Wow. Two years since my last post? Let the self-shaming begin. Seriously. That's just ridiculous. I would offer up a million excuses, and some of them might actually be valid, but I suppose it doesn't matter. What DOES matter is that I'm writing tonight. So. Self-shaming is over. That was unusually quick.
Why tonight? Well, why not? Yes, I have papers to grade and quite a bit of house straightening (read: long-overdue deep and thorough cleaning) to do and people to start moving toward bed, what with losing an hour of sleep tonight and all. And there's some preparation for worship tomorrow that we have yet to do. But I took a long nap this afternoon, so I am JUICED. Sounds like a perfect time to break a two-year no-blogging streak to me. Besides, I was just telling my friend earlier this week that I'd like to get back into my blog by writing about my experience with Jen Hatmaker's book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess.
Sidebar: If you're reading this because you're one of the people choosing all those lucky folks to be part of Jen Hatmaker's new book launch team and you're rolling your eyes because it can't possibly be a coincidence that I'm suddenly posting on my long-neglected blog exactly 22 minutes after I submitted my application for the team, which includes a link to this blog . . . well, I know how this looks. But I really WAS talking with my friend earlier this week about blogging about this, and we really ARE doing 7 in our group. For real.
Actually, I don't think reading the book has made me more awesome, nor will participating in the experiment itself. It might, however, give me perspective I know I need, and I'm genuinely asking God to speak to me through it, and to make me ready to hear what He has to say.
So the first "fast" is food. I won't rehash the entire contents of the book here, because it would take forever and would probably break some kind of copyright laws. In a nutshell, JH chose seven foods and ate those and only those for an entire month. Let that sink in, people. As you can imagine, since she did still have to live her life, they had to be healthy foods. No room for the fluff of cookies or French toast or tortilla chips or even seasoning. I would mention that she didn't have room for coffee, either, but then I'd be forced to observe a moment of silence for that dark time in her life, and I don't have time for that tonight, due to the aforementioned list of other responsibilities I am shirking at this moment. Sorry, Jen.
One portion I'd like to highlight, however, is an interaction she had with her three kids during that month. They weren't participating in that particular fast, and one night she prepared a dinner for them that included frozen fish fillets. Sounds like a familiar scene from the Byrd household. I should also mention that as she wrote this book, she and her husband were in the process of adopting two children from Ethiopia, where 46% of the population are undernourished. To make a long story short, when she returned to the kitchen from doing a quick chore upstairs, she found that her kids had "finished" their dinner. Upon further investigation she discovered they had thrown away most of the fish because of a troubling lack of ketchup. Here's what she wrote:
"How can we extract our children from this filthy engine where indulgence and ignorance and ungratefulness and waste are standard protocol? Where they know they can throw perfectly good food away because there is always more in the pantry?
"I wept for all my children tonight, my Ethiopian children orphaned by disease or hunger or poverty who will go to bed with no mother tonight and my biological children who will battle American complacency and overindulgence for the rest of their lives.
"I don't know who I feel worse for."
I can't tell you how much this resonated with me. Not because I think my kids or hers are horrible, insensitive, ungrateful human beings, because they're not. But because they've had the good fortune of being raised in a home that is more than adequately resourced, none of them (the biological ones) truly understand what it means to go without, to be hungry, to suffer at the hands of poverty.
In fact, neither do I. And maybe that's where the problem begins.
I realize that no two-week or one-month fast is going to actually give me the perspective of those who live in poverty, in Ethiopia or China or right here in the good ol' USofA. It would be disrespectful to them to think it would. I don't want to create a situation for myself in which I try to feel like I'm destitute, any more than JH did when she wrote the book. I want to create a situation for myself through which I can better understand how blessed I am and one that perhaps God can use to open my eyes to things my family and I take for granted. There's nothing wrong with having plenty of food options to choose from, but there's a lot wrong with not knowing how freaking awesome that is. In the same way that I will probably never know what it's like to live in poverty, most of the population of the world will never know what it's like to live with as much as I have.
So my version of the 7 food fast will be a little different. Instead of limiting myself to only seven foods for the next two weeks, I am limiting myself to whatever food I already have in my house, with a few exceptions. I will allow myself to eat basics that might be replenished each week, like bread, eggs, milk, and fresh fruits and vegetables, because these are healthy, and they're things I would buy regularly even if I was living tiny paycheck to tiny paycheck and didn't have the luxury of spending money on Cheezits. Other than those few things, though, I will eat canned or frozen whatever and try to get creative with random seasoning packets and instant grits and things in my freezer I can no longer identify. Because there are plenty of people who have no other choice but to eat what they have right now. I will do this for however long it takes to pretty much empty my ginormous walk-in pantry and both refrigerators and freezers.
Here's hoping I'm able to hear what God wants to say to me, and that His voice isn't drowned out by all the cursing I hear in my head when one of my children says, "There's nothing to EAT in this house!" Even though they have elected not to participate. So they'll still get their Cheezits.
P.S. I'm not emotionally ready to discuss or even consider where coffee fits into all this. Fortunately, I already have a giant bag of coffee beans, so there's no chance of that running out anytime soon. But half 'n' half . . . that's another story. I may have to resort to 1% milk. I think my heart just broke a little.
