What you Feed your Soul Matters
My daughter is a sponge. Most parents admire their child’s growth and intellect as they develop, but honestly, I’m a little fearful of how smart Avery is. She soaks up every experience, conversation, or piece of information she comes across and then will recall it at random. As she’s gotten older and her language skills have developed, Rudy and I are realizing how we need to be careful about what she hears. Not just from us, but also what she hears in movies and tv shows.
Little statements that mean nothing to us, she holds on to and will adapt into her daily life. Last Christmas, out of nowhere she picked up this phrase, “Get out of the road, kid!” She would use it constantly as a way to get her cousin to leave her alone. We wondered where that came from for weeks, and had no idea until one day I was watching Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas and saw this brief scene for myself where Max was trying to get a letter delivered to Santa and tried to stop the mail truck. This two-second interaction with the man in the mail truck made a lasting impression on my two-year-old. The echoes of his one-line conversation could be heard for weeks in my home.
That’s one out of many, many instances of our daughter picking up on words or phrases. I’ve heard her say that “she’s having a crappy day”, or that she is “FREAKING OUT right now”, and many other things that bring me the sobering awareness that I have a small human following me around and taking notes.
As we’ve realized the impact things have on her, we have limited what she sees. We’ve refined what we say, monitored what she hears. Because it has an impact on her.
She may be a child, but the lesson holds true to all of us, old and young:
What we expose ourselves to matters.
The older we get, the more we feel that we no longer need to be filtering and protecting ourselves from what we expose ourselves to. We think we are immune to the effects of watching certain things, that it won’t disturb us, we won’t lose sleep.
But I’m realizing how much things do impact us.
I love Jesus, and I love pursuing Jesus. My heart is for Jesus, yet there are times when I find myself struggling to connect. When I’m in my normal flow, my first moment of free time brings my heart right to my Bible and spending time with the Lord. He’s the cry of my heart; the desire of my soul. Just like the psalmist writes in Psalm 42, “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so I long for you, God. I thirst for God, the living God.” But when I’m allowing myself to be distracted and don’t fill my soul with things that are true, honorable, just, pure, and all the other things mentioned in Philippians 4, I grow distant from the Lord. The desire to pursue him grows smaller, and I begin to notice the effects in other ways. Maybe my mood isn’t very positive, maybe my patience is shorter, I’m less optimistic, I just feel funky.
Have you been there?
It seems a silly reminder, but it really isn’t when you think of all the distractions the world has for us. My friend, whether you are struggling to keep your head above water in the throes of motherhood, or you’re just finding yourself distracted in a tiring season, a lonely season, an emotionally hard season, I want to encourage you.
I love the verse in Acts 17, and the way it describes how when we seek God, he’s never far from us:
‘He has done this so that every person would long for God, feel their way to him, and find him — for he is the God who is easy to discover!‘ Acts 17:27
The HCSB says, “though he is not far from each of us.”
Maybe you need a gentle nudge, or maybe you need a total reset — but I encourage you to go after the Lord.
If there are distractions pulling your affections away from him, recognize those things and put boundaries in place. Maybe that means setting a “screen time” limit on your social apps. Maybe it means taking a break from your evening entertainment. Maybe it even means permanently setting aside some of those favorite shows that you know you shouldn’t be watching, but have made excuses for. You’d be surprised how little course corrections can make such a long-lasting impact on your relationship with God.
. . .
‘I don’t depend on my own strength to accomplish this; however I do have one compelling focus: I forget all of the past as I fasten my heart to the future instead. I run straight for the divine invitation of reaching the heavenly goal and gaining the victory-prize through the anointing of Jesus.’
Philippians 3:13–14, TPT
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