SHAPING OUR MIND

We once lived across the street from a couple who did not get along.  The husband worked in security, but his passion was to be a body-builder.  He was strong, sarcastic, and self-centered.  His wife was small and timid -- and angry.

He had to go to work every morning at 6:00, and she got up at 5:00 to fix his lunch.  We wondered why she would do this for someone she was so mad at until she explained that she was secretly packing his lunches with enough calories to put weight on Shamu the Killer Whale.  She loaded what he thought were dietary turkey sandwiches with butter and mayonnaise.  She put extra sugar in his yogurt and made his protein shakes with half-and-half.  He worked out a lot, but he could never understand why his body didn’t look like the guys in the magazine.

He never knew she was larding him up when he wasn’t looking.

Our bodies are constantly being formed by what goes into them.  We may not like this truth, we may not heed it, but we can’t evade it.  Bodies get shaped by what goes into them…

In this world we are being bombarded by a steady stream of messages from the media, bosses, co-workers, people we date, books, iPods -- and from our own thoughts.  Our mind will be shaped by whatever we feed it while the Evil One tries to lard up our mind when we’re not looking.  He will put depression in our thoughts at breakfast, sprinkle temptation in our mind at noon, and slip us a worry sandwich when it’s time for bed.

He will try to keep us from noticing what we are putting into our mind.

-- John Ortberg in "The Me I Want To Be"

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