Bread and Water at the Christmas Party

The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. – Amos 8:11 (NRSV) 

When he was a kid, he loved to go to the neighbor’s annual Christmas party. The adults decorated every surface and served one another heaping plates of meat and cheese, dangerously spiked eggnog and, best of all, homemade Christmas fudge. 

Every year it was the same. He would eat one piece of fudge after another. By the third or fourth, he was full. By the fifth or sixth, he was a little queasy from an overload of cocoa and sugar and whatever else goes into fudge. Every year, he would find his way to the deserted kitchen, dig a piece of bread out from its place near the toaster and eat it slowly, with a glass of water to wash it down.  

“Here’s the thing,” he says now. “I looked forward to that fudge every year. And every year I overdid it and the only thing that helped me recover was bread and water. One year, my neighbor caught me in the kitchen and wondered what I was doing in there all by myself.  

“That’s when I realized it. I was eating all that fudge so I’d have an excuse to go off to a quiet room to eat something ordinary. It took a while, but eventually it came to me that maybe I didn’t need an excuse. Maybe I could go right for the simple stuff without making myself sick on the rich stuff in the first place.” 

Prayer
God of simple pleasures, in the season of too-muchness, lead us to Your bread and water. Amen.

About the Author
Rev. Jennifer Garrison (formerly Brownell) is a writer, spiritual director and pastor living in the Pacific Northwest. Her published work most recently appeared in the book The Words of Her Mouth: Psalms for the Struggle, available from The Pilgrim Press.