DailyGenesis.com

Today, I am beginning my first blogging series. This is a topic I have wanted to discuss for a while and I believe my thoughts will extend beyond a single post.

I believe that most believers would agree that sin is not a laughing matter. We don’t laugh about most sins. You know, the bad ones like murder and stealing and adultery. Those are serious sins, right?

There is one sin, though, that I notice people tend to joke about regularly. That sin is … are you ready … wait for it …

Gluttony

How many times do you see someone sit down in front of a big plate of terribly unhealthy food and joke about how unhealthy it is? We say things like “man, this is a heart attack on a plate,” or “boy, I really shouldn’t be eating this.” Then, of course, we go right ahead and eat it all.

I know I am just giving a few examples but my point here is that, in general, a lot of people laugh about the fact that they are doing something that’s wrong. It just seems that we don’t take the matter very seriously.

I guess I really got motivated to start up this series when I read this post from the About Oklahoma City blog. Evidently, I am living in one of the most unfit and unhealthy cities in the nation where obesity is rising and things are just all around bad.

Obesity is a problem, but that’s really not what I want to focus on in this series. I think the bigger issue is self-control and moderation, because that’s the problem I see with gluttony. It’s certainly detrimental to one’s health, but it’s even more detrimental to one’s spirit as it is evidence of a lack of self-control. And I think that we all need to be more disciplined and have more self-control, regardless of our waist size.

I want to be clear that I’m talking to myself just as I’m talking to everyone else. I personally struggle with this issue a great deal and that’s why I feel it is so important. People often look at me and say “you’re so skinny, you don’t need to watch what you eat.” I think that is just more evidence of the problem, because you don’t have to be really large to struggle with self control.

I love to eat. Eating makes me feel good and so when I feel bad I often want to eat for comfort. I go beyond eating enough to be filled and move into eating just because it tastes good or feels good. Every time I work hard at eating right, there is huge temptation to not eat right. Why is it so hard? How do we overcome it?

Well, I think the first step is to acknowledge that it’s a problem and, unfortunately, I think that’s the step where most of us fail. After all, if we joke about it or laugh about it, we are not taking it very seriously. It’s as if we are saying we know it is something we should do, but we don’t think it’s that big of a deal so we’re not going to work hard at it.

I guess that’s really the point of post number one. There will be more on this topic to come.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.