Seafood Fastfood?

Long John Silvers has always grossed me out. The thought of having seafood fastfood makes me want to gag. Recently, however, the chain has added a new item to their menu: lobster! That's right, lobster. What has usually been regarded as an expensive treat is now available fried in greasy batter and left under a warming lamp for your fastfood feeding pleasure. After renewing my vow not to eat at LJS I thought about how common it is in our culture to get the "good-stuff" at half the price.

I once heard Ravi Zacharias, Christian apologist, express his frustration with the lack of effort people will put into grasping a concept. Everytime a fan would comment about having to re-read certain paragraphs in Ravi's book he said he praised them for their dilligence. Why do we expect everything to be simple and cost us nothing, he wondered. It's a fair question, and one that we all should take note of. I am thankful that the Bible is simple in that anyone can study it and grasp it, with the aid of the Holy Spirit of course. But at the same time the Bible is not simple in the fact that you can read it once and get all there is to get. Some passages are subtle, some difficult, some very straightfoward, but they all require diligence to study them. The bottom line here is that the only way to eat lobster is at a fine dinning restaurant, with time to savor it, and the best way to study the word is with diligence and thoughtful meditation*.

*For those who confess that they do not have enough time in the day for thoughtful meditation, let me urge you to read small portions of Scripture in your devotional time and spend the majority of that limited amount of time not on reading large portions of Scripture, but on meditating on smaller portions.