Dying to Self

Weighty Matters

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But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.
—1 Corinthians 9:27

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d spoken with several men who had become diabetic in their fifties. This, in part, prompted me to examine my own dietary habits and make some small corrections.

After one month on a low-glycemic diet, I’m 22 pounds lighter. I’m only three pounds from my target weight. That’s astonishing to me. One month.

A few other things boggle me:

  • I made only small changes in my diet.
  • I didn’t even do the tough first phase of the diet, but slid right into the maintenance phase.
  • The amount of energy I have right now is unbelievable.
  • I’m not craving snacks at all.
  • I’m eating less and not feeling hungry later on.
  • My wife tells me I’m sleeping better; I think she’s right. I’m no longer dragging by 5:00 p.m.
  • Anyone can do this if they so choose.

I’m not diabetic, nor was I overweight by more than a couple pounds (according to the BMI index, but then it’s a bit off for really massive guys like me). 'Got more chins than Chinatown...'But I felt run-down and lethargic at the weight I was. Now I’m right where I should be. Feels great.

What did I change? Well, all processed food pretty much got eliminated. This wasn’t hard because I eat a lot of natural foods anyway. I’ve been eating whole grains for more than 25 years, so I was ahead of that curve. I also eat organic meat and dairy as much as it’s possible. I don’t drink soft drinks except on rare occasions, so no sacrifice there. In the end, I mostly cut back on sugar and processed snack foods. I have a soft spot for baked goods, and that was the major sacrifice and probably the largest source of sugar in my diet. Goodbye, cookies!

As much as Splenda seems to be the non-sugar sweetener of choice, I prefer God’s sweeteners to man-made junk. I don’t need Splenda’s chlorine, a massive oxidizer, tearing up my cells. Instead, I’ve used luo han guo, agave nectar, and erythritol as my sweeteners. They all seem to do fine and have been readily available, though not cheap. Still, the benefits are obvious. If you want to know more about these three natural sweeteners, drop me an e-mail.

So I’m feeling great.

All this has a point, too.

I wrote earlier this week about our consumptive habits in the United States, habits that are wiping out a lot of us spiritually. Our addiction to consumerism breeds a spiritual malaise that blinds us to the needs of others and cuts us off from relationships, which ultimately—I believe—leads to depression and a lack of concern for the things of God.

What (and how) we eat forms part of that consumptive cycle that we Christians need to fix. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to possibly wind up a diabetic some day. It’s that I couldn’t let my own wants rule me. My desire to pack my plate had to end. My desire to ignore the four servings of Oreos in my hand needed to die. Sure, I ate mostly good stuff to begin with, but those few vices left me feeling drained.

And that’s the way it is in one’s spiritual life. That small thing which is anti-God will inevitably own us, only to destroy us later. You can take that spiritual principle to the bank. I wouldn’t even have space to quote all the Scriptures that allude to that truth, so God must think it important.

The strangest thing of all about losing this weight is that I have more of a thirst for God than ever before. I’m not going to go so far as to say that some Doritos now and then impaired my spiritual life, but I’m not going to say it didn’t, either. No one has to let anything rule them other than the Lord, and His yoke is easy, His burden light.

I’ve always thought the following quote comes truly God-inspired. Susanna Wesley, the mother of John and Charles, wrote this:

Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.

I would personally substitute “spirit” for “mind” in that wisdom, but the point remains.

If a time of testing hunkers on the horizon for the Church, we can’t be a bunch of couch potatoes, either spiritually or physically. Living a sober life means we’re ready at a moment’s notice for what the Lord desires of us. God has always told his people to be alert and ready. But if we’re so fried because of what we eat or what we own or what we let control us that’s not of God, then what chance do we of being ready for whatever God would ask us to do?

We Christians cannot become so plugged into our electronics, so obsessed with the material, so stuffed to the gills with garbage food that we’ll be asleep from overconsumption when the Lord knocks on the door and asks that we follow Him where He’s leading us.

Folks, we’ve got to cut the ties that bind us. Those ties come in a number of bright, shiny packages, all of which diminish us. I know what mine are, and I’m learning every day how to sever them for the sake of the King and the Kingdom.

So what’s holding you back?

The Fellowship of His Sufferings

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PainMonday morning, I was considering Christ’s agony on the cross. The unrelenting pain intensified by His rejection by a world filled with the souls He created. The weight of sin. The blood-stained ground.

This side of heaven, the world is filled with pain. Some people suffer emotional pain. Others twist in torment from bodily pains.

My father experienced unremitting pain for years after falling down a flight of stairs in his early thirties. This led to several spinal surgeries, some of which did not turn out well, leaving him in constant pain. That experience changed him. The medicines he took to combat the pain were later implicated in a number of psychoses that users experienced. The pain changed my father in many ways and probably resulted in a shortened life.

