Flexibility is a mark of a mature, thinking, intellegent missionary. Since I am known for few of those things, most people like me or hate me because of my honesty and general transparency. But on this night, flexibility ruled fortunately, not my honesty. When dinner is served at 11:35 pm, I am generally beyond hungry, I have gone postal and am considered dangerous. Especially when breakfast was 13 hours earlier and it had been a very very long day of stressful activities.
Now here I sat in a room with 200 other people praying, hoping, wishing that dinner would be served before I did some kind of chick thing and passed out on the floor. That would have been too embarrassing for words. I am so, not a chick. Not only was dinner being served as late as possible, but also this was a no dancing, no drinking party so it had few interesting things occurring to amuse me so that I would not think about being so hungry.
Now mind you I am fat. I don’t need to eat, but I certainly enjoying eating good food on a very regular basis. Not tonight my friends. We are sitting around tables with people that we like, but who are bored and as hungry as we are and this is not a happy scene. I have a killer headache coming on because of low blood sugar or some thingy like that, for sure. Plus I am going through second-hand smoke withdrawal, because so few people were smoking practitioners at this particular party.
Finally the food came at 11:30ish and the quiet in the room was almost ghoulish as everyone stuffed the faces as fast as possible.
I discovered once again that, to be spiritual is really difficult when your stomach is roaring and rumbling. The application of that is that I can’t expect most of the people in the world to hear the Gospel of Christ, until I put something in their bellies. "Poor nutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide - a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death." Jean-Louis Sarbib, 2006
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