Spiritual Bread and Gum

Recently my three-year-old daughter has been quite obsessed with gum.  For example, when I get home from work, she will often run up to me exclaiming, without even saying hello, “Give me gum! Give me gum!”  My wife took her to a little dessert shop with cookies and cupcakes and the like a while back, and when asked what she wanted my daughter exclaimed, “I can get gum there!”  Today before Sacrament Meeting my wife gave her a piece of gum and she was chewing it as the sacrament was being passed.  Normally she wants the bread and will sometimes try to take more than one piece, but today she took a piece of bread and gave it to her younger brother instead of eating it.  She looked at me with a smile and said something to the effect of, “I don’t need it—I have gum!” and pointed to her gum that she was still chewing.    

Her comment got me thinking as I consider how often we might do the same thing, letting something exciting but ephemeral get in our way of participating fully in the blessings of the gospel.  Gum is really a very good symbol for this—it tastes great at first and is enjoyable to chew in the beginning, but eventually the flavor wears off, becoming something we simply want to get rid of.  And unlike food, it provides no nourishment to us.  Christ described Himself using the analogy of bread to the people of Capernaum: “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).  Christ provides us life “abundantly,” but His path is not flashy or dazzling with the things of the world or dressed up “exceedingly fine” like the great and spacious building—it is like simple bread (John 10:10, 1 Nephi 8:27).  Spiritually, the world often offers us the equivalent of gum in all its different flavors—exciting to taste but empty in real power to strengthen us.  Christ gives us bread—simple, boring, and out of date as seen by the world, but it is the only thing that is available to feed us eternally.  Because of the repetitive nature of those principles that we learn in the gospel and the constant messages of faith and repentance of the scriptures, we may sometimes look for something exciting on the fringe of the gospel to focus our attention, seeking for “some new thing” like the Athenians (Acts 17:21).  But spiritual gum never satisfies our need for sustenance for very long, and we may try to move on to something else with some new flavor.  The Lord invites us instead to focus on the fundamentals of faith in Jesus Christ and daily repentance, looking for a constant change in ourselves instead of in the things of the world around us.                   

This is perhaps part of what Paul was trying to teach the Corinthians when he tried to focus the Corinthians Saints on charity.  He said, “Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away” (1 Corinthians 13:8).  Most things on the earth will “vanish away” eventually and are insignificant to our eternal journey—“you cannot carry them with you” (Alma 39:14).  But the pure love of Christ, the change in ourselves to become like Him, the extent to which we love God and feel His love for us, is indeed what matters.  We can only obtain that by partaking of the “true bread from heaven,” living the kind of life that Christ would have us live (John 6:32).  And that path seem challenging to stick to, we must avoid the temptation to say “I don’t need it—I have gum!”