Years ago a pastor friend was recounting a story of a missions trip he took to China. He found himself hiking over mountains to reach out-of-the way villages and dodging local authorities. But the most harrowing incident occurred over lunch one day when some Chinese hosts served him a regional gourmet delicacy: a beetle.

Now, my friend is not an adventurous eater. He’s a native of Pittsburgh, and in Pittsburgh, there are only four food groups: pizza, sausage, ketchup (Heinz is there), and beer. He typically abstained from the latter, leaving him a pretty limited diet. Let’s just say large insects weren’t a part of it.

“So what did you do?” I asked him.

“I ate the beetle,” he said.

Every so often we come across those situations where we know what the right thing to do is. But there’s nothing in us that actually wants to do it. (If there is, we can’t find it. Come to think of it, moments like that seem to come up more often on cross-cultural trips. I’ve eaten my share of unappetizing cuisine in other countries – heart, tongue, kidney. And that’s just in Europe! They eat a lot of strange stuff in France.)

But eat-the-beetle moments happen all the time. For me these days, the biggest one is making one of those really difficult phone calls.

What is it for you?

Forgiving so-and-so?

Following through on that special offering God asked you to give?

So what should we do when we find one of those creepy crawly things on the plate in front of us?

Eat the beetle.