When my wife and I first married, my darling newlywed decided to bake me a cake for my birthday. Since the kitchen in our little apartment was meagerly equipped with cooking ware — a pot to cook spaghetti, a pan to fry an egg — she decided to make a microwave cake.
That would have been fine had she not misread the directions. Where the directions called for a quarter cup of oil and one cup of water, she trickled a quarter cup of water and dumped a full cup of oil into the mixture, baked, frosted, and singing Happy Birthday, placed the cake with candles in front of me.
I knew there was an issue as soon as I cut into the cake and it oozed. But being the dutiful, loving husband, I took a big bite. Seeing the seeping slice, my wife jumped out of her seat, ran into the kitchen, pulled the box out of the trash, stared at it silently for a moment, realized the mistake, and then she began to laugh hysterically.
I took a second bite because I really do love my wife.
“You don’t have to eat it,” she told me as she laughed harder, probably from the face I was trying so desperately not to make.
While always avoidable, these things happen all the time. Like when my son used a moist towelette to clean the TV, smearing it so badly you couldn’t make out a face, or when my daughter put a wool sweater through the washer and dryer and it’s now part of the wardrobe for a stuffed bear.
If what we start with is flawed, what we end with will be flawed. It’s like that old adage: Garbage in, garbage out.
The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” originated in the field of computer science in the 1950s and 60s. It refers to the idea that the quality of output is determined by the quality of input: If you feed poor or flawed data into a system, the output will be equally poor or flawed.
The same is true for our spiritual lives.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit.”
As if to avoid any confusion, Jesus gives the same message again but more plainly: “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”
What we put into our hearts is what will come out of our hearts. We need to be very careful because if what we start with is flawed, what we end with will be flawed. Garbage in, garbage out.
Are our hearts stored more with loving God with all our heart, all our soul and all our mind, or do we find ourselves more often putting God behind other priorities?
Are our hearts stored more with avoiding near temptations to sin, or do we find ourselves more often drawn into baseless arguments and gossip and immoral words, images and actions?
Are our hearts stored more with prayer, Scripture, the Rosary and spiritual readings, or do we find ourselves more often idle or binge watching shows with dubious value?
What spiritual care have we given ourselves to ensure that we are using the correct ingredients in our recipe of faith? Spiritual self-care means that sometimes we need to turn off the TV, avoid political arguments that you will never win, walk away from gossip, and stay away from people, places and things that can lead us to temptation. And sometimes you have to throw out the cake.
Of course, none of us can do this all on our own. It is by the grace of God, the grace we receive in prayer, the grace we receive in Reconciliation, the grace that we receive in the Most Holy Eucharist that we gain the spiritual elements to store our hearts with goodness so that we will produce goodness.
The Psalmist told us: “They that are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.”
Where we plant ourselves is where we will grow. So we must ensure to nourish our hearts more with God’s graces and less with the world’s woes.
Deacon Dean Johnson serves at Church of the Holy Family, Sewell.
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