Food for Thought
He answered, ‘It is written: Man must not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Matthew 4:4
Matthew 4:4
We have free will, and therefore we must make choices. One of these choices is “What should I eat today?”
A nutrient-dense plate of food or a tasty but unhealthy dish?
Your choice might not have a great impact on your health today. It might take months or years before you start to notice the physical effects of your consistent choices.
If you consistently opt for the nutrient-dense plate of food for years, you might find yourself being physically healthy and rejuvenated.
Alternatively, if you consistently choose the tasty and unhealthy dish, you might develop health issues. If you get to this situation, do you give up at that point? Or do you choose change?
Change won’t be easy at first, but it can become easy once it becomes a habit. So you decide that embracing change is the most loving action towards yourself. You start eating healthy, not because you hate yourself, but because you love yourself and want to feed your body with what it really needs to be healthy. Your choice is not a rejection of who you are or a rejection of your friends or family who love eating French fries. It is simply a choice to take care of yourself, without judging anyone.
From a spiritual perspective, thoughts are like food. Sadly, most people believe that they “are” their thoughts, which often blocks the ability to choose change. You don’t identify yourself as the hamburger or the salad that you eat, yet you often identify your thoughts as part of yourself.
You are neither the hamburger nor the salad, but both provide you with fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, which are absorbed by your body, shaping the physical expression of who you are. Likewise, the thoughts that you allow within yourself are absorbed by your mind, heart, soul, and spirit, therefore affecting the expression of your “self”. Don’t believe the lie that “your” thoughts are 100% yours, because most don’t originate from yourself. The enemy often relies on this lie to cause much harm.
Thoughts come from the outside, just like food. Thoughts are passed on to you over many years by the mainstream media, movies, books, friends, family, religion, philosophies, school, etc. Thoughts can be inspired by God, his angels, or by Satan. Our minds are the perfect battlefield, and if we lack discernment, we could accept thoughts from the enemy as our own.
Someone from one religion might come to accept and feed themselves daily with different thoughts than someone from a different religion. Culture, family, and even the generation into which we are born provide different thoughts to different people. As Christians, our goal is to seek the Truth! The Truth does not change regardless of culture, family, or generation. In fact, St. John of the Ladder teaches us to fully “detox” from the influence of our culture, family, etc., so that we may begin to know God’s will for us.
Yet most people live on automatic. Most of the time, because they identify themselves so closely with “their” thoughts. Most people don’t think of their thoughts as outside input, apart from who they are at their core, inputs that can be rejected and replaced with healthier thoughts. Yet for millennia, the ancient Greek philosophers, Our Lord Jesus, the Christian martyrs and saints, and now the contemporary cognitive psychologists, keep repeating to us that we must practice “metacognition” (thinking about thinking), become self-aware, look closely at any thought we allow into ourselves, and change the way we think whenever it’s necessary.
And just as it takes time to see the consequences of consistently eating unhealthy food, the consequences of accepting unhealthy thoughts might not be seen for years. So do not wait, be proactive regarding your thoughts.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life, found in the Eucharist. The Word is the mental bread we need to nourish our thoughts, inner beauty, free will, present, and future.
Panis Mentalis (Latin for “Mental Bread”) is a site dedicated to feeding the mind, heart, soul, and spirit with the Truth.
Glory and Honor to the Holy Trinity, and to the Bread of Life, Jesus Christ, for all His love and infinite blessings.