Episode 1: Food Can Be a Missionary

Erin Davis: Hey Bethany, would you consider yourself a foodie?

Bethany Beal: You know, I like food—I love food. I love all sorts of food. But I don’t think I’m a foodie, because I’m not that adventurous. I feel like foodies are adventurous.

I remember this one time specifically. We were at a really nice restaurant, and I was with some friends, and they ordered escargot—you know, a fancy word . . .

Erin: Fancy for snails.

Bethany: Yes! Slimy, gross snails. How have we tricked ourselves? So, everyone was trying it, dipping it in the garlic and butter. They were like, “This is really good!” I remember just looking at the snails (which is what I call them), and I literally was getting a lump in my throat even seeing them. I could not, because I knew I would not be able to control the reaction of my body.

Erin: Yes.

Bethany: I know you are a little bit more well-versed in food. You’re a farm-girl. So, do you consider yourself a foodie?

Erin: I am a foodie. Listen, this is what I want on my tombstone—for real. I want, “She knew her Bible, she loved her people well, and she made the world’s best chocolate chip cookie.” If that is my epitaph, I’m thrilled. I am a foodie. I love food. I think about food. I find food to be the way I want to bless people most often. If you’re hurting, if you’re suffering, you’re going to get a pan of something from me. It’s just the way I show love. But I don’t like escargot, though. I have tried it. So, I don’t know if that disqualifies me.

In my head—this is embarrassing—I have my own food network show.

Bethany: Oh, that’s hilarious!

Erin: I even have a title! Are you ready for this?

Bethany: Yes, yes. Tell us.

Erin: It’s called, Removing the Upper Crust, because good food doesn’t have to be fancy. It’d be a show like the perfect ham sandwich, is where it’s at for me, or perfectly scrambled eggs, or a fluffy buttermilk pancake. I’d choose those over escargot any day of the week.

Bethany: Oh, girl, I’m watching your show. I’m a subscriber!

Welcome to The Deep Well with Erin Davis. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a foodie, whether you’ve tried escargot, or have never heard of it. I think we’re all going to learn more about God through the subject of food. Erin’s in a new season based on her book Fasting and Feasting.

Erin: I’m so glad my friend Bethany Beal is here. She speaks to young women through the ministry Girl Defined. Thanks for cohosting with me, Bethany!

Bethany: I can’t wait to learn more about fasting and feasting with you, Erin.

Erin: I want to start this podcast season with a four-letter word: food. Aren’t there times when a warm croissant or a bright bowl of berries (picked from my own backyard for me) or a steaming cup of coffee, when they just feel like perfect gifts given to us by a God who loves us? But aren’t there other times—and I think for most of us these times are more frequent—when food feels like our enemy, and our relationship with food is a source of regret, of frustration, maybe even deep shame?

Our reality is that we live in a food-obsessed culture. We read food labels, we count calories, we keep lists of our favorite recipes.

I did a little research, because chefs are celebrities in our culture, which I think speaks to this food obsession. Here are some of the top-paid chefs here in America. You know Guy Fieri—you know, from Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives?—his net worth is 25 million dollars, for being a chef! Ina Garton (I love her lemon garlic chicken) is worth 50 million dollars. Then there’s Bobby Flay. I’m surely not the only one who fantasizes of being on that show, Beat Bobby Flay, and beating Bobby Flay. He’s worth 60 million dollars.

So, we talk about food a lot, we think about food a lot, and we eat food a lot. But have you ever stopped to ponder what the Bible says about food? The answer might surprise you, and my hope is that it will delight you. 

This season of the podcast is called “Fasting and Feasting,” and it started with a series of Instagram posts that I wrote several years ago. It was the beginning of a new year, and that’s a natural juncture to evaluate food. The diet and the health industry make sure of it. 

For years, my own relationship with food has felt like a pendulum. I love food. Any of my friends and family will tell you, I am a true foodie—always perfecting recipes, always cooking for people that I love. My favorite spot in my house is my kitchen. I love food! But I also see food as the area where I am most lacking self-control.

So, I posted some of those thoughts on social media, just on a whim. I was overwhelmed with comments of other women who were expressing their own frustration with a relationship with food that I would call volatile at best.

Monica wrote to me and she said,

I have struggled with food and body issues my whole life. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel ashamed of how I looked and even how I ate. I have studied Scriptures, read the good books, preached to myself, prayed, asked others to pray, started this plan and diet and paid money I didn’t have for a new guarantee of success. And yet, here I am, starting over a new year with the same heart resolutions, praying and hoping that this will be the year that the chains fall off in this area.

