Thank you for listening to the Allender Center podcast.

I'm Dr. Dan Allender.

And I'm Rachel Clinton-Centen.

We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world.

And restoration for the heart.

Thank you for joining us.

Let's get this conversation started.

Thank you for joining us. Let's get this conversation started. Well, our last time together, we put words to the reality that we are in a war with food.

But I think it's so important that my dear friends Matt Temeier, Diane Summers, hi, guys. Thank you for coming back.

Hello there. Hi. So you put well the fact that we are at war with food. We're at actually war with shame with regard to our bodies, including the interplay between our sexuality and eating, both

involve desire, pleasure.

And, Matt, you put it so well that food sometimes gets named as sinful, decadent, over-indulgent.

And in naming that, it's a link that I want us to come back to before we jump into a whole new topic.

So could you take us a little further in the connection between desire, shame, our bodies, food, and sexuality?

No big deal in just a moment or two, right?

Yeah, 30 seconds or so.

As long as you wish. Well, as we've spoken about earlier, these are very parallel desires within us in many ways. We're meant to have them. We're meant to experience goodness from them.

I think we're meant to experience the delight of God through our sexuality and through,

as Diane said earlier, our taste buds, the things that we've been given to give us such a

tremendous, nuanced sense of engagement

with our world.

And as we think about how darkness wants to get involved with this and invade it, I think that

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