Broken Bread

Tilly Dillehay

Description

God Cares More About How You Eat than What You Eat Christians should have their heads on straight about foodbut too often our eating is complicated by burdens and rules, by diets and dependencies. So how can we keep a spiritually healthy view of what we eat? Should Christians stop eating white sugar? Does the Bible ask us to go paleo? Most questions about food aren't really about nutrition but about how we understand God. In Broken Bread, Christian Book Awardwinner Tilly Dillehay challenges us to abandon the concept of good and bad foods and instead offers a way to celebrate food without obsessionmake healthy choices without bondage to rulesfeed our families without feeling frazzledfind satisfaction without using food as an emotional crutch This isn't another diet book. You won't find any system or plan for eating but rather a joyful call to develop a vision of Christ that informs the way you eat. Take delight in food again, and discover a feast for today that whispers of the eternal feast to come.

Informations

• Publié par: Harvest House Publishers
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780736980142
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT BROKEN BREAD
It s easy to spot our cultural obsession with food. We have TV shows featuring cooking competitions, documentaries explaining the hidden dangers in our food, and bookstores packed with every type of cookbook situated alongside the latest and greatest lifestyle diet books. In her new book, Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger , Tilly Dillehay considers how our various sin struggles with food-from gluttony to snobbery-can overflow in guilt, judgement, anxiety, or pride as we contemplate a simple question: What s for dinner? She writes with conviction and compassion as she directs our eyes to a better and more-needed spiritual feast-one truly able to satisfy and sustain our daily lives.
Melissa Kruger, TGC Director of Women s Initiatives and author of Growing Together
This is a book Christian women need--at least the ones who eat food. Tilly helps us see that food idolatry comes in more than one form. She carefully helps us diagnose our sin problem regarding food, and she then points us to food s rightful place and purpose in our lives. Read this book if you want to have peace with God and peace with what you eat.
Abigail Dodds, author of (A)Typical Woman and contributor at Desiring God
Broken Bread is an intelligent and biblical discussion of food issues. It s a massive table covered with dishes of wisdom right out of the oven, which are enhanced with the brown gravy of good sense and set out before an emaciated people who have been suffering through a famine.
Douglas Wilson, pastor of Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho
HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS
EUGENE, OREGON
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version ), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Verses marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Cover design by Studio Gearbox
Cover photo jamesteohart, Nor Gal / Shutterstock; Yaroslav Danylchenko / Stocksy
Interior design by Angie Renich / Wildwood Digital Publishing
Broken Bread
Copyright 2020 by Tilly Dillehay
Published by Harvest House Publishers
Eugene, Oregon 97408
www.harvesthousepublishers.com
ISBN 978-0-7369-8013-5 (pbk)
ISBN 978-0-7369-8014-2 (eBook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
All rights reserved . No part of this electronic publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The authorized purchaser has been granted a nontransferable, nonexclusive, and noncommercial right to access and view this electronic publication, and purchaser agrees to do so only in accordance with the terms of use under which it was purchased or transmitted. Participation in or encouragement of piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of author s and publisher s rights is strictly prohibited.
CONTENTS
What Others Are Saying About Broken Bread
Dedication
Introduction: The Four Food Poles
Part 1: Four Poles
1. Food Is Fuel: Asceticism at the Table
2. Sometimes I Eat the Whole Pint: Gluttony at the Table
3. You Aren t Eating Maca Root?: Snobbery at the Table
4. Coq Au Vin Chicken Nuggets: Apathy at the Table
Part 2: Feasting for Eternity
5. Hospitality: Love in the Pot
6. Learning to Cook: The Joy of Doing Something Poorly
7. The Mirror: Food and Body Image
8. Wine O Clock: Alcohol and the Christian Woman
9. Awakening Appetite: Fasting as a Spiritual Practice
10. Will Travel, Have Food: International Cuisine and Heaven
11. Taste and See: The Lord s Table
Epilogue: The Lady Tower
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
More from Tilly Dillehay
About the Publisher
DEDICATION
For Justin first of all, and Norah, Agnes, and Henry next of all.
It s a privilege to cook for you and eat with you.
INTRODUCTION
The Four Food Poles
The woman in front of me turned back to hand me a Styrofoam plate she d just pried loose from the stack. It was a small gesture of hospitality, one that would become familiar to me over the years to come. I took it and awkwardly moved down the row, feeling that all eyes were on me as I plopped a wedge of meatloaf, a piece of homemade bread, and a small pile of salad on my plate.