Years later, I realize that I didn’t understand his pain. In fact, I brushed it off. Kids are like that. All I knew was that my father didn’t want to wrestle anymore. We always had to watch out whenever we did an activity together lest it somehow result in more pain.

People in pain dwell at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Everyone else stands in the light at the entrance, far, far away. The people in pain can see those others, but they don’t feel those others near. Pain separates.

People in pain turn inward. Their pain becomes who they are. I know that folks who suffer from little-understood sources of pain such as Epstein-Barr and fibromyalgia find their pain threatens to overwhelm their personae. People start identifying sufferers by their pain, not by their God-given identity. In time, people in pain can lose themselves amidst their suffering.

People in pain identify with each other. “You, too?” they ask. Then the heads start nodding. “Yeah.” Someone else sits at the end of that dark tunnel and for a time, the loneliness, separation, and even the pain lessens.

From this one truth shines forth hope for people in pain: they know the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. For the Christian, to suffer pain is to lose oneself in the agony of the cross, to identify with the Savior, and to be more like Him.

Wisdom comes in pain for the believer who seeks it. It may seem a perverse wisdom, but few of us understand the ways of God enough to know how He molds us in the midst of pain.

For me, pain teaches about the human condition. It reminds me that we are all dust, that we dwell in a fallen world, and that people in pain need relationship desperately.

Some cultures handle pain better than ours does. We have much to learn from them.

A few things I’ve learned from pain:

1. Prayer makes a difference in pain, whether physical pain or mental. Our God is a healer and tapping into His healing comes through prayer. I don’t believe that God will it that pains goes on throughout a lifetime. He can heal. Sometimes He heals through our pain.

2. The caring love of others goes far in reducing pain. Because our culture deals poorly with pain, we tend to shove people in pain into an attic and hope they stay there. Their pain reminds us of our own frailty. And a culture based on youth and vitality has no place for the frail. We Christians need to be counterculture and begin to seek out those in pain because they need the word of Christ more than anyone else.

3. People will not understand pain until they experience it themselves. A woman will never adequately convince a man of the pain of childbirth. A person who’s never suffered through a kidney stone cannot transmit the depths of that pain to someone who has never experienced one. A couple with a quiver full of children will not understand the pain of a couple who loses their only child. But the very act of suffering transforms us into better people if we let God be the God of our pain and let others into it. We will all experience pain in this sin-stained world. Better that we take time to associate with it rather than flee from it every chance we get.

If you are in pain, whether from grief or physical torment, drop me an e-mail at the address in the top of the sidebar, and let me pray for you. Christ dwells with those who share in the fellowship of His sufferings. No reason exists to suffer alone.

A Place for My Stuff

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That’s all I want, that’s all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody’s got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that’s your stuff, that’ll be his stuff over there. That’s all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time.A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody’s got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff. And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you’re saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That’s what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get…more stuff!
—George Carlin

It’s been probably 25 years since I saw George Carlin on The Tonight Show do his “A Place for My Stuff” routine. And when your stuff goes bad, you find another place for it...Carson’s audience laughed hysterically, but I don’t think I laughed once. Anyone who knows me know that I spend a lot of time yucking it up, but I didn’t that night because I realized that not only was Carlin right, but he was devastatingly so. The whole routine (only a tiny portion reproduced here) cut me to the quick.

Last week, a reader surmised that I lived modestly. I don’t. I live in America. Every American reading this is in the top two or three percent of wealthiest people in the world. None of us can say we live modestly.

Okay, modestly in relation to other Americans, perhaps. But even that doesn’t mean all that much when you live in a nation geared to consumption.

The Bible has something to say about that:

And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”
—Luke 12:16-21

I don’t know about you, but a considerable amount of my daily routine centers around my stuff. Our washing machine broke down Thursday, and it took me the better part of four hours to deal with my hopeless attempts at fixing it, followed by the inevitable call to the service center to place a service call that will cost nearly half what I paid for the washer. Some people out there would throw the seven-year-old appliance away, but I don’t want to play into that consumer game. Call me a fool, but part of being a good steward of both the things God has given me and the earth that He told me to care for is to resist leaving a trail of refuse behind me.

I tend to use things until they fall to pieces. My newest pair of casual or dress shoes is seven years old. As I type, I’m wearing the clothes I wore to church Sunday morning: eight-year-old shirt, twelve-year-old pants, fifteen-year-old socks, and eleven-year-old shoes and sweater. Needless to say, I don’t keep up with the fashion trends.

