THE GREEN-MATO EPISODE

I was in junior high—that awkward age of growth spurts and hormone-stoked self-consciousness—when my home-packed, brown-bag lunch knocked my day off-kilter.. All right, you know how BIG a deal it is for some kids on the cusp of the teen years to be just a bit “different” from the stereotype of his or her peers. For me, the crisis was the sandwich I pulled from the lunch bag that my mother had packed.

Okay, backstory. This was January, and Mom was using up the last of her holiday-hued “fancy breads,” which included some to which she'd added green food coloring to mark the colors of Christmas. My standard peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, usually slapped together on whole wheat bread from the store, had a new look. Green.

I don't know why—maybe she was low on store bread?—but that day I had my PB&J on homemade green-speckled bread—probably the zucchini bread resulting from our garden's ultra-productive zucchini vines (harvested/frozen). The ultimate old-time homemaker, Mom also rescued tomatoes still green at the first frost, turning them into “green tomato preserves.” My sandwich combined both very “uncool” green products.

Hoping nobody had seen my unique (and embarrassing) sandwich, I slipped it back into the sack and survived the rest of the lunch break with just apple slices and cafeteria milk. I would go hungry rather than risk the ridicule of my “cool” friends who were letting me sit at the “cool-kid table.”

I snicker now over the self-consciousness of my pubescent-self, way back in an era when boys and girls somewhat dressed-up for school, not wore ragged jeans and funky tee-shirts. When even what you pulled out of your lunch sack marked you as a winner or loser. (How times have changed...) But I wonder if, when it comes to our faith in an almighty yet compassionate God, we're apt to keep Him in a sack with a tightly rolled top. Got to be careful about “cool” faith, you know.

Perhaps we need some reminders. Like those offered by the Bread of Life. Jesus. Who said, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry” (John 6:35).

Which brings me back to an uncomfortable analogy—of our tendency to “hide” our faith when it defines us as different from the world around us. Jesus denounced our tendency to be “ashamed of Him” (Mark 8:38). In earnest and robust words, the apostle Paul essentially scolded those who were timid about identifying with Christ:

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of every one who believes, first for the Jew, then for the Gentiles. (Romans 1:16)

Powerful words, recalling that he once went town-to-town and persecuted Jesus-followers himself until his own dramatic vision-encounter with Jesus. After that, for Paul there was no finicky check-the-lunch-bag-for-possible-embarrassment religion. He was all out for the One who called Himself “The Bread of Life.”

In recounting my junior high episode, I'd led to ask: Would Jesus eat peanut butter with green tomato preserves on dyed-green bread​? I think He would, and maybe laud whoever prepared it for injecting fun into an ordinary life event.

Got an abundance of green tomatoes? Check this link:

https://www.acouplecooks.com/best-green-tomato-recipes/