This morning Pastor Joe Snider preached on John 6, the passage I was meditating on in my last post. As he was talking about the difficult statement of Jesus (and he pointed out that Jesus makes lots of hard, sweeping statements) that we must eat His body and drink His blood, Pastor Joe shared this story from his own life. I hope he won’t mind my repeating it here.
As new parents of an infant daughter, living far from their extended family, Joe and Sally were alarmed to find that their five-month-old had turned orange. Not the sickly yellow cast of jaundice, but pumpkin orange. They rushed her to a “crusty old pediatrician” who seemed to enjoy diagnosis by Socratic method. “What do you think is wrong with her?” the doctor asked. “What do you think we should do about it?” “Well, we were favoring the ‘total freak-out’ approach, Doc,” Joe quipped, to much congregational laughter.
Finally the doctor asked the obvious question: “What has she been eating lately?” Sally explained that she’d recently begun to eat solid food, but that she didn’t seem to like anything except strained carrots. Bingo. The old man sighed and rolled his eyes. “You are what you eat, you know!”
And without a missing a beat, Pastor Joe looked at us. “And we’re supposed to eat His body and drink His blood.” Silence–the good kind–descended on the sanctuary as truth took hold. Ah, yes. Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). Come to Him, believe in Him. Digest His words. Become more like Him. And live forever.
This is not only good preaching, it is an example of the value of parables from our own lives. What parables from your life could you share in such a way that a God-truth becomes clearer to those you tell? Which of your stories might be “borrowed” and told to others because they contain such power? Go and tell someone a story… maybe even this one.
And say “thanks for sharing” to Pastor Joe.
Winnowing...sorting the wheat and chaff of my thoughts 