Pie. I like pie. Don’t you? Doesn’t everyone? I can’t always agree with my father who’s been known to say, “I only like two kinds of pie . . . hot and cold.” I mean, I don’t have much of a taste for pumpkin pie (please don’t throw stones, I just don’t care for it). I do however, like cream pie, fried pie, pie with meringue, fruit pie, cobbler (it’s a kind of pie). I even like pizza pie. But I can’t live on pie.

 

I don’t like vegetables, but I eat them. I don’t care a great deal for oatmeal, but I know that it’s good for me, so I eat it sometimes. Food. It’s our sustenance. We’d like for it to be what we like, but consider this: what if you were forced to nourish yourself on just a morsel or two—and that of something that you found distasteful, like the children here:

Why bring in Oliver? Because I think that too many times we (Americans in general, and American church people in particular) take for granted the food we eat. So little do we think about our food that we don’t understand those who are really in need of it. We intone (like my 5-year-old), “I’m starving,” when it’s only been a few minutes (maybe a couple of hours) since our last meal or snack. Then when we do eat, we pick and prowl through the groceries on our plate, taking only the bits we find tasty and pushing the rest around and we wind up at this fair:

So the question is, how wasteful are we when there are children down the street, around the corner, or across the world who (along with their parents) really are starving—at times even to death? It gives us something to think about the next time we leave half a  plateful claiming that we are saving a spot just on the side of our tummies for that yummy piece of pie.

 

What do you think?