4.07.2009

a spiritual side to peanut butter


Tonight, I hadn't eaten dinner yet, so I mixed myself a drink (milk with Ovaltine, to be exact) and then saw my peanut butter jar from August. I decided that I didn't want to see for myself how long PB can last before dying, so I poured myself a stack of Ritz crackers onto my plate and scooped some peanut butter onto it, for dipping.

It was then, that the Lord struck me upside the head (it seems like He's been doing that more often than usual, lately) and showed me something about Himself. And don't worry, it's not that God is like peanut butter...that would be so cliche as to be unmentionable. Rather, God is like the preservatives in the peanut butter.

Let me explain myself, or try to. (After all, I just compared the Creator to a cream of mashed legumes. What could there possibly be left to explain?) The reason I am eating this peanut butter with my crackers right now, even though I opened the jar almost eight months ago, is because I know that the crunchy goodness has enough preservatives in it to taxidermify an elephant, and thus my immune system's hemogoblins1 won't be overrun by bacteria, mold, or other vile, villainous vermin growing inside the jar.

What's interesting about preservatives is that they seemingly defy the law of entropy. Entropy is (for all you non-science people) simply the concept that the natural tendency of everything is to fall apart into disorder. So why don't the long molecular chains that make up peanut butter dissolve into little clumps of disorganized atoms and then finally into nothing? The short answer (and the only answer I actually am sure about) is that the preservatives have something to do with it, and keep the peanut butter awesome and peanut buttery.

Now, to get to the point at which God comes into play here. Refer to Colossians 1:17 and the surrounding verses for this next part. It says that "in him all things hold together", and here, the guy who wrote it is referring to Christ Jesus. What the Lord told me in that moment was that if it were not for Him, everything in the universe would eventually revert to nothingness. All of creation would be uncreated. That's just the physics of it. Of course, what physical science does not (and cannot) account for is the power of God. He keeps all of His creation intact and beautiful.

That is how I can say that we have a preserving God. He is the One who first *defied* entropy by making something out of nothing. (I write 'defied', but that word doesn't give justice to the fact that God made entropy, and so He doesn't need to be restrained by it.) And even today, at this very second, He still actively strengthens His children and does not allow them to return to the chaos and destruction that we knew before God rescued us.

You might feel like you've just passed through a wood chipper and have fallen in a heap of infinitesimal, dissembled pieces. But take heart, for Christ will not let you stay in that state. When you are at the very bottom of the pit and have exhausted every resource in your frail, meat-hunk of a body, it's time to acknowledge your weaknesses to God and ask Him to preserve you. And He will sustain you with His Spirit, so that in your own weakness, He is shown strong.

That's all, folks.

1 Philip Aasen, on the subject of fictitious microorganisms in the body that "hack and pillage their way through invaders".

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Author's note: I know there's this Rockband 2 song with a heavy rock chorus in which the singer repeats "Disorder" a bunch of times, but for the life of me, I can't remember what the name of the song or the band is.

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