Seats, dessert and Jesus

"Finish that meatloaf," your mother tells you. "Eat your green beans. You haven't had the potatoes."

But all you want is dessert!

If Jesus was having dinner with you, He'd probably eat His meatloaf before He had dessert. In this week's Gospel (Luke 14:1,7-14), He talks about doing what you have to do to get the good stuff!

At a fancy dinner, Jesus watched people taking the best seats. "If you sit in the best seat," He told them, "the person giving the dinner might see another friend and tell you, `Give your seat to this person.' Then you'll have to take the worst seat. So take the worst seat right away; then, when your friend sees you, he'll say, `Here, take a better seat!' Those who take the best will be humbled, but people who are humble will be given great things."

If you don't like green beans, it's hard to make yourself eat them -- especially if you know there are brownies for dessert! You'd rather eat six brownies and no green beans.

The people who took the best seats at Jesus' dinner were like kids eating dessert. They didn't want to wait for someone to give them a good seat -- they wanted the best stuff right away!

If you eat only dessert instead of good food, your stomach will feel awful. If you do it enough times, you'll get sick, because your body needs different kinds of food to live, not just dessert!

The people who took good seats were like that. At first, it felt good for them to have the best stuff, but then they lost their seats to other people. Like getting sick from dessert, they ended up with nothing!

If you eat dinner first, you get dessert and your body stays healthy. The people Jesus met learned a lesson like that: If they took the stuff they didn't like, the bad seats, they'd end up with good seats later on!

In the story, Jesus was really talking about heaven. That's one place where you want to wait for a good seat -- because heaven is even better than dessert!

PRAYER FOR THE WEEK: Jesus, help me do the hard stuff I have to do, so I can get the good stuff later on! Amen.

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