Eat mor chikin!

That’s what the happy, smiling cow tells me to do from the delicious fast food place at our local mall. It’s hard to argue with, either, since the chicken really is ridiculously good that they serve there. I admit I’ve had my fair share of it, and probably part of your fair share too. <smile!> I can’t eat it all the time else it would be unhealthy but it’s hard to remember that when you’re enjoying it.

It’s just a redirection, though. While I do like chicken, sometimes my taste buds consider a nice hamburger just the thing and then I suppose you might see chickens carrying around signs saying “eat more beef!” In any case, I remember when my son Dave first grasped that these large, slow moving smelly animals were where hamburger came from. He didn’t go through that “I won’t eat Bambi!” phase, instead he just said pile it on Dad. Lest he gets too big a head when he reads that, I would point out that he was terrified of skeletons, even his own, and when we told him that his teeth were part of his skeleton he was, for a time, afraid of mirrors and wanted to know if we could get the skeleton out of him so it would go away. Ah, children!

There are all those “ah ha!” times in life we cherish. Learning to count in hex and octal was such a time for me. I used to enjoy teaching the high school class here at church because so many of the kids had those moments when a particular scripture made a connection and they saw something in the bible much clearer all of a sudden. I still have those moments myself but they are fewer and farther in between. Not because I know so much, more likely because I just don’t get it.

You would think that any time God spoke directly to someone it was a “ah ha!” moment, that they would get it. Abraham certainly had one when he was about to offer his son and God stopped him. What about David, when the prophet declared “You are the man!” The thing is, these moments seem to come not by someone else’s intervention but by a gradual learning on our part. Moses didn’t seem to get that God would protect him from Pharaoh and seems to argue with God about it. The fact that God was with them certainly didn’t crystallize in the head of the people of Israel as time and again they strayed away from the law. Baalam had his donkey talk directly to him and he still stubbornly complained and argued with it rather than grasp something on a grand scale was going on. The apostles were shown demonstrations of Jesus’ power repeatedly but were still thinking carnal rather than heavenly until the Spirit came up on them.

Usually though life is self-adjusting and we “get it” one way or another. You tell a child to not touch a stove but eventually they sneak a touch and experience that pain. They don’t know WHY it hurts only that it does. Down the road they learn about fire and heat and conduction but by then it’s no mystery. The “ah ha!” moment becomes a mundane “yeah yeah” because they are way beyond it. Yet, ask them to explain what’s going on without simply describing the attributes (light, heat, smoke). That’s where the “ah ha!” moment comes in, because that’s where they actually come to an understanding and can apply it to other things (oh, that’s why light bulbs work, etc)

I mean, we know to “do good.” We get told that all our lives (some of us are told it more often than others, for some reason…!) and we learn that if we conform to that we have less trouble, more benefits, and so on. We self-adjust. Yet people try to confuse us, to misdirect us. They say that what’s bad for you may not really be bad, it’s all in the situation. When a child lies it’s cute, when a poor man steals from the rich it’s OK. But when we read our bibles, we have that “ah ha!” moment! We finally understand what it means to be bad, what it means to be good, and what it means for us in the heavenly scheme of things.

The devil is quick to tell us that God is wrong, and has done so from the beginning. He wants to offer us the delights of this world, and will give us more than our fair share of it if we’d just, well, Eat mor chickin! But once we look beyond his form of advertising and see what we’re actually consuming and what it’s doing to us, when we have that “ah ha!” I-get-it moment, chances are we’ll go with something a little healthier.

Randy