I knew it wasn’t chicken, but it was warm and tender on the inside and crunchy on the outside, so I ate it. I dipped it into the ranch sauce and looked at it before I took another bite. I knew I’d regret eating at Wendy’s later, but I was hungry and was waiting for payday to have money for real food again. I wasn’t worried about the lack of nutritional value, the bodily damage a five-piece chicken lunch crossed my mind, but the growl reverberating from my stomach told me to keep eating. Dan, the coworker who was eating with me noticed my questioning observances of my meal and tried to assure me that it was safe to eat.

★                    ★                    ★

How did Jesus really feed five thousand people in the country? The pharisees couldn’t figure it out. Moving that much food to such a remote location would take more than the handful of fishermen and other religious rejects Jesus had trailing behind Him. The people obviously didn’t help, they’ve been yelling and raising a fuss about some miracle that involved the food. There must have been some sort of show though, otherwise the rabble wouldn’t have come back so excited.

★                    ★                    ★

Lunch was uneventful to the point that I can’t remember any of the conversation between Dan and I. We sat there for several minutes after finishing our food and didn’t talk. Our lack of conversation was enough motivation to get me up and out of my chair, it was time to walk back to the office. He followed and together we left the greasy brown dining room behind us.

★                    ★                    ★

Jesus moved fast, so the Pharisees never got their chance to ask Him about it. By the time people were back and talking about what had happened, that man had already moved on and was across the lake. He was probably stirring up trouble there, too. It didn’t matter though, the Pharisees could make time to chase Him. They needed to make sure that nothing was happening. They needed to make sure their flock was safe and were living like they should.

★                    ★                    ★

I got back the the office with enough time to grab my laptop then run into a meeting. In that meeting, I started to feel a little bloated. That’s what I get for putting that garbage in my body. As time continued to pass, and as the meeting progressed, my stomach began to hurt more and more. I wish I hadn’t eaten that fake chicken for lunch. Why didn’t I get a salad? The pain got to the point that I considered going home sick, but I held out to the end of the day.

★                    ★                    ★

The Pharisees eventually caught up with Jesus. At first, they didn’t say anything, but waited for Him or one of His followers to break the law. It seemed common enough that they neglected some minor detail, and Jesus always managed to break one of the more significant laws. Their chance came at mealtime. The Pharisees cringed a little when they watched Jesus and His followers eat. None of them washed their hands! They didn’t know about germs, they knew about tradition and this was dire.

Jesus retorted that they broke God’s law in their zeal for the laws handed down from other men. It made sense though, their hearts were nowhere near the Father’s- their law made them look better than God’s did. They seemed to be made for that reason though; to give the appearance of holiness, to get people to follow them, because they had successfully followed a bunch of rules that imparted a sense of holiness to the adherent. Jesus looked unholy though; he spent time with the wrong kind of people, paid no attention to the sabbath and didn’t follow the law His culture had relied on for hundreds of years.

★                    ★                    ★

I was pale and sweaty as I drove home. My stomach hurt like hell and I didn’t know what to do about it. Traffic just managed to piss me off because I couldn’t move fast enough though the lanes of other people attempting to get home from work. Eventually, I knew it was going to happen and it was would soon, so I pulled over to the first parking lot I encountered and threw the door open. It came so fast,  I didn’t have time to unfasten my seat belt. I threw my torso as far out of my car as I could, and I let it fly. Three or four splatters later, and I felt tons better.

★                    ★                    ★

The last thing Jesus said to the Pharisees was that it didn’t matter if His hands were clean or not- a man’s ‘cleanness’ or lack thereof didn’t come from what he ate or his hygiene, rather it all depended on what came out of Him. Our bodies digest food and we get rid of it but our words, the thoughts that escape from our mouths, they contaminate us. They make us dirty. We believe our own words and they can make us sick.

★                    ★                    ★

I ate garbage and my body hated it. I was mad at myself for doing it, but sometimes our resources us. If I had more time and if I wanted to spend more money on food, I could have gone somewhere and easily would have managed to hold my lunch. It’s probably better that I vomited anyway, it was less cholesterol and man-made garbage in my body. Even if it did stay though, I would have been fine; it probably would have added to my authenticity as a fine specimen of an American man.

We can’t vomit up words we’ve already said. Our minds and spirits can’t cleanse themselves from the verbal garbage we’ve forced ourselves to listen to. It’s worse when we’re the source of our own pollution because it seems that our hearts, the Jewish notion of the center of our being, seems to believe our own voices more than any other person’s.

What can you do about that?