I was so hit in the heart by that comment. I don’t know Monica, but when she thinks of food, she thinks of deep shame and chains, bondage. Those are her own words for her relationship with food.

Juanita wrote to me, also in response to that series of posts, and she said,

I feel so often that I’m just seeing the negative side of food, rather than thinking of it relationally, spiritually, and healthfully. I would like to be grateful that God created us with nutritional needs.

She’s on to something there.

Anytime I find an exposed nerve among God’s people, something where many of us have an ongoing feeling of frustration or worry or fear, I know what to do: I open my Bible. I know what I want you to do: I want you to open your Bible, not just to a familiar passage or two on the subject, although those are good, and they are inspired, and they’re for our instruction. But here on The Deep Well, we’re learning to know and love our whole Bibles, and to ask the Lord to use His Word to reframe our thinking in holistic ways. 

What I found when I took my own food frustrations to God’s Word is an alternative to the yo-yo of loving food, hating food, loving food, hating food. I found a different rhythm in Scripture; it is the rhythm we’re talking about: the rhythm of fasting and feasting.

What I also found is that Scripture uses food to teach us lots of really important lessons about who God is and who He created us to be and how we’re supposed to operate in this world that He made. Those lessons transform food from something that we have to conquer—a dragon we have to slay—to a constant object lesson given to us by God.

So, here’s what I want for you from this series. Listen to Psalm 34:8–10.

[Oh] Taste and see that the LORD is good.
[Blessed] How happy is the man who takes refuge in him!
You who are His holy ones, fear the LORD,
for those who fear Him lack nothing.
Young lions lack food and go hungry,
but those who seek the LORD
will not lack any good thing.

When you read that whole psalm, you’ll see that David is making an outline of all of the reasons we should bless the Lord and praise His name. That’s what He says in verse one. In verse 3, David invites us into that praise. He says, “O magnify the LORD with me!” Why? Why should we praise the Lord? Why should we join David and the saints in celebrating all that God has done? Well, verse 8 is the why. “Taste and see that the LORD is good.”

Now, David could have appealed to any of our five senses in this verse. He could have said, “Look and see that God is good!” Surely, we can see God’s gifts all around us. I woke up this morning and saw the most beautiful sunrise on my little farm. I could look and see that the Lord is good. But that’s not the word, that’s not the sense that David used.

He could have said, “Listen and see that the Lord is good.” I mean, we can hear God’s goodness in our eardrums, can’t we? When we hear a child laugh . . . I was tickling my toddler yesterday, Ezra, and he was doing this full-on giggle. I could hear that God is good. Or in a bird’s song, or in a lion’s roar. I was at the zoo once, and a lion roared his full roar, and you could hear that God is good and that He makes good things.

But David didn’t choose “look” and he didn’t choose “hear.” He chose an alternate sense to call us to worship: our sense of taste.

Let me show you my hand. I’m not really here to shape your thoughts on food. I’m here to shape your thoughts on God through His Word.

A few chapters later, in Psalm 103, David used eating imagery again to remind us of God’s blessings. Let me start with Psalm 103:1. I bet you’ve sung these words before. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name!”

Again, David was making a list of all of the reasons we can bless, we can praise, we can celebrate, we can honor who God is. Again, he used food language. I have to think maybe David was a foodie, too. In verse 5 he said, “. . . who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.” Satisfaction. Renewed energy. These are the benefits of food.

People often say, “Food is fuel,” and David was saying that that is true. Food is fuel, and we can bless the Lord, because God is the Giver of food. What if each bite of food is a missionary sent to remind us who God is, what He has done?What if food is meant to cause our hearts to celebrate instead of to feel all of those angsty feelings that women have been writing to me about?

In just these first two passages we find a fundamental truth about food, and it is really easy to miss this in our calorie, carb-counting culture. Food is a blessing from God. As we will see throughout this series, food is an area that the Bible does call us to surrender. It’s not just feasting, it’s not just fasting. It’s both. Scripture calls us to two distinct approaches to food, and I’m not sure they line up with anything that we’re hearing about food in the media and on our social media, and even through our conversations with each other. Fasting and feasting—fasting and feasting.

