What are we thinking (or ARE we thinking)?

You know, I've been thinking about making cakes and how that is different than it used to be.  Not sure what got me on this road, but I've been on it for a week or two now.  Ages ago, if you wanted to make a cake, from my understanding, you'd get some flour, eggs, milk, sugar and butter and, if you mixed the right amount of that stuff together, you'd end up with a cake. 

Let's fast forward to now when we've gotten soooo smart and made so many advances.  I don't know what order we advanced so much in, so I'm just going to go in this direction.  We decided that whole grain flour really wasn't needed, so we have processed all the nutrients out and ended up with white paste that you can literally make glue out of.  Then, we really don't need butter; we can use shortening or margarine because we manufacture that stuff rather than take milk and churn it into butter.  It will be cheaper and everyone wins then, right?  While we're at it, let's do away with the milk and eggs to and put in manufactured stuff rather than the natural stuff.  The bottom line is important isn't it?  Well now we're making these things in labs rather than kitchens and people can't really come up to the lab to get a cake or slice of cake, so we have to add preservatives to the cake, and I love this, "to preserve freshness".  Thank goodness for this, your chemicals really can't be too fresh, can they?  What are preservatives?  These are other chemicals that inhibit the food from decomposing and, I'm sure, have some impact on us digesting the concoction we have. 

Now, our waist lines are expanding (talk about watching the bottom line), so we have to make this healthy, right?  Let's take the sugar out and put in artificial sweetener and lower the caloric value so it will now be healthy...  Man, we are SMART!  We have now taken the natural sugar out of the chemical frankenstien we've created to make it healthy!

The same goes for our spiritual lives... we introduce a little of this and a little of that until we no longer have a real walk with God.  The Bible does say all things are permitted for Christians, but we don't follow through with the rest of that verse where it says but not all things are profitable.  We take our daily Bible study out and replace it with a little extra sleep.  Then, we take out some prayer time for a few extra minutes at work.  Then we take out, well you get the picture.  Before long, we don't have the wonderful treat we had when we started.  We have something that looks like the real thing, may even smell and taste like the real thing, but is actually full of things that will literally poison us. 

Let's stop engineering our food and our walk with God.  Let's let both be combinations of natural, basic things to make a very special treat we can savor and enjoy. 

May He increase and i decrease,

Shane

What are we thinking?

We as Americans are INCREDIBLY blessed!  We also do some incredibly crazy things.  We actually have an industry that seems to be doing very well based on us just being hoarders or greedy or something.  Have you noticed how many storage building rental places there are around and going up everywhere?  We pay money to store crap we don't think worthy of keeping at our house.  This may make sense if we had really small houses here, but we have a term called mcmansions describing how big our houses are getting.  

The Bible says "Where your heart is, there is your treasure also".  I don't think there was a Jerusalem mini-storage back then.  Think we could scale down today?  Do we have things in our houses we could get rid of (regardless if we actually rent a storage building or not)?  More importantly, what kind of junk do we have in our diet?  Even more importantly, what do we have in our spiritual life that needs to go?

Here's to a week of getting garage sale stuff together, cutting junk out of what we eat and cleaning out our heart.

May He increase and i decrease,

Shane
 

Progress or Re-gress

About 2 months or so ago, I noticed a nice elderly man in the local grocery store.  He looked as he belonged in our middle/upper class grocery store and I almost didn't give him a second thought.  Normally, I wouldn't have paid much attention to his cart, but I noticed his cart that day.  He had a box of butter or margarine and one or two other items, but not much.  That hit me for some reason and I started thinking of how different the foods we eat are now versus when this gentleman was young.  Back then, we didn't have the modern advances we have now like hydrogenated/partially hydrogenated oils, 2-3 kinds of fast food/drive throughs on every corner, gas stations actually sold gas and not lunch, etc.  Is that progress or what?

Let's think of other ways that we've "progressed"... Prayer out of schools, metal detectors in and teen pregnancy booming.  More two income families, more divorce, more debt and less concern about either. More individualism and less individual responsibility.  Tolerance for every belief under the sun, except for the One who made that sun.

So, we now have progressed this far during my lifetime.  I am about to turn 40, so any of you out there older than me, feel free to chime in about your memories.  Any of you my age and younger, tell me... How does this progress sound?  If this is progress, I want to regress.   I want more real food, more real family time and most of all more real time one-on-One with my creator and the One who paid for my salvation.  I've taken steps toward more real food by changing what I eat, I've taken steps toward more family time by taking a job that pays much less than I'm accustomed to making so I can be home every night and am working on devoting more time to the One who I owe it all to.  It is my desire that this will spread to others.   

We see what progression has done to our way of life.  I am determined that my family will NOT be a statistic or a casualty of this progress.  Unless I'm called out of this world, my kids will know their dad and I will be a major part of their lives.  My wife will know that she is safe with me and if I'm late coming home, it is because I'm stuck in traffic or something of that sort.  There is a phone call on the way.  My family might not always like me being around, but they will know I will be there.  Now that I'm 95 lbs lighter and in better shape, I can be a bigger part of their lives for longer.  I won't be a spectator with a CPAP and oxygen machine; I will be in the fight, leading the charge for a better way of life.      

Will you join me in regressing?

 May He increase and i decrease,

shane