Coveting the inferior

When my firstborn was little, before her school days, the only bread I ever fed her contained the following ingredients: sprouted wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt. It was a recipe from the Bible, Ezekiel 4, to be specific. My daughter thought it was fine.

Then she went to kindergarten and came home begging for the kind of bread all the other kids had. Writer Anne Lamott addresses the peer pressure issue in her book on writing, Bird by Bird:

“The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay. Some bag lunches, like some people, were Okay, and some weren’t. There was a code, a right and acceptable way. It was that simple. …

“Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for you sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag that she also made headcheese. And there were only a few things that your parents could put in between the two pieces of bread. Bologna was fine, salami and unaggressive cheese were fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue.

“Grape jelly was best, by far, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry, for instance—”

This morning I find—in the same book of Ezekiel from which my preferred bread recipe comes—that the ancient Israelites had the same peer pressure proclivities that my daughter had. God addresses the matter here:

“What is in your mind shall never happen—the thought, ‘Let us be like the nations, like the tribes of the countries, and worship wood and stone” (Ezekiel 20:32, ESV).

It’s very odd. There is always a tendency to lust after something less than what God has in mind for us. When I was in seventh grade my parents brought me a beautiful leather schoolbag from their trip to Holland. I was mortified. It was not like all the other schoolbags in class, those ratty denim jobs that were de rigueur if you wanted any kind of popularity.

This peer pressure race to the bottom, alternately known in the Bible as “fear of man,” comes in many guises. It may appear as a lust for the music and pastimes of worldly people over the more refined sensibilities that a biblical mindset would choose. At Thanksgiving, it may surface as the dumbing down of conversation and the careful elimination of any mentioning of God, to pander to and fit in with the unbelievers or nonbelievers present at the gathering.

Let us watch our p’s and q’s on Thanksgiving Day and be careful to give God the glory in our speech—even if there is a tacitly understood “code” in the room, like Anne Lamott’s sandwich codes and social regulations.

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