The food that satisfies

She caught my eye through the window in my office door and turned to knock. She peered through the closed door and asked with a gesture and a questioning eyebrow raise, "Are you available to chat?"

I was in the middle of a conversation with a fellow staff member. It wasn't an official meeting. Just casual conversation. The door was closed because it was noisy in the hallway. My office is the last door before you get to the church's food pantry, and in the afternoons, this end of the hallway is always a bustle of shopping carts and children and the rustling of overflowing bags of food and well wishes.

This woman had just come from visiting the pantry. She had long dark hair and was wearing a crocheted cap. I vaguely recognized her as one of our regular clients. When she caught my eye and turned to knock and silently asked me if I was busy, I assumed that she was stopping by with a financial request. Members of our congregation are generous in keeping afloat a pastor's discretionary fund, and we often field requests for assistance, whether for rent or electric bills or gas tank fill-ups.

I opened the door for her, and she said, "Thank you so much for the coupons!"

The food pantry had recently received a grant to partner with our local farmer's market. Through the grant, we are able to offer our food pantry clients coupons - gift certificates, really - to be used at our twice-weekly farmer's market. They purchase whatever fresh produce they want using the coupons, and we reimburse the vendors for the cost. This was the first week that the pantry had been handing out these coupons.

And here was this woman, stopping by my office, for no other reason than to thank me, as a representative of the institution, for the gift of being able to buy fresh produce.

After Jesus fed the crowd of 5000 men, plus women and children, with only five loaves and two fish, the crowds were amazed. They followed Jesus across the sea. "Are you looking for me because you ate your fill of the loaves?" he asked them. "Don't you see? It's not about the food, it is about the one who gave you the food, the one who has the ability to give you the food that endures for eternal life, which isn't food at all, but is all life and salvation and fulfillment."

Jesus says, "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life." (John 6:27a)

For this grateful woman, it wasn't about the food. Yes, she was going to get to eat her fill of fresh veggies that were so often unavailable to her. Yes, she was going to get to shop at booths overflowing with the abundance of the earth. But more than that, these coupons were a sign of generosity, love, salvation. They were a sign of God's love and mercy and blessings. The food that endures for eternal life.

Comparing notes at a recent staff meeting, nearly all of us who work here at church are trying to lose weight, whether through nutrition or exercise or fad diets. Swapping junk food and indulgences for vegetables and healthy fare seems more a burden than a joy, a symbol of having to deprive ourselves of what we want to eat for what we ought to eat.

And yet here is someone, standing in my office doorway, to remind me that the good food is the better food. That cucumbers and tomatoes and fresh lettuce and rhubarb are privileges. That the ability to make good food choices is itself a blessing.

More than that, I wonder if I am ever going to approach the Lord's table with as much excitement and gratitude as this dear woman approached her envelope of farmer's market coupons. What would it be like, every Sunday, to approach that table with that much hunger for the good food, the food that endures for eternal life? Do I take for granted the bread and the wine, the same way that I take for granted the bowl of salad that sits next to my plate at dinner? And what about my spiritual life would be different if I really really saw both those leafy greens and the bread and wine of communion as the gift that they really are? Because aren't they both signs of God's abundance, and the richness of creation to feed both my body and my soul with good things, with the food that satisfies, with the sustaining nourishment of food that lasts for eternal life, this-worldly tastes of the feast to come?

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