Becoming Well With Liz Tafadzwa

Hello, BW tribe. Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating it today. How has your week been? If it hasn’t been great, be encouraged to know that this too shall pass. If it’s going great, be fully present for all of it. To my new readers, welcome! You are already loved here. To my regulars, welcome back, tribe.  

When was the last time you had processed sugary and oily foods for a straight week? Maybe it was this past week or it was on your last holiday. How did you feel after that week? Tired, groggy, skin breaking out, bloated? I have taken time in the last couple of years to observe how my body responds to added sugars and processed food and it’s interesting to see how consistent the outcome is. My skin breaks out, my body odor changes, I always feel tired and heavy, my focus is compromised, and many other unpleasant consequences. Why am I mentioning all this?  Because when you put trash inside your body, trash is also will come out externally. The same is true with your mind.

When you are constantly feeding your mind with trash, your mental state and behavior will eventually give out trash. I used to do the same thing that many of us may be battling spend all day on social media and then be upset at it for making my mind suffer. I still have days when I fall into this, but being aware of it was the starting point for the change process I’m currently working on. Social media is almost a neutral stimulus and it affects you to the level you allow it to influence your mind. You may disagree here, but can we be honest that the same social media that sends one person into depression is the same avenue that another person is using to help others get mentally well? However, social media is not the only example of potential trash sources. News, certain music and radio shows, TV shows, ads, gossip channels, and magazines are also potent sources of mental decline.

You may be thinking but Liz,  not all news, music, radio, social media accounts etc are trash. I agree with you, but where all these avenues are flawed is that they are not sources of ultimate truth.  Seldom what makes news is negative. A bus that safely arrived at its destination does not make breaking news, but if the bus was involved in an accident and 10 kids died on the spot then that would make prime news. Most of the highly played and viewed songs on YouTube or music streaming platforms are about pleasure, possessions, or power. Movies that hit the box office often have a similar storyline. Gossip channels and social media accounts tend to have the highest views and followers and ads are routinely designed to feed human insecurities and their demise. The products and services marketed routinely promise to give you something you feel and think is missing in you. So, every single day you are constantly encoding information from these sources. 

There is no way you could have peace of mind and security if you spend 5 hours on social media, 3 hours watching movies, 2 hours keeping up with every news headline and constantly following headlines gossip channels release and only spend 5 minutes in God’s Word. Of Course, you will succumb to envy, jealousy, feeling less than, and getting convinced that God is wrong in his timing when you are more glued to other people’s lives than God’s Word. The Bible is not some religious and aloof book detached from reality and the problems we face in 2024. A few of the words used to describe it are “Bread of Life, “Meat,” “Living Water” and “Truth.”  I love all these words because they expound on the essence of God’s Word and why we need to feed our minds.

Science has proven that carbohydrates are the preferred energy source for the brain and in many regions of the world bread is a common source of carbohydrates. Water also proves essential to life, with research proving that a human can survive longer with only water than with food. If the water we see is needed for us to survive, what more is the living water? It quenches the thirst you have trying to quench it with sex, status, and material possessions. 

Meat speaks of growth and maturity. A baby graduates from milk to solid food when they reach a certain age, but what gives a mother the green light that their baby is ready for actual food is hunger levels. Milk is no longer enough to fill the baby’s nutritional and stomach needs. The same applies to your mind. Your mind is constantly overwhelmed with surface-level human thoughts and feel-good statements but it is never satisfied because it’s looking for meat. It’s searching for substance. 

Recall, in my post “Managing Your Thoughts” I talked about how knowing the truth is critical for mind management. You will not only be able to spot a lie when you see it but also replace it with the truth if you don’t know the truth to begin with. If you feed your mind with truth, your behavior will eventually align with truth. When you know that you are the head and not the tail, fearful and wonderfully made, chosen and accepted you will stop behaving like a rejected, unwanted and generic person. When you know that God will never fail nor abandon you, the manipulation of situations, people and opportunities will stop. When storms are all around, you will walk with confidence and peace to know that your heavenly Father has got your back. If you didn’t get anything out of this, I want you to take away this: the quality of your life is in direct correlation to the quality of what you feed your mind. I challenge you this week to be honest about what you feeding your mind. Are you feeding it with trash or healthy nourishing food, the bread of life, living water, and meat?

“The quality of your life is in direct correlation to the quality of what you feed your mind.”

I love you and I will see you on the next one.