Welcome to the kitchen….what many regard as the most important space in the house. It’s a place where you prepare and eat food, where you sit round the table and ‘fellowship’ (share) together. The posh visitors get shown to the living room – the home guests come into the kitchen.
In this space we are going to look at two integrated areas of life – which all of us need. Food for the body and food for the soul. We spend a great deal of our time and money eating and preparing food. It is important for us to think about what we eat, where it is sourced and how it is prepared. Will we provide recipes? Examine diets? Ask questions about the latest food fads? Sure! Send in your comments and questions and we will do our best to source the most stimulating and edible answers.
But humanity does not live by bread alone – or fast food or fancy food. We need rest, cleanliness, entertainment, exercise – all of which you will find in the other rooms in this house. We also need companionship and spiritual food. Jesus said that “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:4). What does that mean?
In a negative sense it can be expressed in this way. You can live for several weeks without food, several days without water and several minutes without air. But you cannot live for one second without hope.
In the positive sense we can show that there is hope. Which is why in this kitchen we not only have an open table, but an open bible. If you would like to ‘taste and see that God is good’…then this is the space for you. Here you can sign up for online bible studies which enable you to study, question and above all be fed the bread of life.
For now – let me leave you with this great quote from CS Lewis:
“The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.
If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.”
(Mere Christianity).
Welcome to our table….!
David ….
