Spiritual Health Food

We all know that eating fruits and vegetables are good for us. Those leafy greens give us energy and those juicy plump grapes make us strong and healthy.

I once went to this health seminar a friend invited me to, and the woman speaking (I can't remember her name, or I would quote her) said one of the most interesting things about eating fruits and vegetables I'd ever heard. Now, I'm not a nutritionist, nor would I ever claim to be an expert on eating nutritiously, but what she said made sense.

She said that the reason we should eat vegetables is that they help protect us. The tomato, for example, sits out in the sun all day, yet it doesn't wither and burn. It takes the sun's energy, and instead of drying up, turns it into food in order to grow and ripen into something delicious.

So, her logic, and I'm sure she probably had some sort of science behind it, was that if we eat fruits and vegetables, we take on those characteristics. Her conclusion was that if we eat properly, we would be be able to better fight off the ill effects of our environment, i.e. being less susceptible to sunburn if we eat more tomatoes. For a fair-skinned blond who wears SPF 85 on a regular basis, this got my attention.

All I could think of was..."Interesting."

While, it didn't make me change my eating habits, I saw some spiritual truths there. In John 15:5 it says, "I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him it is he who bears much fruit much for apart from me nothing you can do."

While we can delve very deeply into why God compares Christian living to fruit, the most obvious is the more we partake of His goodness, the more we will be like Him. As we abide in Christ, the more we are able to show His love, fight off temptation and crave knowing Him more.

So, Lord, let me partake of You today, and bear your goodness.