Thank you God for a bad potato

I was eating lunch today which included potatoes. The casserole was wonderful, made up of some of my favorite vegetables. The last potato slightly caught my attention as it was mostly black, but being the eating machine that I am, I had it in my mouth and down my gullet before I could finish processing the aesthetics of the thing. Sure enough it was a tad on the rotten side.

We have eight people in my family, most of us hungry a lot of the time, so once in a while something gets through that normally wouldn't if it was just me cooking for myself. So I can't complain. But I started to think about it. At first my thought was to mention it to my wife but then thought better of it. She didn't do it on purpose and she would be mortified to find out it had made it into the pot. Mentioning it would only make her feel bad.

Then another thought came into my head. Who am I to complain about it at all? There are people all over the world living daily on rotten food or no food. Let me rephrase that: there are people all over the world dying on rotten food or from a lack of it. Who am I to think I deserve any better than they?

I have, on occasion, abstained from eating food in order to identify with my brothers and sisters around the world who don't even have the luxury of the choice of whether to fast or not. But I have never purposefully eaten an austere meal or committed to a similar diet for the sake of the starving. Is the idea a bit over the top?

As Christians living in America we think we are owed something. We grow lazy and fat on our diet of complacency and spiritual indolence while the rest of the world can't even dream about the amount of food we consume in a day (how can one dream about a thing he has never seen or heard of?).

Maybe you've told yourself fasting is too hard. What about eating less food or less variety? Spend a week simply eating rice and vegetables, or oatmeal, or something along those lines. About the fourth day of oatmeal, while you are gagging on every spoonful, you can be reminded to pray for those who would kill for that very spoonful of food.

All that from a rotten potato.