What’s the best meal you’ve ever eaten? And where did you eat it?
I’ve eaten some great meals at some good restaurants. The Canneloni Paolo at Rothschild’s in Corona del Mar is superb, as is the swordfish at McCormick and Kuleto’s in San Francisco. If you have a rich friend with a membership to Disneyland’s Club 33, ask him to get you in. But for my money, the best meal I’ve ever eaten was in Xining, the capital city of the Qinghai Province, in China. At Kentucky Fried Chicken, of all places.
Now, before you think I’ve gone off my gastronomic rocker, consider the background story. I’d been “in country” a few days eating food native to China’s northwestern region. It’s nothing like what they serve at PF Chang’s, by the way. And while our Chinese buddies were gulping down each dish with relish, I lost my appetite somewhere around the camel-foot soup or the yak tongue. What I needed was American food, stuff my palate recognized as edible. That’s when I saw the life-size statue of Colonel Sanders standing on Xining’s main drag, beckoning me inside for original-recipe chicken, fries, and a vanilla shake. Whatever the downsides of economic globalization may be, at least you can always find American fast food at the globe’s farthest corners!
Different people have different tastes in food, obviously. I can easily imagine a resident of Xining gagging on KFC in Cypress and longing for camel and yak delicacies back home. But hunger is universal. And every human being needs certain kinds of foods: fruits, vegetables, grains—not to mention proteins, carbs, and fats.
Something similar is true of the spiritual life. Our spirit hungers and thirsts for something more than life’s daily fare. And while each of us develops a spiritual “taste”—for the meat and potatoes of expository preaching, the jumbalaya of gospel music, the salsa of uninhibited prayer—there are some “foods” not one of us can live without. We cannot live without God’s righteousness. It is the bread and water of life.
As I wrote in an earlier devotional, “In the Sermon on the Mount, ‘righteousness’ describes three things: (1) what God’s character is. ‘But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness’ (Matt. 6.33a). (2) What our character should be. ‘For unless you righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven’ (5.20). And (3) what the future is like. God’s ‘righteousness’ will be ‘given,’ along with ‘all these things, to those who ‘seek’ it (6.33b).” In other words, we long for the future in which all things are put right. We long to be put right ourselves, from the heart to the head to the hands. And—most importantly of all—we long to be put right with God.
The blessedness of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the simple fact that God fills the plate of the hungry with the meal their soul desires.
GeorgePWood.com 
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