My wife’s car pushes eight, while my truck verges on fifteen. My truck had to go in the shop because a sensor said the fuel mixture was off; the drop-off in mileage proves it. The mechanic hasn’t had much luck getting the part, so the handwriting may be on the wall. I don’t know. The rest of the truck is as solid as the day I bought it.

We don’t go on vacations. My wife and I bought four oak chairs for our dining room—that accounts for all the furniture we’ve purchased as a married couple. And while our sleeper sofa needs reupholstering, we don’t lack for furniture.

In fact, we don’t lack for anything when it comes down to it. We have more in one room of our house than most of the rest of the world has in the entirety of whatever dwelling it is they live in.

And for all that stuff, we spend countless hours and dollars maintaining, insuring, and protecting. Sometimes I think there has to be a better way to live.

I think God has us in a time of pruning. I don’t know why I need all the things we have. Yet I also know many people would look at us and turn up their noses at how little we have comparatively. I know I see the newspaper ads and hear people talking about this expensive bauble and that, but little of that stuff holds any fascination for me.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article last week comparing a $100 sweater to one costing ten times as much. Despite the fact that almost everyone thought the $1000 sweater more chic, the Journal still asked the realistic question, “But is it worth $900 more?”

Meanwhile, I’m asking the even crazier question: “Who buys sweaters that cost a hundred dollars? ”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for buying quality. The appliances in my house are all Kenmore Elite (including the failed washer, sad to say) because at one time the extra money was worth it in terms of quality and longevity. My mother’s high-end Kenmore washer lasted thirty years. Something tells me I won’t get that from these appliances. (I’ll try to stay positive.)

Still, even when we spend more on quality, we still spend too much. We duplicate what our neighbors have instead of sharing with them. We don’t look out for our neighbor in need because it means we would have less money to buy more stuff for ourselves. We expect people to take care of their own because they have their own stuff and we have ours and never the twain shall meet, as they say.

But what if we Christians stopped with all the crazed consumption? Perhaps instead of twenty polo shirts, what if we had two? We could spend a little bit more for better quality and perhaps even buy American once in awhile. But most of all, we could learn to live on less, not because the economy stinks, but because Jesus gave everything, even His own life, so that we could get the focus off ourselves and onto others.

I guarantee you, right now, you know a family that had a medical emergency they cannot pay for and that emergency is crippling them, and not just in the pocketbook. I guarantee you, right now, there’s a family in your church with parents wondering where the next meal’s coming from. I guarantee you, right now, you know a bright kid who may never make it to college because they simply can’t afford to go. I guarantee you, right now, you know a family ready to lose their modest home because of job loss.

I can’t help but think that, for many of us, the enveloping spiritual malaise we feel may have a direct connection to being overwhelmed by all our stuff. Perhaps if we did a better job living with less, giving away our excess, and considering others better than ourselves, then maybe, just maybe, we’d feel that spiritual fire in the belly again.

We can’t take it with us. Better to give it away or forgo it altogether than have our souls crushed beneath a pile of stuff. I suspect that in saying no to accumulation, we can say yes more often to those real needs we encounter every day in the lives of the people we meet.

Maybe then we’ll find our coffers here pleasantly small and our treasure in heaven immense.

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A sidenote: From time to time, I receive e-mails from people who wish to send me money as a token of gratitude for what gets posted here at Cerulean Sanctum. I appreciate those gestures and the kindness of the people involved. This blog doesn’t exist to generate money, nor do I wish to sell out to corporate interests that would alter the kind of posts you might read here. All that is by plan.

While I do appreciate that some folks would like to support me monetarily, I have two much better ways you can help:

Take whatever money you designated to send and instead spend it on a needy person you know. My wife and I know many people who have no health insurance, who are either burdened by outstanding medical debt or who cannot afford the basic medical care they need. We know people like that, so we’re sure you know someone, too. They need that money desperately. Find their address and send it to them anonymously, if possible.

On that note, just this weekend, the son of dear friends of ours was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes after a harrowing weekend in which he came close to dying. The family works with the Hispanic community in our area and operates a small ministry. An emergency room visit, intensive care, and a lengthy stay in the hospital will no doubt tap out the entirety of funds this uninsured family receives in ministry support. Obviously, this is a desperate need. If you would like to help this family defray the costs of medical care for their eleven-year-old son, e-mail me and I’ll send you their info. Donations to their ministry are tax deductible.

If a reader would like to bless me, the best way to do so would be to refer freelance writing and editing work to me. That simple act costs you nothing but allows me to help someone else with the skills God gave me and earn my keep as a workman. I can also offer a blessing in return for being blessed. Because I do quality of work, I generate repeat business and good word of mouth—a gift that keeps giving. In that, one freelancing project can grow into a great tree that produces abundant fruit.

Thank you. Have a blessed week.