My young daughter's strange prayer is a reminder of how much gratitude we owe to God.

At our house we pray before each meal, and after hearing my husband and me model thankful prayers, my children are now excited to offer the blessing when we sit down together.  My three-year-old is especially eager, and though each prayer she gives is a little different, she always starts her prayer with the same phrase, “Thank you for we want to eat.”  When she first uttered these words, we all chuckled a little at how cute she is.  We assumed she was trying to recount a rhyming prayer that begins “Thank you for the food we eat,” and my five-year-old even started to tease her about it.  But my daughter preserved and continued to repeat her curious gratitude with every meal just as the Psalmist encouraged us.

“Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind, for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.” Psalm 107:8-9

This weekend as I listened to her for the fiftieth time say, “Thank you for we want to eat,” it struck me, the significance of this prayer.  Have you ever stopped to consider that God could have made our bodies to not eat food?  God could have made us like the plants to absorb energy through the sun.  Or He could have designed us to eat once a week like a snake.  Or he could have made us to eat only one type of food like a panda.  What a blessing that God made us to want to eat and to want to eat a variety of foods!  Just think about all the pleasure and fellowship that we all have experienced because of the gift of good food!  It is only when we forget to be grateful that food becomes a problem.

If like me you are needing to rethink your relationship with food, there are lots of Christian authors out there writing about this topic.  I have read many, but the books that God used to help finally renew my mind and heart are called, The Weigh Down Diet and Rise Above both by Gwen Shamblin.

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