I really like eating.

The whole experience.  Anticipating that first bite of yummiosity.  The way my mouth waters as I smell the food.  The burst of taste on my tongue.  Delicious, slow chewing.  The swallow.  The sigh.  The occasional discreet belch.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that my Mother-in-Law has cancer.  The tumor is in her throat, and treatment combines chemotherapy with radiation targeted at her neck.  This combination of radiation and chemotherapy have made it increasingly difficult to eat.  For those of you who are unaware—as I, blissfully, was until a month ago—radiation and chemo attack your ability to eat in a nefarious variety of ways.  

For one, your taste buds turn traitor, and start deliberately misleading your brain.  They report “salty” where there is no salt and “metallic” where there should be “cheese.”  Sometimes they go into hiding, so that you taste nothing at all; other times they flame with the heat of a thousand spices.  But don’t try to predict them—there is no guarantee that they will report the same taste the same way twice.

Then your saliva becomes petulant.  It figures that you haven’t really appreciated it all these years—which you haven’t—and decides to teach you a lesson.  It goes into hiding, rendering your mouth so dry that you are unable to chew anything with a moisture content below 80%. When it does come back, it has been to the gym, and now is so thick and strong that you have to wrestle it for every swallow.

Which is kind of a moot point, because your throat is so swollen that swallowing is nearly impossible anyway.

All this leaves you with the need for a nifty contraption called a PEG tube.  This tube allows you to be fed a delightful liquid diet directly into the stomach, thus bypassing the evil that was once your throat.

You get food, but no taste.

You get energy, but no pleasure.

You get sustenance, but no life.

Now, I know where you’re expecting me to go.  You figure I’ll make the connection to Psalm 34:8—“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”  There’s the obvious parallel between radiation and sin, which sears our spirit and renders us unable to taste of God’s goodness.  You can already see how our senses get distorted, and our conscience betrays us, telling us right is wrong and wickedness is righteousness.  You’re totally dialed in to the image of a feeding tube representing spirituality without Christ, providing sustenance of a sort, but denying us the banquet that he offers us.  It’s a powerful metaphor, but I’m not going to go there.

Today, I have a much simpler task for you.

Go eat something.

Something really, amazingly good.

Think of how good it smells, tastes, feels.

Don’t rush…relish.

Don’t scarf…savor.

Make it a moment of Thanksgiving.

Then, do me a favor.  Come back here and write about it.  Tell me what you ate, and how it tasted.  Go on…I’ll be waiting.