More than Food for Thought

I read food blogs. Lots and lots of food blogs. I can’t help it – truly food is a wonderful thing. I am currently hankering over a cheesecake galette from the Smitten Kitchen as well as every healthy thing you can imagine from the Whole30 Instagram feed. Two polar opposites, but food is a long arm of personality (at least I think so), so it makes sense that these two opposites appeared on my plate (no pun intended).

As I was reading the Instagram posts that detail each new recipe for its followers, I noticed a lot of things. First, most of the commenters are women (my gender is always in a mad rush to be healthy), and second, I noticed this mantra that following the Whole30 will change your life.

This interested me. Change your life, eh? And it had me wondering. Can someone’s problems be so small and trite that changing a diet would instantly solve them all? Could you become completely different just be eating differently? The short and long answer to this is no. A firm no. There is no diet potent and powerful enough to impact you in such a way that it changes you completely from beginning to end. It just isn’t possible. Food is not that powerful. YES, it does evidently have some power, but only as a tool of entertainment or as a means of self-preservation. We all know that if you don’t eat, you’ll die. But in and of itself, food taken on a daily basis cannot change you. It can’t take away your mistakes and it can’t solve your problems. It can change your blood sugar to erase your temporary bad mood, but it isn’t able to change your thought process nor your personality.

And so I continued to read comment after comment. “The Whole30 will change your life!”, “I finally read all the testimonials and I too became convinced so now I’m trying this out!” “I’m so excited about doing the Whole30…I think it will make me into a new person!” And so forth and so on.

While I don’t doubt that going on a very strict diet that allows no sugar, grains or dairy of any kind will definitely revolutionize your health and change your outlook on some things, there’s no way it can change who you are. There’s no way it can take your life from going one way and do a 180 so it goes in the opposite direction.

Since this is the case the question bears asking: why are so many people obsessed with diets and convinced that going on one will change them completely? And alternately, why do so many of these people, when confronted with the knowledge of Jesus, completely reject it? As a society, why are we so eager to wholeheartedly believe in a diet or a type of lifestyle while completely forgoing the only thing that will lead us to the right place in eternity? I’ve seen so many people who were so eager to share the news about their diet and how it had changed their life…why aren’t Christians sharing the same testimonies about Jesus? Is it because He’s changed us and we forgot how we were, or is it because we really have not changed?

Something to think on certainly as this scenario applies to me (full confession: I have done a Whole30 but I actually did not think it was life-changing). This reliance on diets and a way of eating as making you “clean” (pun intended) cannot, for the Christian, substitute spiritual rightness and a spiritual way of living. We must have the fruits of the Spirit working in our lives as this is more important than eating fruits and vegetables (pun AGAIN, I wonder if the Lord used food in the Bible for a reason; I’m sure He did). 

Satisfaction

“I can’t get no sa-tis-faction”. That’s the way the song goes, right? It’s one of those random songs that everyone knows it really makes no sense at all if you think about it.

To be honest, so many of those older songs don’t make sense at all. Take Yellow Submarine for example. I mean, what is that song really about? “We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine”. No one actually lives in a submarine. They might exist in one, certainly. We all can exist in one but living connotes that you take up more than just existence, that you make it your permanent place of residence. And no one would do that in a submarine. It simply is not possible. Plus I think you would eventually go mad from the claustrophobia.

Anyway, tangent aside, last night I heard a sermon preached on satisfaction and it caused me to wonder. The precise message of the sermon was along the lines that satisfaction is your enemy. It’s the enemy of your soul, the enemy of revival, the enemy of the pursuit of greatness. And that message is true. But the whole goal of our lives appears to be satisfaction, right? We climb persistently and insistently toward the top of a mountain we really can’t even name and our intent is to reach that goal. Reaching that goal will satisfy us. Satisfaction is what the American Dream was built around – the idea that a two story house in the suburbs with the nuclear family intact and a dog and a cat will bring you contentment. That American dream is supposed to settle your longing for more and I think for many people it does.

But what about the others? There existed in times past and to be sure, these people exist today, a selection of people who were not content to remain idly by. Who believed the world would be better if dreams were pursued and spectacular plans made and carried out. Many of these people history writes down to madness. And yes, I’m sure some of them were. Some had ideas that were reprehensible, yet pursued passionately. We remember them by the tragedies that followed in their wakes – the Red Terror, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Crusades, the list continues. These people were not satisfied but reached for the wrong things. Success in their minds was an evil and twisted picture.

What happens though, when people are not satisfied with the good that surrounds them and pursue betterment (the right kind) relentlessly? I would wager to say that beauty happens. The crossing of the Pilgrims to America, the creation of the Constitution of the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation, the scores of music that have been written since the dawn of time, and the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling…there are always beautiful things that were created by people who were not content to just be ordinary.

To not just be ordinary, to reject satisfaction and the status quo, one must give of themselves. It’s not enough to pronounce yourself extraordinary. It’s not enough to take that label and affix it to yourself in the hopes that speaking the word will fulfill the prophecy, no, one must act. One must dream and not listen to the naysayers. Naysayers sit on the walls and croak out things and words of discouragement. Or worse, a naysayer will encourage you but not actually mean anything by it.

