Balancing Your Life - Lesson #6

“What Are You Stuffing Yourself With?”
Our family was getting ready to leave for the lake just after lunch on the 4th of July but we got a little distracted because of the annual hot dog eating contest on ESPN. Some families might keep background Christian music playing while they are in their homes; we tend to have Sports Center on autopilot at 1707 Wentworth. Just a little confession to feel cleaner. Anyway, I was trying to put my makeup on but couldn’t help but get in on the drama of the moment. Rusty and Will, my husband and oldest son, were glued to the tube (the youngest son was watching in the privacy of the attic) as the two top contestants were neck and neck stuffing themselves with hotdogs. As they stuffed another dog into their mouths a person behind them would change the number on the marker they were holding like the men at football games changing the down marker after each play. The intensity grew as they approached the final tick of the ten-minute giant digital clock. A crowd of thousands at Nathan’s on Coney Island cheered wildly as they frantically crammed more dogs and buns in washing them down as needed with water. It was not a pleasant sight to say the least. I was thankful that we would be served Boston Butt and ribs at the Epperson’s lake house not hot dogs. The six-time champion Takera Kobayashi was two dogs up on the defending champion Joey Chesnut with about a minute to go. It really seemed almost over for the American. When I say he looked pitiful I mean it. It looked like he was about to throw up but fighting through the apparent discomfort he continued to cram those dogs in one after another. The Japanese fellow looked refreshed as he doubled over his dogs and shoved them down his throat. It looked like he would retain the mustard-colored champions belt when at the last second the American tied up the score-59 hotdogs and buns in a mere 10 minutes. Yes history was made that moment on Coney Island. Never before in the 93 year history of the contest had there ever been a tie. Sudden death was to follow. Whoever got 5 extra dogs in the fastest would be declared the 2008 winner. The crowd was obviously pulling for the American-after all; it was the 4th of July. With the unbridled enthusiasm of an SEC crowd the New Yorkers cheered Chesnut to victory. The American was literally stuffed like a prize trophy; he was the champion of the day. Headlines in papers all across the land declared him a great American. You have to laugh to keep from weeping. If we’ve ever needed for God to bless America it’s now. It pains me to even record this “historical” event but I see some powerful spiritual analogies. I pride myself in saying that I would NEVER participate in such a ridiculous contest. Before the contest started ESPN’s Sports Center broadcasted for at least an hour with more details than you could ever imagine. Like discussing competing horses in the Kentucky Derby the pedigree of each dog eater was discussed ad nauseum. Some of the contestants looked entirely normal. One fellow was a spinal surgeon by profession. All of them had gone through extensive training to get on the stage of Nathan’s that day. There had been preliminary eat-offs in various other locals during the year. They purposed to be right where they were that hot July day. But they didn’t purpose to be there after they ate their first dog ever. At some point between 1 and 59 things got terribly out-of-balance. What about you? What are you “stuffing” your life with? “Did you start with the Spirit and are now trying to attain things by human effort? “ (Galatians 1:10) Could you be putting in so many other things that there’s little room for Him? Is intimacy with your heavenly Father something for just a select few? Is the world crowding out the Word in your life? Are you in competition with others to “get ahead “ in the world by cramming in all it has to tempt and offer to you? Are you striving each day to do more and more in less and less time? As I remember those two dog eaters cramming in more and more in the shortest time possible I can only think of people trapped by the world. They are moving faster and faster minute after minute for zero eternal significance. “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world-the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does-comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” (1 John 2:15-17)
As I got in on the suspenseful final minutes of that silly contest with those men literally stuffing animal by-products into their mouths the Holy Spirit highlighted a sentence I had read in John Piper’s book ‘Hunger for God’ and it is as follows: “Your soul is stuffed with small things.” I will end this “hotdog eating” story with paragraphs taken directly from that book. Be still and listen for the Holy Spirit as He will convict the majority of us who live in America. My prayer is that you will do what He says.
“Desires for other things (the enemy) enter in and choke the Word (Mark 4:19)-the only weapon is a deeper hunger for God. The weakness in our hunger is not because He is unsavory but because we have kept ourselves stuffed with “other things.” What we hunger for most we worship. The birthplace of Christian fasting is homesickness for God. The greatest adversary of love to God is not His enemies but His gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God Himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable and almost incurable. The “pleasures of this life” and the desires for other things –these are not evil in themselves, these are gifts from God. They are your basic meat and potatoes and coffee and gardening and reading and decorating and traveling and investing and TV watching and internet surfing and shopping and exercising and collecting and talking. And all of these can become deadly substitutes for God. When you take your stand on the finished work of God in Christ, and begin to drink at the River of Life and eat the bread of heaven, and know that you have found the end of all your longings you only get hungrier for God. The more satisfaction you experience from God, while still in this world, the greater your desire for the next. C.S. Lewis said, ‘Our best havings are wantings.’ The more deeply you walk with Christ, the hungrier you get for Christ… the more homesick you get for heaven. If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestations of the glory of God, it is not because you drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things.”
Ann Allen Salter
July 7, 2008