With the ever-increasing demands for health, people are showing their concerns in the types of foods they eat. It seems like for every study that declares something is good for us, there is another study that says the opposite. To me, this is one of the most frustrating things about dieting. These battles have gone on for years and will likely continue as the fields of nutrition and health are further studied.

We spend so much time worrying about our bodies and the food we allow to enter into the body. How many people stop to consider what enters their minds? The world is gung-ho on selling all kinds of products to us. If we have anything electronic, it is connected somehow, trying to connect us with products we may like. Information is poured rapidly into our minds causing our brains to work at speeds never before thought of to filter it all.

Yet, how often do we sit back to think about what we are consuming? I remember one time concentrating on the lyrics of songs I listened to on the radio. The excuse was always, I liked the beat, the rhythm, and the music. After paying attention to what was actually said, it made me start to think twice about what it was I was listening to. Sure, when you feel sad, you feel like listening to sad music. But it tends to deepen your depression, not help it! I was flipping through a station the other day, and on the car display, it told me the name of the song, name of the artist, and after nearly every album title was (EXPLICIT). I shook my head and went to another station. I get that music is an expression, but how is it that everyone is expressing themselves in the same vulgar way. So much of music today demeans the value of women and the sacredness of one loving, committed relationship as opposed to hundreds of risked exposures to life-threatening or life-altering sexually transmitted diseases. I remember in the nineties they were writing love music trying to win a girl’s heart. Now, they want to do you nasty and throw you away.

Television is another matter that we allow free intake without regard for what we are seeing. We classify it as entertainment and certainly it is. But you have to admit, what was seen on television sixty years ago is far stretch from what is seen today. I still remember when married people on shows slept in separate twin beds. Now, people on television can’t seem to keep their clothes on within an hour of meeting one another. As a child, I never made the connection. Thinking about it now, seeing someone with another person’s spouse in an intimate setting doing intimate things, I can see where that could lead to trouble. For the actors/actresses, they are trying to portray a thing as if it is real. The risk is in trying so hard to live it out is they could become what they are acting out. For the viewer, it continually exposes our eyes to intimacy that is not our own.

The bar keeps sliding, further and further as to what is acceptable. Most profanity is now said on regular television with only a few exceptions. Add to that, the violence portrayed by people killing each other is plastered across our screens in never before seen ways. Give it a few more years and the bar will lower even further. When will it stop though? How much savagery will we expose ourselves to on a regular basis until we take a step back and realize we are losing our humanity? The age of morality is diminishing; I can’t help to think of, at what cost?

The argument is that we can handle it. Perhaps to a degree, that may be true. However, the minds of young people are being exposed to all this material at younger ages than before. Can they handle it before their minds have developed the same reasoning as a fully matured adult, whose formation of reasoning continued to develop far into their twenties? We cannot explicitly control what happens outside of ourselves. However, we have the power to choose what we allow to enter our minds. To some degree, parents can control what enters the minds of their children.

What passes through our minds goes straight to into the heart. What are you allowing in yours?