Thirty Minute Meals

Library shelves are full of them. If they are not the book’s entire content, they often occupy a sizeable chapter within the book. Even cooking shows feature them. . .the thirty minute meal. Everything on the table within thirty minutes. Some protein, some carbohydrate, some produce.

Quality Food

Of course, many meals don’t even take thirty minutes to pull together: a sandwich and some salad (or chips!). Scrambled eggs, toast, and fruit. A steak, salad, and microwaved baked potato. A bowl of cereal with some fruit and nuts. A quick run to the drive-thru.

A thirty minute deadline, neither guarantees nor precludes quality meals come eating time. The steak could be hand-cut, aged and corn fed from Pike’s Market, or a juice-injected lump, requiring eight of the precious thirty minutes just to pry it from its plastic wrapping. The cereal could be a homemade granola or something colorful and crunchy from a cardboard box. The sandwich could be slices of turkey from yesterday’s roast paired with avocado on homemade bread or wafer–thin strips of processed meat on baseball bread.

Preparing to eat

Either way, we are talking about time spent getting ready to eat, not eating. Think about it. Day in, day out, many families–and even more singles–survive on short spurts of preparation time for meals. Truth be told, the eating usually takes even less than the thirty minute prep time! So then comes this impertinent, niggling question: how much time do I invest preparing for my spiritual meals?

Think about what we consider devotional activities: a little warm-up prayer, some Bible reading, answering a few questions from a devotional book, maybe sing a song. All that could be a well-rounded meal, but the chances are far greater that it represents an almost mindless non-preparation, the equivalent of eating out of cans from the shelf while (mostly) doing something else. Forget thirty minutes to the table: our spiritual meals are often prepped, eaten, and put away in less than twelve minutes flat. And we wonder why we are not satisfied or vigorous after years of such “meals?”

Most thirty minute meals overlook three vital components in their race against time:  planning, procuring and preliminary preparation. Finding the recipe, putting it on the menu plan, buying the ingredients, stocking the shelves, pre-cooking the chicken, cleaning the salad greens, stopping by the (out-of-the-way) market for fruit or meat, ordering a specialty sauce or spice: once these components are factored in the thirty-minute meal is the equivalent of the sprint to the finish line, while blithely ignoring the months of training. . .

. . .which makes our spiritual meals, with no hidden and unaccounted for planning, procuring, or preliminary preparation to bolster their nutritional content, the same as preparing stone soup with the contents of Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Impossible to sustain life.