The Ingredients Of Your Life

Media marketing continues to ask “What’s in your wallet?”  Right--like the most important thing in my life is a small plastic card I sit on!  However, there is another group growing in passion and popularity which asks a much better question, “What's in your food?”  More specifically, do you know what you’re eating?  

Have you read a food label lately? Did you look closely at all the strange and wacky pharmaceutical-sounding ingredients?   The labeling of the ingredients in the food items we consume is huge and controversial, including several legislative initiatives to not only take the jargon out of the ingredient labels, but to actually be honest about what’s inside the products we buy and eat.

Don’t you look more carefully these days at the label?  20 years ago, most of us only looked at the price.  Now we tend to micro-scan the label because we want to know the full story on the ingredients within the package that will soon end up within us!

And, it’s right to be discerning.  I saw a news segment last week highlighting that what we believe is inside a product, is not present at all.  One example was pumpkin spice coffee.  The amazing thing was the pumpkin spice coffee actually had no pumpkin listed as an ingredient!  

The best example I found was a product which listed raspberry flavor; however, on close examination of the ingredients, it was only artificial raspberry flavor.  You may want to stop reading now because that artificial raspberry flavor contained castoreum which is extracted from the anal glands of beavers!  Maybe they should label it beaverberry!  

We pay so much attention to the prepackaged ingredients we consume but so very little attention to the “ingredients” which make up the content of our lives.  Who are we really?  What is it that makes you, you?  What are all the realities that you carry within?

 Our lives are a complexity held within our soul. We are all made up of a variety of accumulated experience or “ingredients” -- the content of our lives. 

So, if we were reading a list of all the ingredients (contents) that have been poured into, forced into, or invited into our lives, what would they be?  I’ll bet you can list out many of the “ingredients” that make up the content of your life.

Now look at your list.  These things are living in us all the time. But how much of our content is connected to the living God who made us and desires a full and complete relationship with us?  This is so crucial, because God wants us to be fully connected people. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I am really tired of being fragmented.

Several weeks ago, I suggested that a significant goal for our lives was a process of connecting the content of our lives within God and God’s purpose!   This Sunday we begin that journey with a new series called “Connecting the Content.”  I promise it will be way better than beaverberry!  See you in worship!

Renewing Hope

During the past 25 years, I’ve officiated at more weddings than I can remember.  Occasionally, when I see some of the pictures of these services on my shelf, I wonder about all those couples and how the hope of those wedding-moments has been transported and supported through the years.

Surprisingly, several months ago, I receive a call from Austin – a man whose wedding I conducted did ten years ago.  I remember it well because we held the service on the beach in the midst of a full-blown hurricane.  No kidding!  We ran out in the storm on a board walk, speed through the vows, and ran back into a restaurant across the street for the reception.

 

Since the beach wedding was literally a wash-out, he wanted to bring the hope of the moment alive again.  He asked me if they could have a redo, only this time with all the bells and whistles they missed before – a wedding renewal.  It was a wonderful request!  So, we held the renewal service last Saturday on the beach in Daytona. 

 

Here is the greatest part - it was all a surprise to his wife, Jena.  He told her they were having anniversary pictures taken on the beach to celebration the union exactly ten-years ago to the day.  He blindfolded her and led her down to the beach.  In contrast to the hurried-caned wedding, this day was beautiful -- a wedding-day-dream. 

The sun was beginning to set on a backdrop of blue sky with just the right amount of dotted with fluffy clouds for texture.   And, at just the right moment, he removed the blind fold and revealed to her a wedding gazebo and chairs filled with all of the guest and family from the original wedding – including me, the officiating pastor!  The tears began to roll down Jena’s face.  Austin had actually done it – recaptured the wedding hopes of a moment ten years before.

 

I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to maintain the heights of hope and joy from one particular moment to the next.  Hope seems to drift in and out of my live at times leaving me a bit hungry for re-fulfillment.

 

 

 

 

I think soon or latter, everyone finds it hard to maintain these hopeful positions in life.  It’s because the dark clouds of a broken world have a habit of sweeping over us periodically, diluting down our hope -- shifting us away from the light into overcast darkness.

 

This seems especially true for Christians!  We may be people of faith, but we are just as susceptible to the dark clouds that would sweep us away from our relationship with God as anyone! 

 

 

I believe we all long for a sense of hope – maybe a chance to have a do-over – a renewal that actually recaptures the hopes and dreams, like that of a perfect wedding day.

This Sunday in worship, we will explore a renewal that guarantees a hope that doesn’t just drift in and out of our lives.   You can hear all about it as we talk about “Raider’s of the frozen Dark.”