Food Poisoning, Part II

Thankfully, I am now recovered fully from the bout of food poisoning that I blogged about last week. I am not going to belabor this topic too much, but I feel there is one more side-note to this sorry saga. I knew pretty much immediately that I had eaten something that did not agree with me. I had a soup and salad and it was likely the soup that got me but the salad was the second thing I ate and even now, the thought of a Waldorf Salad skives me out. When I had food poisoning once before, we suspect it was a sandwich from Panera but it was cupcakes that skived me out then because it was the last thing I ate before all rumblings broke loose (you know what I mean).

Sometimes root issues manifest themselves to the second one in line. I may have a particularly bad day and I take it out on those closest to me. They are not the cause; they are simply the burden carrier. We know we can be transparent with them and sometimes they take the fall because they are just there in the aftermath. I know there are many times where I take my own baggage onto Deb (today is her birthday by the way) even though she is far from being the cause of my own frustration. My Waldorf salad was an innocent bystander of my contamination. A by-product of relationships is this diffusion of the stain of sin. I could be having the roughest of times but I know I have relationships that just seem to ease the problems.

Deb and I watched the movie "Fences" last night and Rose (Viola Davis) is a perfect example of this type of relationship.  Troy, (Denzel Washington) to whom she is married to is often despicable. He is always having bad days as he bemoans what he could have been and time and time again. Yet she is there for him even as he remains a despicable character. God has wired us for relationship even knowing we bear burdens of others.

Thank You Food Poisoning

I have been trying to lose weight. Last year, I put on six pounds that had never been there before after 10 years of being around the same weight range. Then the six pounds became ten pounds. Yikes! What happened? Age happened. I can't keep doing the same things I had been doing and expecting the same result. I have a particular affinity for sweets and lately latching onto Oreo cookies.

Last weekend we had dinner with some deer friends of ours at a nice, reputable restaurant. I ordered the seafood gumbo and a salad. After I ate the zippy, seafood gumbo, I did not feel quite right. I gutted it out so to speak. For the next five days, I extracted (my nice way of saying it) all of the stuff in my system. My weight chart (via Fitbit) shows the result. I dropped half of my excess weight and thus far I have kept it off.

It got me thinking about life. We can play around in the sandbox of life and if we draw close to God, He will put things into our life that rightsize us to him. Kind of like God introduces a little seafood gumbo and food poisoning into our life to get us back on track. God does not introduce temptation because that is for our bad, but He introduces trials for our good to get us back on track. James says that this is a welcome event and "we are to consider it joy when God puts us through trials". Why? It is "because the testing of our faith produces endurance" (James 1:3).

We have a number of friends going through various trials right now. My little food poisoning example is not to make light of the fact that trials are a burden. God says He will never allow any trial to be beyond what we can handle. The television preachers say that life is smooth and God wants us to be happy.  Wrong! God wants us to be holy. Holiness does not necessarily mean happiness - it means joyfulness and they are two different things and maybe the subject of a future blog.

I am hoping that my little bout with the gumbo will help level-set some new habits as half of my excess weight is now gone. Can I now take that as an opportunity to grow in my habits?