The *Dumb* Introduction to Formed for Fellowship + Winners of the Book Giveaway + A Free Audiobook of Formed for Fellowship.
Plus an excerpt from the book that I had to fight to the death to keep. (Not really, JK)
My friend JT told me it was dumb. When I started writing Formed for Fellowship: Becoming what you Behold, I told him I was going to mention the obscure German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach in the introduction of the book.
His response? “Kyle, that’s dumb. Please don’t do that. Nobody cares about dead German philosophers.”
But guess what? I did. I want the readers of Sacred Slang to get to read it first. So here you go, an excerpt from my dumb introduction to Formed for Fellowship.
I only remember one thing from high school health class. Don’t judge my teacher. He was there to coach football, not teach health, and I was there to pass notes to my friends, not learn anatomy. But despite his disinterest in the subject and my distraction from it, I remember one thing he said that sounded profound at the time: “You are what you eat.”
He pointed to a picture of the food pyramid (look it up if you’ve never heard of it - it is a real thing) and said, “You are what you eat. If you eat pizza, ice cream, and candy all day, your body will begin to look like those foods.” At first, I was startled. Like almost all high school boys, my diet consisted mostly of pizza, hamburgers, soda, chips, and candy. The thought of turning into a gummy bear sounded both disastrous and delicious. But it turns out, as you might already know (because you listened in health class), body composition and diet are a lot more complicated than this.
For a long time, I thought “you are what you eat,” was just a way to discourage us from eating too much of the wrong kinds of foods, but what very few people know is this quote did not begin its journey into our conversations as a statement about our diet, it began as a statement about our existence. Specifically, it was objecting to the Christian view of our existence. It turns out my health class had become a school of philosophy, which surely would have boggled the mind of that teacher just trying to make it to after school practice if he had realized he stumbled upon something more fundamental than food.
The quote originates with a German philosopher named Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach was no fan of Christianity. Not at all. He was what we call a “materialist.” He believed all we are is matter. For Feuerbach, there is nothing beyond the material world: no God; no heaven; no soul. So, when he said, “Man is what he eats.” He didn’t mean that if you ate a donut, you’d begin to look like a donut (thank heavens!). He meant you and the donut are the same thing. You both are matter. Nothing more and nothing less.
Thankfully, Feuerbach was wrong. We aren’t what we eat. We are more than matter. We humans are creatures made in the image of God, composed of body and soul. We were made with a purpose. We are not becoming what we eat, but we are becoming something. We were created to grow and change, to become.
You tell me - does it work? Do you want to read a bit more? I hope so, if for no other reason than proving JT wrong.
Here is the deal when you do a giveaway: People scroll real quick to see who the winners are - ignoring everything else. So, let me make it easy for you:
New Subscriber Winners: (Since Substack only gives me your emails and I didn’t want to share them here with almost a thousand strangers - I had to do some guesswork to get your names. Forgive any misspellings.)
Crandall Hemphill
Vanessa Schwertz
Brie Boateng
Greg Macmillan
Ryne Fullerton
Subscribers “who shared” winners:
Matt
Tyler English
To all the winners: Congrats! I will be emailing you to get your mailing address and get those copies in the mail to you all in the next week or so.
But for everyone else…I have a way for you to get something free as well…
If you pre-order a physical copy of Formed for Fellowship, you will get access to the audiobook for free. That’s right. It’s basically a “buy one get one.” So you could:
Preorder a copy of Formed and give the physical copy to a friend.
Preorder a copy of Formed and use the physical copy as a doorstop.
Preorder a copy of Formed and use the physical copy as a frisbee.
Just think of all the possibilities? You can preorder the book anywhere and qualify for the free audiobook.
Here you can find a link to every place you can preorder the book (including the Bezos bookstore.
And here is where you can go to get the free audiobook.