All eyes were most emphatically not on me, but as the Proverb goes, the wicked flee when no one pursues. I had lived in the shadows for so long, I couldn t even navigate a church potluck without flinching. As I slid into a white plastic chair in front of a white plastic table next to the one girl I knew, I felt myself stiffening, preparing for the difficulty of friendly conversation.
They all knew what I was, I felt certain of that. They knew I was a refugee from the city, a problem case for the pastor/biblical counselor. They knew that I was recalcitrant, raised in a Christian family, a self-described agnostic. But they didn t necessarily know how hungry I was-hungry in my very bones-to see what an ordinary Christian community might look like in a small town where the coolness factor was low. After a few years of being spiritually on the run, moving among unbelievers who served themselves openly while looking for salvation among the leaves of marijuana and between the sheets of friends, I was ready to be reminded of how ordinary Christians lived.
The people at the church potluck didn t know whose bed I had just tumbled out of a few days earlier; they didn t know that I was caught in a cycle of overeating and throwing up food. They didn t know that the shame of food and the shame of sexuality felt somehow intertwined for me-both were things to enjoy in secret, with consequences that humbled you in public. They only knew that I had a lost look on my face, that it was lunchtime and I needed a plate, that I was from out of town and needed a friendly conversation.
They also didn t know about the condescension I carried into the potluck. I assumed that these people, with their meat-and-three sensibilities, would be impressed by the refinement I brought from Nashville. It was satisfying to my limping ego to feel that, at least here, I wasn t a small fish in a big pond. I wrote about it in my journal that night, funny stories about the 72-year-old man in the blue polyester suit, comments about the quaint hymns being sung, observations about the young people in the church who seemed so unaware of the wild doings of the world outside.
But I was converted that week, sitting under that biblical counseling and hearing the gospel with ears that God had prepared for 22 years. Twenty-two years. For 22 years of sitting under good expositional preaching with parents who loved me and taught me. The ground had been prepared and seeds dropped in constantly, and yet it was in this tiny town with a church potluck every single Sunday, living as a guest in the home of ordinary believers, that God chose to whisper life into the seed and call it up from the ground.
Food continued to linger in the background of the rocky early years after my conversion. The bulimia kept stealing my time and attention. Food and cooking seemed emblematic of my ineptitude in every area of life. My condescension melted as I realized that in the small country church were cultured people-well-read, well-traveled, capable of bringing much more than a meat-and-three to the church potluck. Among them, I felt like a clumsy child trying to pretend I was a Christian adult. Hospitality was the great blessing that allowed me to move to the small town permanently-living first with one family, then with another while I got my sea legs. I grew, got a job I loved, married, started having children, and as life stages gave way to other life stages, I learned to cook. I began practicing hospitality.
My husband became a pastor in the same church, and food still lingered in my life, only this time it was behind the ministry work we were doing. It began to represent something besides shame and social clout to me. I began to experience food as something else: a good gift from God and a tool in my hand. It became a means of grace.
But the complications of food still intruded themselves on my own life at times. I still spent time in the ditches of gluttony, snobbery, apathy, and asceticism. And friends of mine often talked about the ways food complicated their lives. I watched friends become allergic to gluten, only to become unallergic a few years later. One young mother posted online about the struggles of dieting without becoming obsessed, and I was amazed by the well-meaning comments from other Christians: Think of food as just fuel for life, You are what you eat! and I just think of food in two categories-poison and medicine. A lady at church told me of her hurt feelings when her daughter-in-law came for dinner the first and only time and was unable to eat the meal served because she was doing keto.
I started to root around for books that celebrated eating as a gift from God and explored these sticky topics of taking care of our bodies without being driven around by the winds of diet culture. I found precious little. The flavors I d experienced at the church potluck-the gospel flavors of hospitable love, simplicity, and patient fellowship with people from many different culinary backgrounds-were not easy to find in the Christian bookstore. Some of the most straightforward commands in Scripture about food were often unexamined in the literature, passed over in favor of repeated examinations of 1 Corinthians 6:19 ( Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? ).
It felt to me like the zeitgeist of twenty-first century American culture, with its unique food anxiet