If you give a Jake a pizza...
Get filled up on the RIGHT things and stop chasing what can't fill us up.
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It’s the New Year: That means it’s time for me to lose all the holiday weight that I put on because I told myself I would just lose it in the new year.
Last New Year, I undertook a radical regimen through my CrossFit gym where I cut out sugar, gluten, and dairy and did at least 30 minutes of exercise a day—for 75 days straight. I missed a few workouts but always adhered to the diet. I’ll admit, it worked. I lost a lot of weight and had more energy than ever. It really helped me in my travels when I could scale Mayan pyramids with ease while the cruise ship tourists were panting out of breath at the first landing.
But for 2024, I decided to be slightly less strict. I’m just counting calories. I have a daily calorie budget that I stay within and can even earn a few extra calories for the day through cardio.
Eleven days into January, and I’m doing pretty well. Mostly, I’ve been skipping breakfast and having an early lunch, consuming lots of stuff high in protein to keep me full. I’ve already lost 8 pounds if you're wondering. But while my initial detox from high-calorie food went pretty well, eventually, I caved for one item: I really wanted pizza.
Now, according to the diet, I CAN eat pizza. But man, oh man, does it cost me! Even a few slices of cheap pizza eat up a significant portion of my daily calorie budget. This should just mean that for the other meals, I eat lighter—so it all evens out. But I noticed something quite sinister about eating pizza…
I was still hungry.
For being such a calorie-dense food, on the days I ate my leftover pizza, I found my self-control at an all-time low. On regular days with more healthy options, I didn’t have 11:30 pm cravings, and I’d wake up not hungry the next day. But the pizza cursed me. Despite stuffing myself with stuffed crust pizza (yeah, go big or go home), it didn’t satisfy me in the long term. Just in the moment, for a moment. It ultimately made me want MORE. And MORE. And MORE!
Since I’ve been doing some curriculum work on the Minor Prophets, I’ve been thinking about idols. As I’ve argued before in this newsletter when I told the story about the Mayan prophecy concerning my life, I think idol-worshiping in the Old Testament was mostly about “hedging their bets” to get extra protection for flocks or to ensure fertility or to make the locals like them better. People would turn from Yahweh to worship idols to get something that they felt they couldn’t get from the Lord.
But we find out in about 72 million instances in Scripture that it NEVER works out when they turn to idols. They get natural and supernatural consequences for their folly. The metal, clay, or wooden statues do nothing for them. Jeremiah declares, “Do not fear them; they can do no harm nor can they do any good” (Jer. 10:5b).
Idols and pizza (when you are on a low-calorie diet) both SOUND GOOD. They seem to fulfill our deepest desires. Yet…
Then they don’t.
The fantasies that we chase, the ones that draw us away from God, end up demanding too much of us. Typically, they end up demanding all of us.
We get on our phones for a minute to entertain ourselves… and then next thing you know, days later, we’ve consumed thousands of TikToks absent-mindedly.
We chase materialism to create our happy place… only to find out that to “keep up with the Joneses” is a never-ending journey of getting more and more useless stuff.
We patriotically fall in love with one nation… before discovering we are so committed to the country that we end up excusing its most atrocious and terrible actions.
We work extra hard to provide for our families… until we wake up one day having missed all the important moments when we wrapped our own self-worth into how much a boss praised us.
It’s the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie phenomenon. You give a mouse a cookie… it wants milk… then needs a straw… napkin… And it keeps going and going. That’s life when we let anything besides God fulfill us.
We are all slaves to something. It just depends what you want to attach yourself to. Paul’s Roman letter speaks to this very issue at length.
I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
-Romans 6:19-23
Getting your fill with sin leads to death—that’s the big payout. Getting your fill from God, which truly satisfies the rumble in our hearts, leads to eternal life. That’s a super sweet deal, if you ask me.
Personally, I’m going to try and curb my junk food cravings as I commit to eating better so I can craft my body into peak sculpture-esque shape that will make Greek statues jealous. In my spiritual life as well, I want to spend my year finding fulfillment in God’s open arms, not chasing these artificial substitutes on earth that only chew me up and spit me out.
In 2024, let’s find our fill with God! Who’s with me?
[If you need some more New Year’s centric advice, I discussed spiritual and psychological advice for committing to habits in last year’s New Year’s newsletter. It’s behind a paywall, however, like all my content older than a year. Just 5 bucks a month (4 if you join the sale) gets you access to all that old stuff plus tons of extra-special content!]
Question of the Week
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What things have you been prone to chase after that ultimately don’t fill you up?
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Fill me up,
Jake Doberenz
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Great article, Jake.