How This Food Network Star Came to Faith: ‘It Was So Beautiful’
Movieguide® Contributor
Food Network star Aarti Sequeira happily shared her come-to-faith moment with GROWING PAINS actor Kirk Cameron.
“The community I’m from in India is Catholic. It was part of the Portuguese Empire and so Sequeira is the name, apparently, of the priest that converted us,” the chef told Cameron on TAKEAWAYS. “But it was always sort of theoretical. It wasn’t in my heart.”
“After we got married, my husband and I started going to church, and that was when I really heard the gospel properly for the first time because I did not understand this concept of grace. I did not understand why Jesus had to die. I didn’t understand what it had to do with me.”
But one day, she attended church and felt something while she was worshipping.
“I closed my eyes and I bowed my head and…I saw a set of eyes and they were amber and fiery but loving and compassionate and I felt two hands. It felt like a weight on my shoulders, and it was like there was a man standing in front of me with his hands on my shoulders, looking deep into my eyes, going, ‘I know everything about you, and I still love you. I see you head to toe and I love you,’ and that was it for me, you know…I still get, like, choked up about it because who am I for Him to see me and know me and love me, you know?”
“And it was so beautiful,” she continued, “and I remember I got baptized a couple of months ago, and I still didn’t even know what I was doing…I hadn’t read the Bible…but it just took me over, and it is my BC and after Christ, like, you know what I mean? …This is my life now.”
Food Network host Aarti Sequeira joined Candace Cameron Bure on her podcast to talk about how she came to faith in Jesus…
READ MORE: FOOD NETWORK STAR AARTI SEQUEIRA REVEALS MOMENT SHE MET GOD
As a chef, she finds ways to connect her faith to her food.
“Jesus specifically used food so often in breaking bread so often to teach people about Himself and about the kingdom…and so I believe that every time we break bread with people, we’re touching that a little bit. Right? Like we’re using that same strategy. Like you can talk to people in parables or you could invite them over for dinner.”
“And to me, I’ve just been able to have really wonderful honest conversations with people around the table, and when I’ve made the food for them, it’s almost like I’m taking the intimacy of my heart and I’m putting it on the table,” she said. “Then some it’s going into your mouth and your body and down to your heart too. It’s very intimate.”
One of Sequeira’s favorite Bible stories is when David invited Saul’s son to dinner, which cleared the way for forgiveness to happen.
“I remember reading that and just sobbing, that you could communicate so much through just inviting someone to come sit at the table with you,” she said. “What mattered is that David said, ‘Come, I know everything; I know you’re scared, and I know you’re worried about your future, but I’m going to take care of you.’ And he said all of that through just eating with him.”
As Sequeira goes throughout her day, she finds that she’s “a mess” before dinnertime. So she spends her time praying before she prepares food.
“We pray before we eat, but I pray before I cook because I’m like, I know I’m coming to this moment and I could just blow through this and be really hurried and ungrateful and everything,” she said. “When I pray, everything that I need, I find in that moment when I’m cooking.”
Sequeira has had a lot of success as a Food Network chef and has even taught a few celebrities how to cook, like Selena Gomez.
“The Selena Gomez one, I was really excited to be asked to do it and then it turned into not only are you going to teach Selena Gomez how to make a dish, you’re actually going to teach her to do an entire Thanksgiving spread, and it’s going to be its own stand-alone episode, and I was like, ‘Lord, what in the world?’ Everybody else is doing one dish. I have to do turkey, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, all of those,” the chef said.
“The thing that I wanted most out of that was to be able to connect with her,” Sequiera continued. “It’s what I want always is to connect with people, and we had a moment. I don’t know if it made the show, where we talked about faith.”
“She told me her favorite Bible verse and I told her my favorite Bible verse,” Sequeira recalled with a smile.
The chef said that before she became a Christian, she worshipped herself and hard work.
“But nothing has given me peace like the message of Christ,” she said.
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