For the love of bacon

As I was working yesterday I walked by the meat counter, and saw a little pink sign that labels all sale items, stating with pure joy and heavenly trumpets that their bulk, thick-cut bacon was on sale for $2.99 a pound.  I thought to myself, Jacob.  This is your lucky day.  

Once I clocked out, I went straight to the meat department, anticipating with joy and excitement, my two pounds of bacon that I was going to purchase.  I thought, man what could be better than bacon?

And then an image went into my head piercing me like Cupid’s arrow.  So straight and so true.  The response was so rapid and immediate that I knew it could only be divine: 

Bacon wrapped in bacon. 

I stood there stunned, almost paralyzed at the thought.  It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.  Because what is the one ingredient that makes any food - without any hyperbole - one hundred million times better? Bacon!  So the only way bacon can be improved – in an odd cannibalistic type of way – is by bacon itself.  And then I got an even more specific image: make a crispy piece of bacon and then wrap it with a chewy piece of bacon.  Like a candy cane of swine sweetness.

The meat guy was looking back at me with a gleam in his eye.  I could feel my heart pulsing, my hands were a little clammy, and my knees were trembling.  And he gave me a look that asked, Two pounds, only two pounds? And if I knew better I swore he winked at me. I pondered this and I said to myself, he’s right.  Better make it four.   But I had to stop myself, cause I really think I would have passed out, so I said three.  Three pounds.

As a composer conducts his orchestra he wrapped them all up in the purest of white butcher paper, and handed them over to me like an Olympic torchbearer.  I looked him straight in the eye and said, “God bless you.”  And he was about to respond but I could see he was getting a little emotional.  He paused and with a tear in his eye he said, “No, God bless you.” 

And as I literally skipped my way to the check out line I thought of those two thousand years of existence and the Israelites, a nation without bacon.  I wondered of God, and how he could allow his own people not to enjoy one of the most profoundly delicious miracles of life.  I pursued this more, and concluded that yes, salvation is the best thing about the coming of Christ.  But God does wants us to know the freedom and the gift of salvation, in that through the law we are dead – no bacon.  But through the sacrifice of Christ he has made all things clean… first and foremost our sinful nature, but then a pretty close second… pigs.  And with that I could not help but glorify my God all the more.