The way this series is going to unfold is that we’re going to alternate each day. We’re going to talk about fasting, and then we’re going to talk about feasting. We’re going to talk about fasting and then we’re going to talk about feasting again. It mirrors, I think, the rhythms that God calls us to in our actual lives with food. When we look at our Bibles, that’s what we see. It’s not one or the other, it’s both, alternating between the two.

You probably are really interested in one of those two approaches, either fasting or feasting. Maybe (this has been my experience) you are strongly opposed to the other one. Maybe you’re naturally pretty disciplined in the area of food and the thought of feasting makes you feel a little bit out of control. Or maybe fasting is something you’ve never tried, and frankly, you don’t want to.

I was in my women’s Bible study group several years ago as I was starting to wrestle with these ideas myself, and I said, “Hey, girls, I think we should do a study on fasting.”

My friend Jenny, who is normally pretty even-tempered and easy to get along with, stood up and said, “I do not want to talk about that.”

I don’t know why her reaction was so strong, but she’s not the only one that I’ve had that experience with. I went to my own pastor a couple years ago and said, “Hey, could you do a series on fasting?” 

He said, “No. I won’t. I never am going to teach on fasting.” 

I said, “Why? It’s all over the Bible.”

He said, “Because I don’t fast and I don’t want to teach on something that I’m not doing.”

Again, I saw that exposed nerve in the church. We have pretty strong feelings about food, strong feelings about fasting, and strong feelings about feasting. 

Wherever you are on that spectrum, I want you to come to this series just as you are. Come with your real experiences; I’m going to come with mine. I will never pretend to be a food or health expert in this series, and that’s good, because I’m not one. Come with your real reactions to food. I’m not asking you as you listen to feast one day and fast the next and then feast one day and fast the next. You’re going to get a bellyache if you try that approach.

What I’m asking you to do is to open your Bible with me and consider, maybe for the very first time, what do God and food have to do with each other?

I want to read you David’s words from Psalm 34 one more time, and this time I want you to hear them as my prayer for you as we listen to this series.

[Oh] Taste and see that the LORD is good.
[Blessed] How happy is the man who takes refuge in him!
You who are His holy ones, fear the LORD,
for those who fear Him lack nothing.
Young lions lack food and go hungry,
but those who seek the LORD
will not lack any good thing.

Bethany: Erin, I can’t wait to hear the rest of this series and learn more about fasting and feasting. You are just crushing this topic, girl!

Erin Unscripted

As we move into Erin Unscripted, I have to know, what is your favorite meal?

Erin: Oh, great, this is going to cause some strong opinions from the get-go, probably, but I do know what it is. I want a steak—and here’s the controversial part—I want it rare.

Bethany: Like still mooing?

Erin: Yes, that’s what people say. But yes, I want that red center. Ever since I had babies, I have become quite the carnivore.

Bethany: Really!

Erin: Yes. So I want the steak—still mooing is great with me—and I want that loaded baked potato. I mean, don’t skimp. I want the butter, the sour cream, the bacon, the chives, everything. I guess I’m a steak and potato kind of girl. I’m probably good there. Although I would need dessert.

Bethany: Yes, yes. Absolutely.

Erin: I’m going to go with cheesecake of every variety. Just give me a cheesecake sampler platter for this last meal, and I’m good to go.

Bethany: You are good. Well, now we know. I’m a cheesecake girl, too.

Erin: Now we know. But I want to know yours! What’s your last meal or your favorite meal?

Bethany: Honestly, my all-time favorite food is probably truffle French fries with aioli sauce. When my husband and I go out, I’m like, “You better get your own fries. I love you, but that’s where I draw the line.”

Erin: You’re not a Wendy’s fry girl; you want the truffle. You want the good stuff!

Bethany: Hop toddy fries—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of those—those are my favorites.

Okay, we have to go deep here, because I know that as we’re listening, you were pretty open and honest, but for a lot of us it brought up different feelings. So, I want to know, for you, how has food been a source of shame in your own life? Would you be willing to be super honest with us?

Erin: Always. Yes, I had a full-blown eating disorder in college, so to be on a podcast talking about the beauty of food is just further evidence that I’m a trophy of God’s grace. I was rail thin—unrecognizable to the person I am now, to be honest. But food absolutely controlled me all day, every day. Food was not a blessing; food was the enemy. I had to work all the time to keep food from me in order to stay that thin.

People did notice. In the height of that eating disorder, I had several people—my mom and some people from church—that came to me and said, “Are you okay? You’re really thin.” I said more than once to wise, godly people, “There’s no such thing as too thin.” I absolutely believed that to be true.

