Dear Morning Devotion Group: Today we start a new study called 100% Jesus.  I hope you enjoy the journey.  Blessings, Larry Jones

Introduction

It took me a while to catch on to the organic food movement.  I understood the basic principles, but not the urgency.  This might be due partially to my upbringing and the long summer months I spent as a child on my grandparents’ farm in Kentucky.

We were organic before organic was cool.  My grandfather raised most of his vegetables in a huge garden behind a chicken house, and some of his beef came from a steer he raised on fresh grain.  Our meat and vegetables were supplemented with bass, bream and catfish from local farm ponds, and an occasional rabbit or squirrel.  Fruit came from apple trees in the yard, wild blackberry patches and a neighbor’s plum tree.

We didn’t live totally off of the land.  Once a week we made a pilgrimage to the local Winn Dixie to stock up on household items, and staples like cereal, milk and cheese.  Our food on the farm also had a little help.  No, we didn’t pile on the fertilizer.  Instead, my grandparents collected leaves in the fall, let them compost in the winter and plowed them into the garden with the rotor tiller in the spring.  But we did use pesticides.  Every few weeks my grandfather filled a small leather bellow with white powder and “dusted” the garden.  I’m not sure what was in the dust, but fortunately I don’t have any residual twitches or deformities today.

Yet, even though everything I ate wasn’t organic and the word wasn’t even in my vocabulary, I did grasp the difference between packaged food and the fresh stuff from my grandparents’ farm.  I figured my grandparents were just saving money by raising their own food.  I had no idea we were so advanced!  I also learned to respect the land, be kind to the animals we were planning to eat, and work hard with my hands.

Maybe this is why it took me a while to get the organic craze.  I assumed everyone knew the difference between farm fresh and processed food, and tried to eat as well as possible.  I had no idea how corrupt our food supply had become and how little the average person understood about soil, plants and produce.  In the Garden of Eden, God delivered the first lesson in agriculture to Adam: “Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food” (Genesis 1:29).  He didn’t say anything about potato chips or cattle injected with steroids, but in His omniscience He surely knew it would come to that.