Fast Food Society

Look around, we have become a "fast food" society. We are so used to pulling up to our local fast food joint, placing our order, and driving off with our food, and in about the same time it would take us to pop something in the microwave at home. Fast Food joints (and regular restaurants) are a great convenience. It seems fewer and fewer families eat at home anymore. Not that I'm saying that this is a bad thing, but just stating my opinions. This mentality has spread, however into every part of our lives. We expect to get what we want and when we want it. We don't take time to stop and smell the roses anymore. I went to a local pizza joint a few months ago with several church members. It was a great time of fellowship, (it always is) but the service was horrible! There were 16 or so of us in our group and there were only 2 other people in the place. They were a little under staffed that night, so we were there for 10 minutes or so before someone took our drink orders. It was probably another 15 minutes before we got our drinks. I don't remember how long it took them to take our orders, but I do know it was close to an hour and a half before the last order came out. Needless to say, we were not to happy about the service. Why, because it was not as fast as what we expected. After about 40 minutes of S-L-O-W service 85% of our conversations turned to talking about that, SLOW SERVICE. We all started complaining to each other about it. (I did say WE ALL, which includes me!) Don't get me wrong, there is a certain quality of service that should be expected when we go out to eat. But I think we sometimes forget what goes into preparing a meal.

Thanksgiving dinner at my parents house is always great. My dad always smokes a turkey on the Webber Kettle. (Not a gas grill. They are faster, but the flavor is not quite as good.) It takes about 3 hours to cook it this way. Mom slaves away for a few days before making all kinds of good deserts. Plus, on Thanksgiving day mom is still making the side dishes. A good home cooked meal is NOT fast food. It's a process. Red Lobster now has a special menu, the Wood Fire Grill menu. It takes longer for them to cook it, but man, just like Thanksgiving dinner at home, it's worth the wait.

Back to the "fast food". If all we ever ate was fast food we would be in some BIG trouble. (Side note: The USA on average is the FATTEST COUNTRY in the world. Let that soak in for a minute. Maybe it's because there is a fast food restaurant on almost every corner!) There was a documentary a few years back called "Super Size Me". Morgan Spurlock only ate McDonalds for 30 days. That's 3 meals a day for 30 days for a total of 90 meals. He went to a doctor several times during this 30 day period to track his health changes. It got to the point where his doctors tried to get him to stop filming the documentary because it was destroying his health and they thought it was going to kill him.

So, here's my point...

In our spiritual lives we do the same thing. A lot of times we live on a "Fast Food" diet. We get up in the morning and read one or two verses and go on about our day and wonder why we haven't seen God do amazing things in our lives. We all know someone we look up to spiritually. someone who we say we'd like to be like some day. They seem to always be able to find joy even in the middle of trials. If you were to ask them how they got this way they would tell you it was a process. They didn't just wake up one night and have it all together. In fact, they would probably tell you they still don't have it all together and don't think they ever will. You see, they have learned that getting to know God is a process. You can't just pull up to church on Sunday mornings and expect to walk out full of the knowledge of God. For that matter, come back Sunday and Wednesday nights and it still won't happen. You need to spend time with God every day in order for that to happen. I know my youth think I'm old, but I'm not. I'm only 33 at the time of writing this. However I have learned this. When I spend time with God I learn to become content in Him. Which means that there is still stuff happening around me, but I'm able to keep my focus on Him. I know that just hit-and-miss time with God is not healthy. I can't grow spiritually if that is my regular habit. When I become content in God I am able to have joy through the struggles. Most of them are not fixed overnight. In fact, a lot of them take years, and some of them will last until I'm at home with my Lord. But I'm able to trust that everything is ok because of the time spent with Him. We CAN'T expect to grow in Christ if all we do is eat spiritual fast food. It will give us our fill, make us feel like we did something for the day, but what we will end up with is a spiritually fat and lazy life. We won't want to get off of our backsides and do something for God because wel will be too tired to do so.


I know I'm probably the last person who should use this example, but I'm going to anyway. Physically if we don't exercise regularly we will become lazy. When we become lazy we become fat. When we become fat we see people all around us having fun and want to join in. However, now we don't have the energy to get up off of our backsides because of our laziness and lack of good nourishment. We know we need to change our diets, we know we need to start to exercise, but we don't have the energy to do so. Sometimes people will even get depressed because of this. We think about the old days when we could run and play with the best of them. Now we are stuck. We know that if we would just start small, maybe a walk around the yard twice a day, then a walk around the block, the 2 times around the block. The next thing we know we are able to walk 2 miles. Spiritually it's the same way. If we start off spending just a little more time with God, the next thing you know we are able to spend more and more time with Him.


That's just something that was on my mind today. I hope you are able to get something out of it.