Almost twenty-five years ago I was waiting on customers at Black’s Furniture in Xenia, Ohio. A woman came in with a zip-lock bag and handed it to me. “Try these,” she said. I did.
“They are snow crop peas. I grew them myself in my garden. Whada’ ya’ think.”
I said, “You eat them with the pod and all?”
“O, yes. They are delicious. Try another.”
They were cold and crisp and sweet.
“Thank you,” I said, thinking she meant to give me the peas.
She snatched the bag back and said, “You can’t have them all. They are my lunch.”
She walked out with her peas and I did not taste another snow pea anything like that for over twenty-five years. I thought of them often but never mad the effort to figure out how to get them.
A couple weeks ago a friend asked me to lunch to a new stir-fry place here in town. On the vegetable island, you guessed it, there were delicious snow peas, a huge pan of them. I had a big bowl full of them and went back for more. (After all I am making up for over two decades of snow pea depravation). I have been kicking myself for not figuring out earlier how to get this delicious vegetable into my diet. I’m going to have more again soon.
With that on my mind, this is the prayer that is in my heart this morning:
Father in Heaven, this morning I pray that you will give me a hearty spiritual appetite. I ask that you would cause me to have a hunger for things that are good and good for me. Make me spiritually healthy so that I am strong to serve. Help me never to be satisfied with the “junk food” of the world which is little more than poison to my soul. Thank you for all the good things you have created. Make me hungry for them. Amen.
Ken Pierpont
Riverfront Character Inn
Flint, Michigan
May 16, 2005