A few days ago I attended a luncheon for Oklahoma Healthy Business. It is a group that recognizes businesses in Oklahoma that are working toward achieving health and wellness for their employees. I joined a table of women. Only a few of them knew each other but it didn’t take long for the conversation to be centered on food. I have to admit the chocolate swirl cheesecake at each setting definitely was what steered the conversation. First, it was about the hypocrisy of rewarding healthy businesses with cheesecake and then to the calories that was in that cheesecake. I sat and listened to their conversation. It seemed they were all involved in Weight Watchers and started figuring out points for that lovely dessert and then started guessing what was for lunch. They jokingly said lasagna. Sure enough, they guessed right. It had some veggies and chicken in it so I am sure it was healthy ‽ I continued listening to the women talk. (I know some of you are shocked I can listen to them without talking!) I picked up on some phrases that showed me their commitment to their weight loss journey. It was apparent they all wanted to lose weight but the world ‘health’ was never spoken. Also, they were adamant that if food tasted good, they could not eat it. Everything they had to eat was inferior. I think this way of thinking is a means of sabotaging yourself. We mess up our taste buds with all the crap (I am sorry, I just don’t know a better word for it) we put in our bodies. When everything we have eaten for years is loaded with fat and man made chemicals, our view of good tasting gets marred. My translation of their phrase is, “Everything that God made for us to eat taste bad but everything man has made is great!” I do not believe God makes inferior food. If we have lost the taste for a sweet juicy piece of fruit but can get satisfaction from a calorie packed, fat laden candy bar, our mind and taste buds needs to be refreshed. When we stop eating the bad stuff, we start to taste the sweetness in a piece of fruit. I started enjoying my vegetables. I learned to enjoy the creaminess of yogurt. Now the bad stuff doesn’t taste so good! When this process happens, your new way of eating becomes a lifestyle and not a weight loss project that ends when the goal is hit. Also, to become a lifestyle, it has to be continued for the goal of ‘good health’. If you always feel you are giving up everything good and have to endure the inferior foods in life and if you think you are doing it for only a weight goal, you will not make it a lifestyle and you will continue to yoyo your weight.
We see people yoyo their spiritual walk as well. They realize that their life is in chaos and they need God to fix it all. They start going to church and attending Bible studies. Then the stress of life starts to minimize. They begin to miss all the things they think are fun; you know, the things that brought the stress and chaos to begin with. Before too long, they are out of church and back to old ways. Soon the chaos and stress returns. Then the process starts over again. The problem is that God isn’t their lifestyle. He is someone to fix their problems. They see His ways as inferior to the world’s way. It is never about a long term relationship with Jesus, they only focus on the short term. When walking with Jesus is your lifestyle, you commit yourself to God’s path for your spiritual and emotional health, not just to get quick fixes. You realize that your desire for God has been marred because you have fed too long on the emptiness of the world. The more you consume Him, the more the world loses its appeal. Soon your desire for the food of God is all you care about. You continue to serve Him for your health and the amazing thing is; you have less things in life that needs fixing!
So here is what I want you to do. God helping you:Take your everyday, ordinary life-- your sleeping, eating, going- to -work, and walking around life-- and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what He wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Romans 12: 1-2 (The Message)
2 comments:
The scripture you quoted today gave me goose-bumps!! In the words of a Pastor I once knew ;) "Good stuff"
When you said if you start eating the good stuff and later the bad stuff won't taste so good....it is so true. I remember being able to go eat at Taco Bell, KFC and those places and thinking it was so good but I tried to eat some of that stuff recently and I pretty much spit it out and said it tastes like crap!!
I love the scripture it is such a great reminder to give EVERYTHING to God. :-)
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