
But as I got older, and read my church's supplementary writings to the Bible, by Ellen White, I was told that we should change to eating the diet prescribed in Genesis 2:29. Here God gives the Edenic couple permission to eat only from the seed-bearing plants and the trees whose fruit had seeds in it. It was veggie time.
Then one day, I read Mark 7:18-19. Here Jesus says, "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean?' For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body". And then it says "In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean."
Well, this certainly was a disturbing revelation, seeing how it contradicted the teachings of my church.
And since we were Seventh-day Adventists, we couldn't eat in a restaurant on Sabbath, because Exodus 20:8 told us that on the seventh day, Saturday, we couldn't allow any manservant, maidservant or even our animals to work. So on one Saturday, our family found ourselves in Los Angeles, hungry on the Sabbath. We couldn't go into a restaurant. And so we found some vending machines that would give us change and allow us to buy crackers and candy and pop. LOL.
At the age 40, realizing what a confused crock of hogwash this all was, sitting in a restaurant in Sun Valley, Idaho, we looked at each other and decided to exercise our sovereignty. Judy and I enjoyed a wonderful shrimp cocktail, while our boys gasped and watched their parents eating these weird looking little creatures.
Even today, the freedom to go into any restaurant, on any day, and eat anything on the menu is a feature of "taking back our sovereignty" which I truly enjoy.