Intolerant

I'm going to start by sharing something very important....something as weird as I am.  Something extremely on topic.  Prepare yourself.

God uses every bit of our story.  I was thinking about that as I opened up my new box of pots and pans I had to buy because of my hubby's nickel allergy.  I was thinking about how so many of my people, my tribe, have allergies and insensitive to food.  I have a loved one who has struggled for years with symptoms that multiple doctors couldn't figure out and it was apparently as simple (I use that word ironically for those of us with allergies and unexplained symptoms) as cutting lactose out of her diet.  Gluten, dairy, nickel, nuts, onions, ginger, I have friends and family who all live in this awkward state of having to carefully pick what we can eat, where we can go and how pretentious we're going to sound when we get there.  I didn't seek out people of intolerance, but I am so proud to do life with them.  They work as hard to avoid our allergies as we do for theirs.  Part of the reason our friends work so hard to avoid their allergy foods is always individual and usually filled with people along the way that thought they just don't like the food they are avoiding and seem to think its a choice that can be trained out of us.  Sometimes the road to discovering what had been causing all those weird symptoms that the doctors couldn't figure out was a hard one.  We learn to live without those things but we miss them and every encounter that reintroduces those food items holds a vast array of consequences. 

As I was thinking about food intolerance God whispered something beautiful to me.  The care that my tribe puts into caring for our allergies is a very direct working out of 1 Corinthians 8:13 and Romans 14:19-21.

1 Corinthians 8:13
Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.

Romans 14:19-21
Therefore let us not pass judgement on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats. It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble

My tribe adjusting our meals for community times of breaking bread (metaphorically speaking, I can't have bread) is an act of love.  We delight in serving each other in that way.  It isn't a burden that we resent, it is one we gladly share because we understand how difficult it is.  The same should be true of our intolerance, our fears and, our weaknesses in life.  They shouldn't be treated as an inconvenience that we must suffer through because someone else can't police themselves.  They should be loads that we share because we have intolerance, fears and weaknesses too and we should understand better than anyone.