Bethany: Wow!

Erin: If you believe there’s no such thing as too thin, then food is not evidence of God’s love for you. You have to combat it. So, I’ve come such a long way since then, but that’s not even that far in the past. I mean, I think those chains are generational for many of us.

Bethany: Yes.

Erin: I watched my mom diet. I watched my grandma diet, my aunts diet. I think we just pass on this relationship with food that is way more fear-based than blessing-based.

It’s not even all in my past. I mean, there are definitely still times when my relationship with food feels strained, and it also is an area where I do need self-control. What I’m not saying is, “Eat the whole pan of cinnamon rolls, because God gave those to you!” That’s not what we see in Scripture. So, like every other area of our lives, it takes walking in the Spirit, but He does give freedom.

Bethany: Wow. That’s so hope-giving to us, because I think we all have an interesting relationship with food. Just to hear that you have come from a really dark place and such a confused mindset about body image and food, and to see where you are now is incredible.

You talked about Monica and how the chains fell off for her with food. I want to know, what was the specific moment where the chains fell off for you in your relationship with food?

Erin: Well, it is the same pattern for all of my life. I married my husband after that stint in college, was still very thin, was still really struggling with food. My husband was a youth pastor, and there was a girl in the youth group that said, “I would really love to know how to feel better about myself and my body.”

So for her sake—not for my own—I opened my Bible and started to see these themes, some of which we’re talking about in this series, and chains did fall off. I mean, that’s what the Bible does. It is a chain-breaker. Jesus, through His Word, is a chain-breaker. I started to have a really redeemed view of food and everything that comes with it.

Now, there wasn’t this dramatic moment where everything changed. It’s been week after week, day after day, year after year of choosing to, first of all, look at God’s Word for the authority on this, and second of all, believe what He says and then implement it. I really do feel like the Lord’s broken many chains—and probably has more chains to break, but He does it through His Word.

Bethany: I love that. It’s so nice, because we don’t have to have the strength in and of ourselves.

Erin: We don’t!

Bethany: God has the strength for us, which is incredible, because this can be so hard to talk about. It’s amazing that we’re having these conversations, because it’s sometimes hard to know where to go.

I know for a lot of us, we look at even our parents’ generation, and there was a lot of dieting and this yo-yo: “Okay, I’m going to diet, but then I’m going to binge and eat everything on the weekend.” 

For the woman who’s listening right now and feels stuck in this yo-yo cycle where it’s like, “Okay, I did good, and then I did bad,” and it’s back and forth, what encouragement do you have for her?

Erin: First, I would tell her to not be okay with it. I do think we have this mindset that that’s just part of being a woman. “All women struggle with food and weight and body image and identity. That’s all a part of the same enchilada,” to use a food metaphor there. I would just say, don’t be okay with it. Don’t settle for, “I’m going to spend my whole life with this volatile relationship with food, which is something that I have to deal with every single day, and that’s just how it is.”

Jesus called us to freedom. He called us to abundance. He called us to joy. As Christians, we are to have happy hearts for all that God gave us. So, first of all, I would just put a stake in the ground as you’re listening to this, like, “No! No more! I don’t want to operate that way anymore.”

Then I would say, look around, because they’re rare, but I bet there are women in your church, in your community that you look at them and go, “Why does she seem to have freedom here?” It’s probably not because she’s the thinnest one or the most fit one. It’s probably just a woman that has some sort of peace around her approach to food. I would start with just spending some time with her, because we do need to be re-programmed. I mean, I don’t think I even understand the scope of how much we hear related to food that is just nonsense. It’s just dripping into our minds all the time, and we do need to be reprogrammed. So, I’d find a guide, a woman that you emulate and admire her own approach to this.

Bethany: Well, you are one of those women. You’ve been dropping some truth bombs already, and we’re only at the very beginning!

Erin: Oh, thank you! (hissing sound) That’s my bomb noise. (laughter)

Bethany: We’re only at the beginning of this series, which is amazing. You said something that I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. You said that food is a missionary to tell who God is. You talked so much about that and how food is a blessing. Can you unpack that a little bit more? I think that stopped a lot of us in our tracks. “Food is a missionary? What in the world are you talking about?”

Erin: Well, that really comes from Romans 1, which is just one of my favorite passages. I know I say that about all the passages, but really, Romans 1 is an important one to me. What Romans 1 tells us is that the invisible nature of God can be seen in what He has made.

