Last Tuesday I walked out the door yet again without taking my vitamins. With coffee in one hand, lunch in the other, and my briefcase on my shoulder, I used a leg to swing the door shut behind me. With my hands full and the clock ticking, I remembered the vitamins in the back of the refrigerator, largely untouched for two years. I shook my head in dismay and mumbled something about the pace of life. When is life going to slow down? There’s just not enough time in the day!
Then I looked at my coffee mug. Coffee can do a lot of things, but speak truth is rarely one of them. But my coffee confronted me.
Every morning I spend careful minutes to grind fresh beans and pour boiling water over them. Before I became a coffee snob, I slept those fifteen minutes.
When I walked out in a rush, I saw the truth: I choose what I want over what I need.
While my vitamins sat untouched, I made coffee. I abandoned the very thing my body needed most for the aroma and hazelnut taste I wanted. The pace of life and busy schedule had nothing to do with my failure to take vitamins. It came down to my choice to prioritize what I wanted over what I needed.
How often do we choose what we want rather than what we need? And even worse, do we have the awareness to realize the ways we mask these choices?
Sadly life does not always allow us to know the cost of our decisions, either. I have no way to know how my neglect of vitamins has affected my life. Better sleep? Less sickness? Happier moods?
The external provides metaphor for the internal: In terms of your responsibility to care for your heart, where do you drink coffee instead of vitamins? How do you choose wants and miss the pursuit of needs?
I hide rather than tell the truth. I leave my own life to fantasize about another. I choose an evening alone when I need to call a friend. I let the demands of my calendar blind me from my marriage. I skip time with God to check an item off my to-do list.
Each sentence starts with “I” because I have a willing participation in all of these, whether I am conscious of it or not.
It is quite scary, actually, to consider God gives us the freedom to pursue our wants and bypass our needs. He has made us so incredibly needy. Yet our indulgences keep us happy enough that we forsake the needs of our heart: To belong. To love. To sacrifice. To connect. To surrender. To fight. To live and relate humbly. To live freely. To be loved. To seek God and find Him. To live in the real over the fantasy. To stay present in our story (read more here).
I am so needy and dependent that I barely function without water and food. My thirst and my hunger scream loud enough that I answer almost immediately. But the needs of my heart too often go unseen and unheard because I pursue what I want rather than what I need. And perhaps this is the greatest fear of all- we do not always know what it costs us to neglect the needs of our heart, the very needs God has wired into our soul. In the freedom he offers, he allows us to fool about and get by with the frothy life we want even as we neglect soul nourishment.
Our heart, like our taste buds and stomach, wants the easy way out. Our first impulse will always be toward the sensually pleasing rather than that which nourishes us.
So if you are just finishing your cup of coffee like me, let’s drink to this: To watch over our heart we must seek, discover, and pursue our needs. Only then will we grow, mature, and find life to offer. Only then will we live the story for which we are written.
