Often, I will tell my patients to go home and work on or process what we talked about. Too often, I get a polite nod or a blank stare. Allow me to elaborate.
One of the best ways to cover this topic is to look to the body for God’s wisdom. I will use the analogy of how our bodies encounter the environment (food) to teach us about how we are meant to encounter situations in our lives.
We have forgotten how to digest our food! We think putting a cheeseburger in our mouths is the same as being nourished from it. The real process of digestion is quite complicated, it just happens behind the scenes. We could learn a lot about how to learn and grow from our environment by mimicking it.
The digestive system starts in the mouth and ends at the anus. Officially, what happens there is not really inside of us. Until it is absorbed, it is still on the outside. We haven’t been nourished by it, changed by it or grown from it. We have simply endured it. It has passed through our body but not touched us.
Think about your life. Consider that everything in your life is a cheeseburger. It was given to you by the master nutritionist and chef. He has chosen this particular food or situation because he knows exactly what kind of nourishment you need to encounter to become who you were created to be.
However, nourishment isn’t passive. If you place a cheeseburger on your lap, it really doesn’t nourish you. It is certainly in your life. You are aware of it. You can smell it. Perhaps it leaves grease on your pants, but your body doesn’t really get any benefit from it.
Guess what? It works the same way with life. If all you do is go through the motions in your life, you gain nothing. If you get up, go to work, do what you have to do, take care of business, eat what you’ve always eaten, interact with who’s in front of you to accomplish the tasks of the day, then go to bed and get up and do it all over again, you’re missing it! You will end up feeling bored, depressed and empty, in fact, hungry. You have encountered food, but you haven’t digested it.
Digestion begins with food selection. We often control what we eat. We should choose what is best for us, what we know will help us heal and grow and thrive. We should choose good friends, wholesome entertainment, and holy pursuits. To the extent that we have control we should choose well, not from fear, but from respect for our bodies and our souls.
There are also times that we can’t control what we eat. Perhaps the lettuce we make our salad with is contaminated with bacteria or pesticides. Maybe the steak contains antibiotics, artificial hormones or was raised on GMO corn. We might be eating out and who knows what they feed us there! We might even be at a friend’s house or a pot luck and we need to eat what we’re served. The soil the food was grown in might be replete of nutrients; the air we breathe may be toxic.
We think we have control, and we are responsible for our choices. However, we must also wrestle with the fact that we encounter many things that are beyond our control, but not God’s. We must trust that after we have made the best choice we could, God can still have something else planned for us.
It is the same way in our lives. We control many of our circumstances, and we need to take these choices seriously. They will form the fabric of much of our lives. We need to remember that although we cannot control all of the things that enter into our lives, we ALWAYS control what we glean from them and who we become because of them.
So, this gets us back to our original question: “How do I process things?” Start with the end in mind. Our earthly lives are so temporary. Live for eternity. Let this life be a training ground, in effect, marriage preparation for a life with God. Let this desire be the cornerstone of your decisions. Continually ask, “Will this choice lead me closer to God or further away?” Choose what will lead you closer.
Once the decision is made as to what food you will put in your mouth, chew it. Accept your choice and live with the consequences. Commit to glean whatever nourishment you can out of it. Often, this gleaning is done through pondering, praying and discussing. Your stomach acids, pancreatic enzymes and bile start to break the food into small, digestible pieces that your intestines can absorb. If it is not broken down in this way, it leaves your body without being absorbed. You get nothing from it.
Situations that you simply endure are like this. Things that you don’t reflect on or take to God are like this. Don’t be content living your life on the surface. DIG IN! That is where the good stuff is. Ask questions like: “How does this make me feel and why?”, “Where is God in this?”, “Is this a pattern that I see in other places in my life?”, “Is there a different way to see this?”, “Why is this in my life RIGHT NOW?”, “How is this situation essential for my growth or freedom?”, “What does God see in this?”
These questions are like the digestive juices. They don’t change you, but their answers do. They help you to see the situation and its purpose in your life differently. They help you to see God’s perspective. He sees differently than we do. Everything makes sense to him; it doesn’t always make sense to human eyes. Perhaps that is why so often we live in blindness. We refuse to see differently. We want to sculpt our lives so they make sense in human terms. We call out for human justice and refuse the grace of conversion to a new way of seeing the world.
The next step is absorption. The slurry might be broken down, but it is still “outside” of you. You must internalize it. It must change you. You must be open to changing your viewpoint, your mind, and your choices. You must be open to having been wrong. Absorption requires humility.
Finally, there is the colon. We are called to release the “packaging”. The cheeseburger wasn’t what you needed. The nutrients were. God brings situations, relationships, thoughts, inconveniences, traumas, etc. into our lives for what they have to offer us. In the end, we don’t get to keep them. We keep only what we’ve become because of them. Past the grave, we take only our souls.
We tend to clutter our lives with stuff, baggage and bitterness because it seems that hanging onto it will serve us or protect us in some way. When we do that in our bodies, it creates constipation. We can’t absorb anything new because our intestines are lined with things we can’t let go of. We can’t get rid of the packaging and it makes us toxic and poisons us. Receive the nourishment, then forgive, heal, let go and move on. Internalize what God brought to you through it but let go of the details of how he gave it to you.
Choose wisely. Accept what you receive. Look for the nourishment in it.
Be transformed by it. Let go of the packaging it came in.
