Savoring What We Love
(Enjoying God and all He has given to us can be difficult to understand and abstract at times. That’s why I’ve asked a few friends to share how they have enjoyed various aspects of the Christian life, seasons, and disciplines. I pray you are encouraged by this series of guest posts.)
By Karen Prior Swallow
Two of the great loves of my life are reading and eating.
Both bring me much happiness, and while only one is absolutely necessary to live, they both seem as natural and as essential to me as breathing.
Yet, although sources of great pleasure, both eating and reading require discipline in order to bring me the longest lasting health and joy.
Some of the best, purest food that I’ve enjoyed in my life was in the North African kingdom of Morocco. There is no such label as “organic” in Morocco because, as an unindustrialized nation, all of its food is produced free of artificial processes or chemical additives. All of it is natural, and you can taste that fact in every bite. From flaky pastille to velvety couscous to goat roasted over an open fire in the Sahara Desert to simply sumptuous fruit, the food I dined on during my several trips there still lingers in the memory of my taste buds. I never even missed the junk food that wasn’t widely available.
Here at home in the U.S. it’s a different story. To be sure, plenty of healthful and natural foods are fairly easy to find. But so is all the junk. And on a day-to-day basis, it’s just too easy to choose the fast, ready and artificially made foods, which I also enjoy, but which end up bringing me far less joy in the entirety of my life than their healthier counterparts (as the roll around my middle can testify!).
I face similar difficulties of late when it comes to reading. When I was young, which was, I suppose, before the internet had even been imagined, I had plenty of reading material at my disposal. Falling in love with reading in my earliest years, I graduated from Little Golden Books, to Scholastic Book Club selections, to daily newspapers (which I still read), to eighteenth and nineteenth century British literature—all paper and ink items I could hold in my hand and immerse myself in for hours and days at a time.
Today, the world still offers these options—and so much more. The internet provides a supply of reading as infinite as the stars in the sky and the sands on the shore. Much of that reading is short, easy, and cleverly curated by sophisticated algorithms so as to cater to my very present and very precise tastes, as scientifically determined by my most recent browsing history. And if I don’t like what I’m reading, no longer must I get up out of my chair, walk to the bookshelf in another room, look for another title, walk all the way back to my chair, and settle in again. No, on my phone, with the flick of one finger, I can swipe, click, or press, and—voila!— I’m presented with a new and vast array of choices. No need to hold a pen in one hand and pause my reading to underline and make a note on the page. Now my eyes skim across the screen of my phone, taking in every third word or so in a millisecond, skipping paragraphs to get to the conclusion at the end. Loathe to skip a page in a book, I triumph over those ethereal electronic words that slide across my screen, feeding and deepening my addiction the way a Diet Coke only increases my hunger for sweets.
I have become far too easily pleased: by the tweets and blogs I read on my phone, by the sandwiches I eat in my car between meetings and classes, and by the gummi bears that so easily replace a meal. These all are, to be sure, good gifts I’m thankful for and would never want to give up entirely.
But I find myself thinking more and more about the differences between those things that bring me ceaseless and instantaneous pleasure and those that bring me deep and lasting joy. The greatest joys usually come only with discipline and sacrifice, focus and attention, intention and investment and love. Such joys are to be savored. Savoring takes the devotion of time and care, things not easy for most of us to give in this world of hurry. It’s too easy to equate efficiency with goodness, to mistake ease with joy.
Food and words are my great loves. Yet even as I try to love them more faithfully and well, I need to let my love of them remind me of my first love (Rev. 2:4). I need to remember that there is no word that can bring me more joy than the Word (John 1:1), no food more satisfying than the Bread of Life (John 6:35).
As I try to slow down more to savor His good gifts (James 1:17), may I slow ever more to enjoy Him.
More about Karen: Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is an award-winning Professor of English at Liberty University. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012) and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014). She is a Research Fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a Senior Fellow with Liberty University’s Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States.
(Learn more about Trillia’s new book Enjoy: Finding the Freedom to Delight Daily in God’s Good Gifts)
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