I’ve said it differently; I’ve said that creation is God’s first missionary, meaning you can go outside and go, “I didn’t make the stars. I didn’t plant that oak tree. There’s someone, something bigger than me,” and at least know there’s a Creator. But I think it goes deeper than that, and you know what? Every single blueberry God created.

I have this blackberry patch, which is my pride and joy, on my little farm. I have worked it and cultivated it. I’m not kidding you, in the summer it makes blackberries as big as my thumb.

Bethany: Oh, my goodness!

Erin: So, it’s this summer thing, “Oh, they’re blooming! They’re on! They’re red! They’re black!” Then we have the best blackberry cobbler of the year. But who created that? The Lord did.

It’s really not an overstatement that when the blackberries are ripe, I know that God is good, that He’s powerful, that He’s a creator, and that He loves me. That blackberry patch is just for me (and whoever I choose to share it with).

That’s what I mean by food can be a missionary. If we choose to receive food as a gift, which I think is what we see in Scripture . . . It is the Lord who feeds us, and we can have a gratitude towards food that reminds us, “God’s good. He loves me. He gives me good things. He sustains me. He provides for me.” Food is so easily accessible to us in the modern era that I think we lose a little bit of our awareness that we need God to feed us every day, and He does. So, I just think food can be missionaries or messengers to show us who God is and remind us that He loves us enough to give us humongous blackberries!

Bethany: That’s so freeing. I have felt this way, too. I want to have so much control over this area of my life, and food being a missionary, food being a good thing can seem so foreign. I know throughout the rest of this series you are going to really help us with that. Even through your devotional, which we’re obviously talking about, Fasting and Feasting, the forty-day devotional, you’re going to help us with that. But this whole idea of control—we hear you and we’re like, “Yes, this sounds good, but I just feel like my fists are clenched. I don’t want to give up control in this area.” How can you help us? Our fists are closed, Erin!

Erin: You’re taking me right back to recovering from that eating disorder. I know not every woman has an eating disorder, but I think most of us have disordered eating. What I had to learn as I was coming out of that is, no, food is good. Food is not bad. It is not something I’m just constantly trying to wrestle or control (you used the right word there); it’s a gift first and foremost.

Now, it doesn’t stop there. Is this an area where we need self-control? Absolutely. Is this an area where our nutrition is reflected in the way we behave and the way we feel? Absolutely. I’m not just saying, “Ingest all food all the time and celebrate it!” That’s swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction. But if we could just start with the simple truth that “food is good and food is from God,” or “God is good and food is from God,” that really does set our feet on the path of giving up control, because then we want to steward something that’s been given to us. 

That’s true of all kinds of things. Marriage is good, it’s a gift, but if I try to control the thing, it goes haywire. Money, resources are good, they’re gifts from God, but if I’m trying to hyper-control every penny, it goes haywire. Just that starting place of, “God is good, God has given me this good thing,” shifts us from closed fists to open hands, because then we want to be good stewards in the patch of blackberries the Lord has given us.

Bethany: Your life sounds unbelievable. Who has a patch of blackberries in their backyard?

Erin: I do!

Bethany: We’re going to learn so much more about you in the rest of this series, and you’re so gracious to have dropped the entire series at once. If you’re listening and you’re like, “Wow, I need more,” you can go ahead and listen to the rest of the episodes right now.

But Erin, you also have an incredible devotional to help us. Can you tell us a little bit about your devotional, Fasting and Feasting? That way if we want to grab if we want to know more. What is it about?

Erin: Right! Well, the title, I hope, says it all: Fasting and Feasting. It’s a forty-day devotional. The reason that both of those words are used is because as I see it in Scripture and as I think we’re going to see together in this series, that really is the approach to food God gives us. It’s not all fasting, all deprivation; and it’s not all feasting, just eating everything we want at all times. There’s a balance, but both are good and both are from God. Really, I just want you to open your Bible and see that in Scripture for yourself, and then how you apply that in your own life is going to vary. But I want to take you to Scripture and help you see food in maybe a way you haven’t seen it before.

Bethany: You can actually grab a copy of Fasting and Feasting right now at ReviveOurHearts.com/TheDeepWell.

So, Erin, what are we going to talk about in the next episode?

Erin: Well, we’re going to open our Bibles, like we always do on this podcast, and we’re going to look at an interesting little story in Mark 9 and find out what it has to do with fasting.

The Deep Well with Erin Davis is a production of Revive Our Hearts, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the CSB.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.