By: Parie Drechsel

I’ve always enjoyed eating healthy foods. My mother helped me understand good nutrition and raised me on healthy foods, lots of vegetables, beans and rice and those kinds of foods. I naturally enjoyed that. When I married, I tried to prepare healthy foods for my family, and as time went on, I worked harder at doing that.

I’ve also always loved the Word of Wisdom, but I’ve questioned the “eat meat sparingly” advice throughout the years. I would ask my husband, James, “What do you think this means?” I wondered why God would tell us to eat meat sparingly when we as a Church don’t do that. Sometimes, I’d limit meat to just twice a week or otherwise cut it down. I was confused, but I don’t think I ever prayed about it. I think I didn’t want to give up meat. It kind of scared me.

Last October (2013), my sister, Jane Birch, came to visit for a week. Because I enjoy cooking, I enjoyed modifying my recipes to cook whole food, plant-based foods for her. I knew it was healthy and thought it was great she was eating that way, but I really didn’t feel ready to do that. I felt it would be very drastic. I felt like I was already doing a lot to feed my family healthy foods. We were eating whole grains and vegetables, and I had cut out a lot of white stuff: white flour and white sugar. A whole food, plant-based diet seemed too radical.

Then on the Sunday when my sister was here, I suddenly had a prompting to not eat meat. I was kind of bothered by this, and I certainly did not tell my sister! I kept wondering why I was feeling that way and why the feeling didn’t go away. By that evening I decided, “OK, I’m not going to eat meat. Fine.” And then that unhappy feeling I had went away, and I felt peaceful.

I realized I’d have to tell my husband. I was nervous, but when I told him, he seemed OK with it. So we decided to not eat meat. I think I may have told him it would just be for a little bit, but really in my heart I felt it would be forever. At some point I said to him, “Honey, instead of just trying it out, we are going to do this.” And he said “OK.” Because it was a spiritual prompting, he was willing to go along with it.

A few days later, I cleaned all of the meat out of my freezer and took it to the neighbor family who are on a special diet with lots of meat. The mother had just purchased a quarter of a cow, so I doubted she’d want all of mine, but she said she would love it. When she asked what we were doing, I said, “We decided to try vegetarian.” She asked, “You aren’t going to do that scary vegan stuff are you?” I replied, “Oh no! But my sister does that. She doesn’t eat oil either.” My neighbor seemed very shocked!

I went away feeling very excited to be vegetarian. Later that night while I was cooking, I had a feeling, “We can do this. We can go vegan.” I felt the Lord telling me, “This is a good thing. You can do this.” I called my sister Jane to tell her.

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