During January 2012, I was in Costa Rica, living in shared housing while volunteering for a sea turtle conservation project. One afternoon, one of my colleagues complained of a stomachache multiple times for more than an hour. He eventually attributed it to some salsa and chips we had shared earlier. After that comment, I started to get a knot in my stomach, too. I realized I needed to pray to protect myself.
Because our work was mostly at night, I had a lot of time during the day for prayer, and for study of the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. I recalled that the Christian Science Bible Lesson that week included the story of Daniel and the three Hebrew boys who were brought to King Nebuchadnezzar’s court to be fed and nurtured with the king’s food and wine (see Daniel 1:1–20).
However, they did not want to eat the king’s nonkosher food and wine, and they convinced their keeper to give them a ten-day trial of eating vegetables and water. After those ten days, they were “fairer and fatter” than the boys who had eaten the king’s food, showing that the type of food they ate did not affect their well-being.
