I know, don't be nervous. By it's title, this blog might seem like another en vogue, trendy, and tired "go green" campaign. But this is not that blog. However, having said that, the premise proposed in this blog would support such a campaign, the virtue of which would not require us to wear birkenstocks and patchouli oil, but instead hold our ideas (light bulbs) loosely and change them when they burn out, which may be more often than we realize.  

The header for my blog page is "Moving the Swing". I chose this because it seemed to fit a posture of learning that I believe is crucial to our growth in any category of life: spiritual, physical, emotional. To move a swing, we pump our legs back and forth until we get some motion going. It's certainly more interesting than sitting idle and lazily hoping someone will come around and give us a boost. That does and should happen and is a great case for building a life sustaining community around you, but hasn't God called us to more initiative when it comes to our own extensions and contractions on our swing of life?  

We don't know what we don't know. And if all we've learned so far is what we're practicing, that familiarity may be found contemptible before too long. The mana from today will do us no good tomorrow. Romans 12 vs. 2 exhorts us to "be transformed by the renewal of your mind". I cite that verse not to pluck it from its intended meaning but rather to suggest it's transferability into other areas of life. 

Now here is a charge that can and should be practiced for life: "forgive as you have been forgiven".  It is safe to say that we may never claim mastery over that call. And it is one that will forever find new context in our lives for us to practice.  My encouragement is not to trade transcendental truths like that for new ones but, instead, to find what "general rules" (light bulbs) we've been living under that can be looked at, reworked, thrown out, and changed. 

Take diets, for example. From our grandparents, to our folks, to us - three measly generations - how much have sensibilities on healthy eating changed? And it can be such personal thing too! Things that we avoid feeding our kids today, my parents will staunchly defend as being perfectly fine for us when we were kids. It's not as if things turned out horribly for us, right? But that can't be the bar we set for ourselves. The absence of irreparable illness can never equal the presence of optimal health. Now in their defense, and not to sound too Ralph Nader-like, but the manufacturing and distribution of food today is an entirely different animal than it was in their day. Meaning - the same food item we find on our food store shelves today should not be confused with it's counter part decades ago. (Let me now throw in a quote for our current manufacturers, marketers, and distributors ... "To have the right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it" - G. K. Chesterton.) Finally, where ignorance kept them blissful, education and research makes us accountable. 

So, as the fads of new and improved ways to be healthy come across our paths, let's simply look with more scrutiny at those light bulbs. Let's get in the game and fight to make useful the ideas and rules we integrate as our own, all the while holding them loosely. If it's our assumption that integrating newly learned "general rules" into our paradigm (changing out bulbs) is of value, then we must continue to move the swing.  Extend as we learn and contract as we practice.  I recognize that the daunting and un-motivating dynamic in this could be that if what we learn in our future will potentially blow up our paradigm of today, then what benefit is there to learning if we can never believe it to be perpetually true? Again, I believe the answer is that we look to give the benefit of the doubt to the evolution of those "general rules". We learn. We integrate. We eliminate. And we do it over and over again. 

So, here's the "what do I do now?": It's too overwhelming to change out EVERY bulb in your life. Frankly, that's not even the goal. Instead, pick one or two bulbs to tackle today, this week, this month. On the food front, maybe it's beginning to learn about "partially hydrogenated oils" (found in staggering amounts of food items, by the way) and eliminating them from your diet. You may learn (not from the marketers, mind you) that those partially hydrogenated oils are one engineering process away from being considered an actual plastic. Maybe another bulb replacement is switching from processed white (flour, rice, bread) to brown/whole wheat/whole grain (flour, rice, bread).  Or substituting the naturally sweet Agave for white sugar. Moving closer to foods found in their natural state rather than those that have been overly tampered with in order to survive on shelves for a few more months/years. 

Pertaining to the accommodation of our preferences ... understand this: that the more you don't, the more you won't and the more you do, the more you will.  And as you do - smile - because now you're swinging!