What's for Breakfast?

For two long days now I've been sagging under a weight of some words.  Seemingly innocent, somewhat truthful words that sat heavy on my shoulders. I tried to shake them off.  I tried to analyze, rationalize and downsize their effect on me.

Nothing.

I prayed and journaled and prayed some more.

Their grip only seemed to squeeze tighter around my neck.

This morning, as I listened to my children prepare breakfast, I pick up Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book.  With food preparation well on the way, I found it quite appropriate

What I found there on page 10, I share here with you:

“Words spoken or written to us under the metaphor of eating, words to be freely taken in, tasted, chewed, savored, swallowed, and digested, have a very different effect on us from those that come at us from the outside, whether in the form of propaganda or information. 

Propaganda works another person’s will upon us, attempting to manipulate us to an action or a belief. Insofar as we are moved by it, we become less, the puppet of a puppeteer writer/speaker. There is no dignity, no soul, in a puppet.

And information reduces words to the condition of commodities that we can use however we will. Words are removed from their originating context in the moral universe and from personal relationships so that they can be used as tools or weapons. Such commodification of language reduces both those who speak it and those who listen to it also to commodities.”

Wow, I say to myself, rubbing my neck, the propaganda/commodity chain of words finally off.   And I thank God that no matter what anyone  might say, His word to us is never propaganda reducing us to a puppet. And never tools to manipulate or weapons to force His will on us.

His Word is the food not forced down our throats but freely taken in and tasted, chewed and savored, swallowed and digested  by those who know and love Him.

And it that gives life to our spirit, soul and body.

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. John 6:63