a connection to His creation, but in consuming, we are connected back to the ways He gifts us – giving us our daily bread.

Next time you sit down to eat something, I challenge you to take a minute and think about how that bite made it to you.  I have been trying to that lately and the tastes have been that much more delicious.  Take a bite.