No Sugar Crash {A Less Digital Life…Day 15}

I’d been putting off the week’s trip to the grocery…didn’t want to take the kids, but too tired to go late night. One morning I went to the half-bare pantry and settled on what was left for breakfast…carb-heavy, sugared-up CoCo Wheats. It tastes like childhood, the glory days of processed sugar and high fructose corn syrup, the days before we had a clue that Twinkies were bad for you.

Within an hour, I felt more tired than I did when I woke up. The pillow invited me back to sleep off that sugar crash. But I had kids to take care of, so I muddled through, sighing and shouting out when the sugar got to them too.

All day long, the smart phone is on the kitchen counter waiting on that buzz and chime. And aren’t I eating out of Pavlov’s hand with the way I go for it? The screen glows and so do I to pick up a little morsel of words.

Psychologists say infants need ready response to sense they are known and loved, even to feel they exist. You and me? Seconds after we walk away from the screen, we’re hungry again for something else, cluster feeders crying out to the world, tell me I exist to you.

Always on the buffet sits the story I’ve been taking in all my life, milk to meat. Page corners turn up like wavy noodles. By then, we had been flipping through this anthology during meals for five years, words nourishing my boy from babyhood to school age, us reading straight through from cover to middle. That day on page 943 of 1694, we found ourselves listening in on the strangest of dinner conversations.

There was this hand outstretched like a platter and it held a scroll. Eat what you’re offered. Eat this book. We laughed at the menu choice, but Ezekiel didn’t. He opened his mouth right up and swallowed it down like manna straight from the hand of God. It tasted like raw honey.

I didn’t have to explain it. Elliot dished out the exegesis. Ezekiel had to eat the words so God’s words would be inside him. Then he could say God’s words.

I’d done this before and I needed to do it again if I wanted to give up the sighing and shortness and instead give out words full of grace and truth. I needed to lay my Bible open on the kitchen counter like a cookbook, to check it more than social media, to let the soul feed and feel its worth, to taste and see that the Lord is good…all day long, no sugar crash.

{I’m linking up with Nester for her annual 31 Days blog get together. Don’t want to miss this series? Be sure to subscribe by entering your email in the box on the homepage sidebar. Find all posts in the series here.}

edited from the archives