(Sorry I missed last week and sorry this one is late. Last week I was really busy and this week I just didn’t get to it this morning.)
As most people who know me are obviously aware I can get a little bit passionate about certain things. Now, this is a blessing and a curse bc I am human! I can get incredibly passionate about incredibly foolish things. Movies I enjoy, a book I read, a tv show I’ve seen, a food I like… yes I can get passionate about almost anything!
And I get so frustrated with myself at how much time, thought, and emotion can get wasted over the most foolish and trivial of things. And I begin to wonder if I’m alone in this struggle.
Nope.
We’ve all probably heard about the grown women who spend tons of money to fly around the world to see a movie star and shake his hand for 1 minute. Or the people who spent hours one night watching a certain tv show and just couldn’t turn it off and as soon as they get home from work they intend to turn it back on.. Or you can read any amount of information over the smallest minutia on the internet (and you wonder who has the time to not only type it all up but figure it out in the first place???).
We are a society filled to overflowing with detail after detail about things that don’t really matter and may not even be real!
Why?
Why do we spend so much time here? I LOVE this quote from CS Lewis. “Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
… Deny it food and it will gobble poison…
Since I so readily consume the poison, how much real food am I eating? If any at all?
To ask it another way, how much do I really know of God when my attention is so easily turned from Him to a tv character that doesn’t even exist? I’m not sure I like the answer to that question.
In the Hebrew culture to know someone really means a form of intimacy with that person and his/her ways. For instance, in a marriage relationship when you know your wife she can get pregnant. That is intimate. So, how intimate are you with God? How much real food have you been eating lately?
May we learn to differentiate between the food and the poison that surrounds us. May we learn to truly value what is eternal and be able to truly enjoy the temporary by putting it in its proper place. May we as a body and as individuals become intimate with God Most High, and therefore, be unable to settle for anything less.
May Jesus become all to us.