Home-baked Goodness

My wife and I have been working for the last few years trying to get our family eating healthy food. This is not an easy task. As most people find out, if you want to eat good, you have to pay more money for it.

Approaching the holidays brings this out like no other time. We have a cooking magazine with an article that my wife left out. It starts out with the line, "Take a can of pie filling…" Immediately, I began thinking, What would we use in place of that? The next thought hit me square between the eyes. It might have something to do with apples and sugar. What a revelation! The real reason why there is a can of the apple pie filling in the first place is because no one has the time to make it on their own. We live in a world that is too busy to make apple pies from scratch. They add all these chemicals and extra preservatives to make sure that the food doesn't spoil while it sits on a shelf at the store. If I were to present two pies to a person and tell them that one of them was completely homemade and the other was bought from store, which do you think he would choose? Quite obviously, he would pick the homemade one, with all the imperfections and irregularities found in home cooking. The world wants good food; it just doesn't know where to get it. And so it accepts secondhand, store-bought imitation versions of the real thing, filled with chemicals and things they know to have no nutritious value, if it's not harmful.

Christians, especially homeschooling Christians, are susceptible to the belief that they are inferior because they are not polished, store-bought perfect. They fail to realize that what the world really wants is truth, with all of its little bumps and ridges. There's a reason they call Hollywood "Tinseltown." All that glitters truly is not gold. No matter how many chemicals, face lifts and botox, they can't replace the truth that God has created, just like you can't replace home-baked bread with a snack cake. He made us hunger for what is truly good. We crave sustenance and substance over sweet and saccharine.

To the homeschooling moms, I say that you are the fresh-baked bread of the world. You give life and hope to those who need it: your children. It is better that you raise one child with such goodness than for you to raise 50 children with the wisdom of the world. Have patience. Your work will be rewarded.