A blessing on the food

A while back I started thinking about the words we generally say when praying before a meal. How often does someone unthinkingly ask for doughnuts to be nourishing? I definitely want to express gratitude for what I’m going to eat, especially doughnuts. But I started to wonder exactly why I was asking a blessing for the food. Just what kind of blessings does a plate of tacos I’m about to consume need? In an effort to be more mindful in my prayers I stopped asking for the food to be blessed and instead started asking for us, the consumers, to be blessed. Rather than ask that my food be made healthy for us, I started asking that we be blessed with health.

Friday night Brett came home from work with our week’s groceries. We were planning to have McBlatts for dinner on Saturday so I commented that while we were putting away the new groceries we ought to get the bacon out of the freezer so it could thaw for the next day.

Except the bacon was already almost all thawed.

That’s not right.

I’d been noticing frost building up in our freezer for a few days and now we realized why. Our freezer was dead.

My first thought was the 50 some odd bags of breast milk I was storing in the freezer. If those thawed they’d all be lost. Breast milk has an insanely short shelf life. To lose all of that would’ve been devastating.

I got on the phone and called a neighbor I knew would understand and hoped she’d have room in her freezer for it. She did. I walked it around the block and breathed easier. If the chicken thawed before we could get a new freezer it would still be edible as long as we kept it cold.

We sat down for dinner. Brett asked me to pray before our meal. This time I knew what blessings our food needed. Our food needed to be blessed to not spoil before we could get a new freezer. I asked for a blessing on the food.

By the end of dinner it was clear it wasn’t just our freezer that was gone, but our fridge too. Three brand new gallons of milk (cow’s milk), in danger of spoiling before the night was through if we didn’t do something. I put a post on facebook and we made a few more phone calls.

Before Iddo went to bed that night we’d taken all of our food to various friends in the neighborhood and had offers for twice as much space as we needed. We bought a bag of ice and figured we’d keep the food for one day in our cooler, buying a new bag each day until the new fridge could arrive.

Saturday afternoon we went to the store to buy our fridge. They originally told us they couldn’t deliver it till the 15th, one week later. But he double checked and they had two of the one we wanted in the basement. We only needed one of them. They’d deliver it Tuesday morning. That night we were at some friend’s house and they mentioned they had a mini-fridge in storage we could use in the mean time.

Because of the blessings of our friends, the only thing we lost was a can of frozen orange juice concentrate that thawed enough to spill all over everything. Our food was truly blessed.