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    Nourish: A God Who Loves to Feed Us
    Nourish: A God Who Loves to Feed Us
    Nourish: A God Who Loves to Feed Us
    Ebook178 pages2 hours

    Nourish: A God Who Loves to Feed Us

    By Matt Moore

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    About this ebook

    What if, instead of focusing on church programs, we shared meals with people? What if, instead of starting more building initiatives, we fed the hungry?

    The Old Testament is filled with stories of food, nourishment, and the struggle against hunger. Jacob and Esau fought over soup, God saved the world from famine through Joseph, and the people of Israel received manna from God when they were starving in the wilderness.

    Similarly, Jesus's ministry was centered around feeding people and discussing "real food" during meals. In Nourish, Mark Moore shows us that by using food to reach people, Jesus was simply following the precedent set by his Father—a God who loves to feed us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeafwood Publishers
    Release dateSep 8, 2015
    ISBN9780891126706
    Nourish: A God Who Loves to Feed Us
    Author

    Matt Moore

    Mark Moore is the co-founder and CEO of MANA Nutrition, a non-profit food producer that makes specialized emergency food for severely malnourished children. A graduate of Harding University, he has held a fellowship in the U.S. Senate and has consulted with many large companies. He was selected as a 2013 Unreasonable Institute Fellow in Boulder, Colorado, was a national finalist for the prestigious White House Fellows program, and in 2014 was awarded the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition's Smart Power Award for his work at MANA. He currently resides with his wife and four children in North Carolina.

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      Book preview

      Nourish - Matt Moore

      us.

      Chapter One

      IN THE BEGINNING—

      GOO VS. GOD

      Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

      —Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

      When God made us humans, we started in a garden, not for sentimental reasons but because our Creator God wanted us to be well nourished and to experience life at its fullest and best. We were tossed out of Eden because we humans chose malnutrition over nutrition. It was through food that Adam and Eve were initially tempted, and as a curse for the man’s poor choices about food, the Creator told Adam that nourishing himself with food now would be much tougher in a regular garden. Soon his sons were fighting and killing over food and God issues, and so began a long saga that continues today—a God who loves to feed us, and a malnourished world.

      That’s the God-version as I know it, as Christian and Muslim and Jewish traditions have handed it down through the years. It sounds like an absurd story, a fairy tale, in these modern times. It sounds ridiculous and uneducated, in fact, until we listen to the educated version.

      The goo-version of the story says man made a god. But before that, somehow rock came to be, and rocks collided and became stardust. As particle physicist Lawrence Krauss (a seriously smart guy, by the way) likes to say, It’s the most poetic thing I know. That we are literally all stardust. That the atoms that make up your left arm are not from the same planet or asteroid as the ones that make up your right arm.

      The goo-version theorizes that after these primeval rocks collided, eventually there was goo. Somehow the goo grew opposable thumbs, stood upon two feet, and eventually turned into a man. Obviously I’m a theist, so I am certainly selling the goo-version short here, but not by a whole lot. The entire happening is unlikely and preposterous—just like our God-version. No higher ground seems to be offered here for smart people—just goo vs. God. The goo-view says we all got here by accident, and the God-view says we humans got here on purpose for a purpose.

      Those two worldviews inform and divide our country, a divide that isn’t getting any smaller. As Lawrence Krauss says, Science never asks why, and when it does, it really means how. But getting bogged down in the differences in those two is of less use than noticing the incredible similarities of the two. Whether we are here on purpose or by accident, whether we are goo-creatures or God-creatures, both stories (shall we call them faiths?) offer us a narrative that begins in a garden.

      The earliest thing we know, categorically and with any historical certainty about humans, is that we really got our act together and formed something called civilization around a garden. It was in the Fertile Crescent, the land between the rivers, where the first men (and women) known to anthropologists managed for the first time to grow more food than they actually needed. We know this from our world history classes, and we know it with certainty because those early ancestors actually wrote it down and Leonard Woolley dug it up. Etched in clay tablets unearthed by Woolley and his team, who dug in Iraqi soil for twelve long, amazing years from 1922 to 1934, are accounting records that basically say things like, Elki traded three bushels of corn to Ashkem for two vessels.

      These writings were found in and around Mesopotamian sites like the ancient city of Ur, home to the Sumerian peoples (in southern Iraq today). These ancient records are really pretty mundane as historical documents go, but they are anything but trivial, given that they are the earliest extant documents about the humans who preceded us.

      Thomas Cahill in his great book Gifts of the Jews rightfully recognizes that thus begins what we call history. Anything we claim to know about anything before that period is largely a guess. Cave paintings, reconstructed pots, bones, and carbon dating all give us a decent guess at what happened before that period. But that’s all it is. Largely a guess. But here in the ancient writings of Sumer and Ur we have the first tangible human history. Real notes written by real people. Boring stuff like basic accounting. All of it, most of it anyway, revolved around their gardens: who grew what and who swapped it for what in the world’s first complex economy. Here men and women first grew more than they needed, and thus it freed up a bunch of people to do things such as painting their huts or making pots. Metalworkers thrived, plows got better, gardens grew, and the Stone Age was gone for good. Combine all of this with a healthy dose of slave labor from less fortunate conquered neighbors, and we have what has come to be known as progress.

      So the God-people have their narratives of Adam and Eve and the goo-people have their historical artifacts. For the latter group, we are stardust infused with happenstance-accidental life. For the other, we are dust with life breathed into us by an intentional creative force for good. Believing either one may be guesswork, faith, or science, but both narratives basically begin in a garden.

      Chapter Two

      HUNGER: A HISTORY

      "All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree

      that everyone had come to eating their children."

      —Inscription from the Egyptian Tomb of Ankhtifi, 2000 BC

      Either garden version above has humans gardening not so much because they liked it, but because they were in a constant scramble to fight off hunger. If you are human, hunger is your oldest and most persistent foe. Evidently, the garden thing failed from time to time, as it became a problem for the people of Ankhtifi’s time, the land-between-the-rivers people, who lived more than two thousand years before Christ. I’m not an Egyptologist, but it seems safe to say that eating one’s children qualifies as less than idyllic times. Scholars think this eating their children comment is not necessarily to be taken at face value, that it might be a bit of exaggeration to impress either the gods or inscription-readers-to-come—people like you and me. Inscriptions in the same tomb rave about Ankhtifi being a near perfect ruler, feeding the hungry and bringing peace. Each line ends with for such a man I am. That’s hieroglyphic for that’s just how I roll. Exaggerated or not, the fact that Ankhtifi (who apparently put significant thought into his tomb inscriptions) found such a prominent place for the role of hunger is telling. People had plenty to be afraid of in those days, and hunger was apparently somewhere near the top of the list.

      Perhaps more telling than ancient crypt inscriptions are the numbers we know from later history, where historical facts come together and find agreement with God- and goo-people alike. As record keeping and data improve, the evidence of hunger mounts and the numbers get bleaker: In 1347 two-thirds of Italy’s population reportedly starved in the Great Famine. From 1845‒50 the great hunger in Ireland claimed more than a million lives. During 1932–33 in Ukraine, hunger and famine killed about seven million people. In 1943‒44 in Bengal and India, hunger brought death to four million more. Then in 1958‒62 an estimated thirty million people died in China from the same serial killer—hunger. Disease might kill you quicker, but whatever hunger lacks in speed, it makes up for in tenacity. It has humbled and demoralized and bullied us puny humans for millennia. And while our scientific genius has made amazing progress against many diseases in modern times, our track record and the forecast for our battle with hunger still looks pretty

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