In addition to ignoring the naysayers, we must not naysay ourselves. We must feel the urge to be better deep down inside. We all must have the drive to seek more, to be better, the fire must come from within before it can flame into someone else’s life. There is no point in thinking about a fire if you cannot keep it burning inside yourself.

Another thing about not seeking satisfaction is learning that sometimes the biggest dreams come true in the smallest ways. In fact, I think they usually come true in that fashion. How many times has a pastor dreamed of a thousand-soul revival? Probably several hundred thousand times over the course of human existence. But note that the thousand soul revival did not come with a bang, it came with a small series of explosions. A Bible study taught here, an all-night prayer meeting there, a day-long fast done once a week. Nothing big was ever built on big things. Even Rome was built not in a day, but in a series of loads of bricks and mortar and one person at a time. Nothing that was done for God was done in one big bang and then the process was complete. Even David had to kill a lion and a bear before he could kill a giant. There is always a season of preparation that a dreamer must go through.

The road to satisfaction should end at Heaven’s pearly gates. It simply won’t do to reach the threshold before then.

Today, July 7, 2016

I had a thought today (I have them every day, thankfully). There are so many times that our American life seems to be enough for people. We have everything we want (within reason) and we are far more abundantly blessed than what most of our ancestors ever dreamed was possible. Very few of us go hungry, we all have somewhere to sleep at night…within reason, we have enough money to satisfy our immediate desires. There’s very little American people need.

But this is not enough. To have the needs of your body met is good and well, but the needs of your soul far outweigh the needs of the body. The needs of the soul are eternal and cannot be ignored. There are many times when we can sit on our laurels and feel as though we have really made it. I see people every single day who think they have made it. I work with them and so do you. We also go to school with them, live next door to them, chat to them about the weather at the grocery store line, and sit near them at restaurants. They are the people we all see every day who, sadly, believe in the delusion that life is satisfied when the roof over your head is x amount of square feet and your car has x amount of features on it and there’s money in the bank.

This is such an easy delusion to buy into. Life is nothing but a series of checkboxes and once you have completed them all you die and…then what? What happens next?

We are so wrong in our thinking, in our preconceived notions that life is really about what’s on this earth. It’s not. This terra firma won’t last forever and when it does, where will you go? How are you living your life to make sure you go to the right place?

Unlike life where the series of choices you can make are endless, eternity only offers two: heaven or hell. This life offers you the option to live for either. That’s simply all it is. Yes, we live and laugh and breathe and enjoy things, but the main focus of it all needs to be on our Savior, on the One who made our blessings possible. Let us guard so carefully what he has given us and not be careless when it comes to caring for our eternity. 

Today, July 5, 2016 - Is He Enough?

Last week my feet led me to that black money pit, aka the mall. There’s nothing special about this as I habit the mall frequently. But anyway, for once I decided to not focus so much on shopping and I instead started looking around at the people in the stores. Usually people watching is not my gig; it’s occasionally too depressing. Everyone seems so unhappy. But this time I just wanted to see the expressions of the women who were shopping in the stores. Peering at them, I all saw variations of the same thing: desperation, discontentment, and hunted, harried faces. Everyone in there was desperately searching for something…if only they could find it.

I understand that when you’re perusing racks in a store, your facial expressions do not really share the best about you. Yes. But the discontent on each person’s face said so much more than anything else. It was as if they were dissatisfied with themselves and what they were looking at.

And, to be quite honest, I understood the feelings. There have been many, many times in my life where I was frantically searching for something in a store, certain that if I just had something new to wear that everything would be fine and that the feelings of irritation at my own flaws would fade and dissipate…if ONLY I could get the mirror to look how I wanted it to. I know for a fact that I’m not the only woman who feels this way on occasion. But I have to ask myself the question: why?

There seems to be a thought that correlates in women’s minds, and true, not just women’s minds but primarily in that category, and it goes along the lines of: I either can’t/won’t/am not able to change my situation so I do what I can and I change the outside. How many times has a woman tried to mask what she felt on the inside by pasting a fraud on her outside? How many times do we hide our insecurities, our flaws, our failures, the disagreeable parts of our temperaments with something artificial and shallow like a new haircut or color or shade of lipstick? How many times do we reach inside the dissatisfaction bottle and pull out a new change to hide it?

This happens more often than we would like to admit. For some of us, it happens every day. That restless, gnawing dissatisfaction with what we have and how we look. And there really is no true cure for it. You can buy until you’ve maxed out every card. Fix your hair until you’re blue in the face. You can change everything you possibly can in the book about yourself but until you dig down deep and go to the heart of the matter, no cure will satisfy.

Our hearts all beat with the same desires: to be heard, to be loved, to love back, to become something and to have a purpose. We were all created with a drive, the same humanistic drive that leads us to always push farther and push faster. But this drive should not always correspond to the outside. A drive to change should be channeled inward and upward. The only meaningful change can come through an experience with the One who never changes, and whose grace and mercy is enough. Nothing needs to be added, nothing needs to be modified to make Him better – God is simply enough.

I want Him to be enough for me today and for every day.

”Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” John 4: 13-14