Sigh. I learned A LOT from youth ministry. It lead me to studying psychology where I learned us humans have LOTS of different kinds of appetites and it's our behavioral responses to them that can make our break us! Fast forward about 10 years.
It's Monday night. Here at the 687 you can typically find us in sweaty work out clothes camped out on the couch eating steamed vegetables, fruit and cottage cheese, or a bowl of cereal and watching The Bachelorette. (Put your gavel down Judge Judy! Judge not lest you be judged!) I'm not sure what's sadder our viewing choice or our meals. No, I DO know, it's our dinners because we laugh lots AT our program! I have to admit both are pretty BLAND though.
We're definitely sitting there CRAVING relationships with more sustenance than the ones playing out on the Bachelorette and food with more sustenance than the the stuff in our bowls. As a matter of fact, you'll hear a lot of, "Oh my gosh I want Chinese food right now!" Or whispers of "Mmm chocolate cake!"
Hunger and cravings are two different things. Our bland meals take care of the hunger, but they don't do anything at all for the cravings. According to It Starts with Food, one of many books I've read and not applied, cravings are psychological and come from conditioning (our habits). In other words, you don't crave things you've never had. Hunger is physical, cravings are emotional. We were actually made to crave sweets (for energy), fats (for calories), and salt (to conserve fluid). Our brains were hardwired to naturally give us pleasure and reward signals for these three things that are vital to our nutrition. Smart people figured all that out. Unfortunately smart people also figured out they could manufacture these tastes with stuff like MSG, corn syrup, fancy colors & all the other stuff found in the bag of M&Ms on my night stand, to stimulate my taste buds and induce cravings in our brains that in turn line their pocket books and my waistline. But I digress, like I said before we have appetites and cravings for lots of things other than food and those too were naturally ingrained in us, but unfortunately the world has learned to manufacture, unhealthy crap for us to feed those appetites too. And then we're held captive by the cravings!
Rewind a few 1000 years. My devotion was about the Israelites and God had just freed them from slavery in Egypt, 470 years of slavery to be exact. You remember the story from the History Channel right? The Egyptians killed their baby boys. They beat them and forced them to do hard labor. God did lots of cool miracles to get them out of this terrible situation, like send plagues of boils and frogs on their enemies, part the read sea, and send manna down from heaven daily for them.
But in Numbers 11:4 says this, "The rabble with them began to CRAVE other food!!" And again the israelites starting wailing and said, "If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt AT NO COST- also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, and onions, and garlic. but now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna.
At no cost?! They beat them, stole from them, forced them into hard labor, and killed their kids, but oh how we miss those cucumbers and garlic. How ridiculous do they sound, they even contemplated going BACK! It's like when my girlfriend calls and tells me she's really missing her EX and wants to go back to him and all I can remember from this Ex relationship are the long late night phone calls trying to make out her words between her sobs!!!
Idiots, huh? Unfortunately we all do it too! Because cravings are deceitful in that they come with rose-colored glasses. Between youth ministry and my short time practicing as a therapist, I've sat across the room from many craving things from a past that they fought so hard to get out of or that robbed and beat them and nearly killed them. Drugs, affairs, gangs, horrid relationships, bondage, but they sit with rose colored cravings and contemplate going BACK!
What's the point of all this? There's too much counterfeit, manufactured junk taking up a lot of room in our lives where God wants to give us the good stuff, the real stuff, He wants to get us out of and far away from Egypt into the promised land. Cravings are the crap part of John 10:10, what the enemy is using to steal from us, kill us, and what he's hoping to destroy us with. When we finally fight our way away from these things whether they're bad relationships, twinkies, unforgiveness, bitterness, or crack cocaine; whatever it is that has us so tangled up, God will fill that new space and we get to find out what the good stuff is God had waiting for us all along.
Fight the cravings! Don't go BACK! Move forward! Freedom is available!
DISCLAIMER: All cravings are conquerable unless they are for MnMs and Coca Cola!
Rewind a few 1000 years. My devotion was about the Israelites and God had just freed them from slavery in Egypt, 470 years of slavery to be exact. You remember the story from the History Channel right? The Egyptians killed their baby boys. They beat them and forced them to do hard labor. God did lots of cool miracles to get them out of this terrible situation, like send plagues of boils and frogs on their enemies, part the read sea, and send manna down from heaven daily for them.
But in Numbers 11:4 says this, "The rabble with them began to CRAVE other food!!" And again the israelites starting wailing and said, "If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt AT NO COST- also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, and onions, and garlic. but now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna.
At no cost?! They beat them, stole from them, forced them into hard labor, and killed their kids, but oh how we miss those cucumbers and garlic. How ridiculous do they sound, they even contemplated going BACK! It's like when my girlfriend calls and tells me she's really missing her EX and wants to go back to him and all I can remember from this Ex relationship are the long late night phone calls trying to make out her words between her sobs!!!
Idiots, huh? Unfortunately we all do it too! Because cravings are deceitful in that they come with rose-colored glasses. Between youth ministry and my short time practicing as a therapist, I've sat across the room from many craving things from a past that they fought so hard to get out of or that robbed and beat them and nearly killed them. Drugs, affairs, gangs, horrid relationships, bondage, but they sit with rose colored cravings and contemplate going BACK!
What's the point of all this? There's too much counterfeit, manufactured junk taking up a lot of room in our lives where God wants to give us the good stuff, the real stuff, He wants to get us out of and far away from Egypt into the promised land. Cravings are the crap part of John 10:10, what the enemy is using to steal from us, kill us, and what he's hoping to destroy us with. When we finally fight our way away from these things whether they're bad relationships, twinkies, unforgiveness, bitterness, or crack cocaine; whatever it is that has us so tangled up, God will fill that new space and we get to find out what the good stuff is God had waiting for us all along.
Fight the cravings! Don't go BACK! Move forward! Freedom is available!
DISCLAIMER: All cravings are conquerable unless they are for MnMs and Coca Cola!
No comments:
Post a Comment