This is Pastor Tim’s article appearing in the Evening Leader on Monday, Nov 25, 2019
We are approaching the time of year when we are thankful for things. Today I would like to point out something I am very thankful for – peanut butter. Now I know that you were probably thinking I would come up with something more profound than that, but as I sit here this afternoon considering the topic of my weekly article, peanut butter is truly something I am very thankful for.
Think about everything you can do with peanut butter. One of my favorite uses of peanut butter is making something wonderful out of something frightening. You see, at Halloween time, we are all frightened of witches and monsters. Well, you add just two ingredients, sand and peanut butter and that witch becomes a peanut butter sand-witch. What is frightening about that?
Celery – a completely useless watery vegetable without peanut butter. On the other end of the scale, the only think that makes ice cream better is to serve it with some peanut butter! Can you even eat toast without peanut butter? Apples, rice cakes and bananas are all begging to be served with peanut butter.
If you are a sissy, you can have creamy peanut butter, but I prefer peanut butter in its manly form, crunchy. Peter Pan is good, Skippy is also pretty good, even the Great Value brand from Wal-Mart is good. But, the best peanut butter on the market is Jif. Did you know that Jif peanut butter was never ever referred to as Jiffy peanut butter? That has been one of the great mysteries as to where the idea of Jiffy came from because it has never been called that.
But the application of peanut butter goes even further. Christmas is fudge and Buckeye season and peanut butter is a prime ingredient of those wonderful goodies. There is peanut butter pie, which is great washed down with a glass of milk. Peanut butter is also found in Little Debbie treats, Nutter Butter cookies, and brownies. You want to taste some of the most wonderful cereal on planet earth? You need a box of peanut butter Captain Crunch or Reese Puffs. Man, it hardly gets better than those.
Now I know that peanut butter is obviously not the healthiest food on the market, but there are far worse things you could eat. Peanut butter has protein, which is good if you have enough will power to practice portion control. That is much easier said than done.
Peanut butter was originally created in the late 1800s to be a protein source for people who had teeth and gum problems and had a hard time eating other sources of protein. In 1895, after James Kellogg began to market his famous corn flakes, he began to market an early form of peanut butter. The rest, as they say, is history.
This season I want you to consider a question with me. Are we working too hard to find something to be thankful for? Sure, there are certainly more important reasons to be thankful this season than peanut butter, but that doesn’t mean that these small blessings should be overlooked. Even if you don’t like or can’t eat peanut butter, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of small things in your life that you can be thankful for. This whole article came from the fact that I had an apple and peanut butter for lunch today and the Jif container is sitting by my computer on my desk. Do I have more important things to be thankful for? Of course, I do. But that doesn’t give me the right to overlook this obvious example sitting right here on my desk.
How many opportunities to be thankful have you overlooked already today?