Sometimes missionary families miss good American cooking. We might have to be a little more creative when creating cuisine that resembles an American dish using the ingredients available. Tacos were one dish my mom had to improvise quite a bit as we grew up.
Dairy was always tough to find in Taiwan, so she had to replace sour cream with mayonnaise. Those reading this who also grew up on the mission field can probably relate. Let’s just say that Taiwanese mayonnaise is not Hellman’s. It was like a white jelly, and certainly did not resemble sour cream in the slightest! We had cabbage instead of lettuce, rice instead of taco chips, pork instead of ground hamburger, and nothing like cheese even existed there. So, just to review, we had rice covered with cabbage and pork, onions and tomatoes, and topped with white Jelly.
For reasons I cannot understand, we still called it taco salad.
Perhaps we could also ask, ‘When does our faith no longer resemble Christianity?”
Sometimes we can compromise an element of our spirituality without feeling like it’s a big deal, but eventually, we can find ourselves way off course and we don’t always understand how we got there.
As an example:
We need to be careful to feed more on the word of God than on devotionals. These are merely interpretations of an individual and have the potential to be wrong.
Facebook friendship can’t replace face-to-face interaction.
I can easily spend more time in entertainment than in prayer.
Christian radio cannot replace congregational singing, no matter how profound the words are.
Sometimes I have gotten so busy with all the ‘busyness’ of church that I don’t have time to stop and have the intimacy of worship myself. We can be physically in the building, but we are checked out, and church has no effect on my attitude or the decisions I make on Monday.
We even replaced communion with a packing peanut.
It’s easy to talk about current events, rather than witness to those we come in contact with.
We can’t figure out why our spiritual lives are drying up while we have the artery restricted.
A survey by the Christian Chronicle found that churches attendance is down by up to half the attendance that was before the pandemic. I have heard lots of churches say that online streaming has served a benefit to those with compromised health, but at the same time, I believe that the world needs to see those church parking lots full of cars. If we aren’t public in our faith, others may conclude it isn’t necessary. Just as businesses and organizations, churches also saw a steep decline in total attendance since people started to conclude they didn’t need these services. Christians didn’t attend church for so long, they found it cumbersome to go back.
Pressure is put on us on all sides. Sometimes the world can even make us feel like terrible people if we choose to be godly. Ex: We can be made to feel like bad parents if we make our kids miss their sporting games because we insist that they attend worship services.
I encourage you to renew your emphasis on the spiritual things you need to for you and your family to grow stronger in your faith. It’s easy to subsist on all those things the world offers as replacements, but soon we will have a faith that doesn’t reflect God.