So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.
1 Corinthians 10:31 (NET)
Glory in the Eating
At nine in the evening the shop still smells like sawdust and hot glue. Two of them are building a staircase that has to look like cut stone from twenty feet away and weigh little enough for four people to carry off in the dark. Neither of them will see the show. They’ll be on another build in another town by the time the lights come up on this one. One of them eats a sandwich standing at the bench with the wrapper still around the bottom half, and the other drinks coffee out of the lid of a thermos older than the shop.
Something at the table in Corinth is getting Paul denounced. Paul asks why he should be denounced over something he thanks God for, and he settles it by giving eating and drinking the same purpose as everything else a person does: the glory of God. He wants no one tripped up along the way either, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God.
Eating happens several times a day, while a man is thinking about something else, in the clothes he put on for other reasons. God takes glory from that. Paul takes his own food with thankfulness, and the thankfulness is what he does differently at the table.
The man with the sandwich isn’t going to think about God while he eats it. Paul’s sentence covers the sandwich anyway, and it covers the four minutes he spends on it, and it doesn’t wait for him to feel holier about those four minutes than he does.
At half past nine the one with the sandwich has a bus to catch and goes. The other carries the thermos lid out to the open bay door where the air is cooler, drinks what’s left of it standing up, and doesn’t touch the stair again until the glue has taken.
A Prayer to Remember
Take the ordinary half of today, God, the part I’d never think to offer you. I eat and answer messages for whole hours without once turning toward you, and I’d like those hours to be yours anyway. Make them yours before I’ve noticed they started.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
