A healthy body

There is one thing which you do not often forget to have at home, and that is your meals.  And so, when you come in hungry from school or from play, one of the questions you often ask is, “When’s supper?” or “When’s tea?” or “When’s dinner?”  And after you have had your supper or your tea or your dinner, you feel better.  This is because food makes your bodies grow and keeps you healthy – or rather the proper food does, what we call a healthy diet.  If you lived on nothing but sweets, you would get ill; though I remember one boy in Catechism who said that, when he grew up, he would like to work in a toffee factory as a toffee-taster, and when I said that would spoil his appetite for dinner, he replied, “I’d have toffee for dinner too!”

Of course there are other things besides diet that keep us well.  Here is a rhyme that reminds us of them:

Sleep, sunshine and fresh air,
Exercise and diet,
Are the five best doctors in the world,
And no one can deny it.

Now, God provides the sleep and the sunshine; you provide the exercise; and your parents provide the diet.  Or do they?  They see that you have all the bread you need, and they provide you with your meals.  And maybe sometimes your mother or father makes a cake, perhaps a birthday cake.  But bread and cakes are made for flour, and the flour comes from the wheat which grows in the fields.  But your parents do not make the wheat grow, nor does the farmer.  It grows because the seed that is sown has life in it, and it is God who gives it life.  If it were not for him, the seed would be as dead as sawdust, and so there would be no wheat, no flour, no bread and no birthday cakes.  And the same is true of all the food we eat – it is all a gift from God.

So you can see that it is God, just as much as your parents, who keeps your body well.