Anger Free Dadናሙና

What's Your Meal Plan Look Like?

I’m sure I don’t need to mention the importance of good eating habits, but that advice is often ignored when the stomach is yelling. Loudly. When that happens, what do we do? We usually eat what we can get the fastest. It’s called fast food for a reason.

Good eating habits can be hard, and it often takes retraining the way we think. It doesn’t help that we’re also juggling marriage, kids, work, bills, schedules, and the occasional golf game. Eating healthy is a challenge when there is so much on a dad’s plate (pun intended), but we face greater challenges if we don’t eat well: loss of energy, weight gain, poor brain function, and even depression.

There’s another diet that is even more important: feeding our souls with the Word of God. We need spiritual sustenance! If a dad isn’t sensitive to his spiritual diet and continuously feeds his mind and heart with excessive social media and news reports that get his dander up, he quickly becomes malnourished. We can’t “eat” this way and only consume a bite or two of God’s Word on Sundays. That’s like expecting to have great health by eating unhealthy foods for six days and only eating healthy on Sunday.

As dads, what we spiritually consume shows up in our marriages, parenting, and all relationships. Over time, it becomes easy to pick out the dad who is feeding regularly on God’s Word. A regular diet on God’s truth gives you the wisdom, knowledge, and spiritual power to fight things like temptation, lust, greed, hate, and anger. Filling your mind with the things of God fills you with peace, and where there’s peace, there’s no room for anger.

Being aware of your negative intake from the world shouldn’t be something you do passively, and you should not wait until your spiritual health is critical before you change it for the better. Develop a biblical meal plan in which you intentionally receive and obey God’s Word every day. The very fact that you are reading this devotion may well indicate a desire on your part to get a handle on your anger and a handle on God’s Word. May the Lord go before you as you daily feed on God’s Word, gaining an appetite for His peace over your anger.

Commit to making time in God’s Word a priority every morning. If it means getting up 15 minutes earlier, ask God to give you the discipline to do so.