Cancers Both Tangible and Ethereal

God speaks to me mostly in the early morning. My first brain hours. My defenses are not up yet. He can slip in anything He wants before I can filter what I might not want to hear. I'm glad of that. I really do want to hear.

When God speaks in the early morning, the topic has been character issues, you could say. The ways I am that I mostly don't even know about myself, but when brought to light aren't who I want to be. God and I discussed my inability to see these bits of evil for what they are sometimes.

How do I change what I can't even see in myself? What I only realize when I am down yonder in Belize with nothing but time to think about it? And if your want or tend toward things that are not good for you, how do you change THAT? The heart wants what the heart wants. Is it just will power?

It occurred to me that it's the principle of the 90-day cleanse I'm going through. You fill yourself with good food and you lose the taste for bad. It's not will power. (It's not will power at all.) When you start eating exclusively what is good and nutritious and delicious, your palate starts to change. You crave what is good and nutritious and delicious. Even if the sugar or french fry desire doesn't wane completely, you don't mindlessly "want and therefore eat," anymore. At least at some level you make a decision either to not eat because it feeds cancer, or to eat it in spite of that. (And sometimes that's okay.) The point at some stage is to consciously make the choice, not have your desires run you (amok).

Maybe the heart is the same. You fill the heart with what is pure and good and focus on truth not lies or nonreality, and your appetite changes. You start to be drawn to what is good and repelled by what is bad. Your pursuit of God stops being able to coexist in your heart with your pursuit of what is self-serving / destructive / thoughtless / (insert your word). Not that you aren't still tempted by the spiritual french fry, but you at some level make a choice because the difference has become clear. You decide not to judge someone for being so judgmental because you realize "Oh, I'm doing the same thing" instead of letting your righteous indignation steamroll on through.

It was in an instant, just a blink, when I realized this.

I decided I would work on the heart issue and let God work on the cancer.

"Which cancer?" 

Oh. My. So He's calling the heart issue a cancer. That sounds so much worse than I would label it. And the centrifugal force of this thought whipped my perspective around.

If both are like cancer - silent, almost symptomless, but deadly cancer - and God were doing triage, which would He would work on first? Luckily (for me) He's God and He works on them all at once, but He doesn't want me to be thinking that one is important and the other is negligible. If anything, the one I want to discount is the one He wants me to give my full attention...

These are my quiet thoughts as I head to the jungle today. Adios for a week or so!