An Unbalanced Diet

Courtesy darrfalls.blogspot.com

We miss out on a lot if our spiritual diet is unbalanced.

I recently had a conversation with my wife about social media and it got me thinking.  Depending on what friends one has on Facebook you can read a lot of different things.  For example, my friends list and the pages I like tend to be religious in nature and therefore my news feed tends to contain mainly religious items: Bible verses, quotations from religious authors, and of course, religious memes.  One could get a lot of religious/inspirational reading done by going through my feed.  Which is all well and good, but if all your religious/inspirational reading is done on places such as facebook and twitter, then we would miss out on a lot.  We could also end up suffering the consequences like Rehoboam.

Rehoboam's Folly

You may not know who Rehoboam was, but I'm pretty sure you've heard of his father, Solomon.  Rehoboam became king of Israel after his father's death.  Long story short, Rehoboam took the advice from only the people he chose, and he chose the wrong people.  As a result, he lost the allegiance of eleven of the twelve tribes, and divided the kingdom.  While we may not suffer such dramatic consequences as he did, we suffer just the same.  We suffer from spiritual malnutrition.

Spiritual Malnutrition

When we get our spiritual insight primarily from facebook posts, twitter feeds, etc., we snack instead of eating meals. When we snack, we seldom get full, or the nutrition we need.  Leaving us empty and poorly equipped for proper spiritual growth. What we need are full meals.

Keeping with the food analogy when we rely upon other people for our spiritual nutrition, it is similar to eating processed food.  Sure it may taste good, but processed food is nutritionally unbalanced; often containing excess of one ingredient or another.  What we read/eat may contain too much law or not enough love, or they may be tainted with artificial ingredients (human opinions).  The best way to manage our spiritual diet is the same as the best way  to manage our physical diet.  Prepare it ourselves with a variety of natural ingredients.

The Best Diet

The best spiritual diet comes straight from the Bible.  The more we study it, the more widely we read it, the better off we will be.  Take time to read the entire Bible.  I know that may sound intimidating because of the size of the book, but as the saying goes, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.  Many Bible reading plans exist that enable the reader to read the entire Bible in one year, often with only reading about 15-20 minutes a day.  Why read the entire Bible?  By doing so, it allows us to make the connections between the parts of the Bible.  To read only one part of the Bible is like eating only one kind of food, making us malnourished.

Your Part

I've given you enough to chew on for now (pun intended).   Now go and try it for yourself. 

Unfinished Business

Courtesy wikipedia.com

There is nothing wrong with leaving a task unfinished.

This post continues along a similar theme as my last one in which I paused to consider accomplishing small tasks in favor of large ones.  Today I'm taking it one step further in asking you to consider accomplishing no task.  That's right, I'm talking about giving up.

A long time ago, I came across a book about Michelangelo.  My favorite sculpture has to be the one picture above in which Mary cradles a recently crucified Jesus on her lap.  I marveled at how the folds and wrinkles in the fabric looked like actual folds and wrinkles in fabric and not in marble.  Then further along in the book I discovered something else altogether.  A collection of photographs of his many unfinished sculptures.  Yes, even someone as talented as Michelangelo gave up on a project once in awhile.

Michelangelo could have thought about all the time that he put into those sculptures, and finished them in order not to let that time go to waste, but he did not think that way.  The sculptures didn't go the way he wanted so he gave up on them and moved on to something else.  We can get a lot more accomplished if we follow a similar route.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about giving up every time a project gets challenging.  However, I'm sure if we took a long, honest look at the projects we currently have on our "Unfinished Business" list, some of them could be erased with no real loss to our quality of life.

Let's face facts.  We only have a finite amount of time and ability to accomplish what we want/need to accomplish.  By giving up on some of the unfinished business in our lives it makes space to focus on other tasks and relationships.  The most important of these of course being our relationship with God.  We can rest from our unfinished business knowing that He always finishes what He starts, and what He finishes are always masterpieces.

Take it Easy

Courtesy rushtheiceberg.com

Sometimes the harder we try, the less we get done.

I decided recently that I wanted to get back to posting regularly on this blog.  I started writing, but kept getting stuck.  I got frustrated because I would start writing, but was getting nothing but unfinished drafts.  Then I figured out a solution to my problem.

I was reading a post on one of the blogs that I follow, and was struck by its sheer simplicity.  I realized that I was trying so hard to get things just right that I wasn't getting anything accomplished.  To use a baseball analogy, I was trying too hard to hit a home run, and kept striking out.

This principle can be applied to many things in life.  In our striving for excellence, we often think that excellence equals perfection which causes us undue stress.  That stress gets in the way of us accomplishing anything (esp. if its a task that involves creative thinking), and nothing gets done.  So while its good  to swing for fences, sometimes we need to relax and focus on simply hitting the ball.