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!