Frog Legs in Heaven

My mother grew up on a farm in southern Indiana, the eldest of seven children. She hunted squirrels, set rabbit traps, and caught frogs, which she skinned, butchered, then fried in flour, salt and pepper, and then ate.

My mother was Catholic, my father Lutheran, but when they got married, they converted to another Christian faith, the

, which preached that Jesus had come to fulfill the law, not to do away with it. This meant that the laws of the Old Testament, including the prohibitions against “unclean” or “non-kosher” animals were still upheld. No more squirrels, rabbits, frogs, or turtle soup for either of my parents, or for any of their kids.

Over the years, my father would randomly say to my mother, “I guess you really miss your frog legs. I know you liked ‘em an awful lot, and now you can’t have ‘em any more.”

Though she usually ignored these little digs, one time my mother replied, “Maybe there will be frog legs in heaven.”

“No, there won’t be,” the keeper of heaven said, shaking his head. “They aren’t clean.”

“Maybe God will make them clean in heaven,” my mother countered.

“No,” my father insisted. “He can’t.”

“With God, all things are possible,” my mother concluded.

“Yes, all things are possible, but God wouldn’t do that.”

My mother is ever hopeful, ever trusting, and believing in the power of God to make the unacceptable acceptable. Just as she tends not to like it when distinctions are drawn between ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ whether with reference to animals or to people, she assumes that God, too, accepts everyone at face value, regardless of their presumed value or lack thereof.

We were the only family in our community to attend the Worldwide Church of God. There were any number of sacrifices that I was willing to make, and did make, for my faith, and being quite different from our immediate family and friends was just one. Frog legs, pork, shellfish–didn’t touch ‘em. We also didn’t celebrate Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, or Halloween–pagan origins.

We understood that Jesus was Jewish and we believed that the Law had not been nailed to the cross when Jesus was crucified. Thus, like the first-century Christians, we observed Saturday as the Sabbath, and we went to church on Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Passover, and Sukkot.

We weren’t supposed to watch “Bewitched” or “I Dream of Jeannie”–demonic. However, when the church banned make-up as harlotish and Jezebelish, I began to kick up a fuss. For someone like me, with my white eyelashes, mascara was not an optional luxury. It was a necessity.

Continued on page 2: Why should I feel guilty about Jesus' death? »