Taste and See -- Day 11

The taste of Day 11 was hamburger. A bacon-sharp cheddar cheese hamburger. With french fries loaded up with salt. Yikes! Talk about eating just what the doctor didn't order! To make it healthier, I loaded up veggies -- lettuce, onions, pickles, and tomatoes. And had a diet IBC Root Beer.

Yeah, as if they would cancel out the grease and sodium and fat.

Still, it was delicious. Yummy, indeed. I'd forgotten how good a "real" hamburger tasted as compared to some slapped together thing from a fast food place. I savored it. Not even feeling guilty.

Now unlike my rabbi friend (aka my little brother) Aaron, I don't keep kosher. Well, not as Jews understand it. I do, though, keep a kind of "diabetic kosher" -- a list of foods that are okay for me to partake of and a list that ain't.

As I understand kosher -- and Aaron gave me some really long discourse on it that had me sooo confused by the end that I'm sure I'll get this wrong -- the point of kosher is to make sure you eat food that blesses your body. Which is what my "diabetic kosher" diet plan does.

But, sometimes, every now and then, occasionally, sometimes, I just need a taste o'somethin' that just blesses my taste buds. And so by having the big hamburger and load of fries, my taste buds found themselves blessed yesterday. Mightily.

And then I went back to keeping diabetic kosher.

As I reflected on this breaking of diabetic kosher and its spiritual corollary, I decided it wasn't about yielding to temptation. That would be a good post probably, but one I dont' really want to get into. Confession may be good for the soul, but public confession of all my yieldings to temptation would not be good for my spirit. Instead, I began to think of Paul's injunction in 1 Corinthians 10 that "'Everything is permissible'—but not everything is beneficial." I need to always keep, spiritually and physically that question before me -- "Is it beneficial?" Will it bless my body and my soul?

-- Brent

PS In case my good doctor reads this, I did not eat the entire hamburger and I did leave 1/2 of the fries!