Don't Skip!

My husband's dream has come true!  Literally!  The other night he dreamed he was drinking raw milk like in the old days, and now he has found a place to get it!  At church last Sunday, Howard was talking to a friend we had not seen in a long time, and she mentioned  she has  a cow--a Brown Swiss/Jersey mix  that gives 5 gallons of rich milk a day!  He found out she sells the millk, and we have our first gallon in the refrigerator.

I was so surprised  to see the deep band of cream at the top (our friend said she gets a pound of butter from two gallons).  I tried a little of the cream on my oatmeal this morning (with blueberries and strawberries to make it healthier) and I had a treat to rival a Macdonald's breakfast!

Howard has always been a milk drinker, and our kids loved it growing up.  With six of them, we often used two gallons a day!  Ads wear a milk mustache, adults love it, and babies need it. It is good for bones and teeth, and it is used as a metaphor for health (physical and spiritual) and wealth in the Bible.  A land of milk and honey is pictured as a place of plenty and blessings for God's people.  I Peter 2:2 admonishes, "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby."

The perfect food for newborns is mother's milk, as has been proven by many scientific studies as a protection against certain diseases and infections.  I read somewhere that there are over a 100 listed beneficial components of mother's milk. Yet there comes a time when a baby needs solid food.   Paul says in I Corinthians 3:1-2, "And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ.  (2) I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither now are ye able."

He seems to be saying that those teeth you grew on milk should have by now enabled you to eat  meat and digest deeper meanings and stronger teachings.  It made me think of something I read the other day about the new "narrative" Bibles. Evidently, they are very popular, as they attempt to condense the Bible into one storyline, often with the removal or abridgment of Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, genealogies and laws.

I can't imagine the Bible without these beautiful, or even preponderant and difficult portions.  God had everything in there for a reason, and the divinely-inspired writers did not sugar-coat anything.  There are the unlikely heroes, the letters, visions, prophecies, battles and victories that take our breath away.  Surely we are not babes who must  have our scriptural diets pre-digested and fed to us in a bottle of mediocrity, but rather  mature Christians who relish the whole grand, glorious, scope and language of the Bible, the Word of God!