Our Life Reflects Our Loyalty

Our life reflects our loyalty.


It was painful to watch, but watch I did. Activist and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver visits a family in Huntington, West Virginia – a town given the label as the unhealthiest in all of the United States. On his new television experiment, Food Revolution, part reality show, part educational programming, Oliver explains to the mother that the freezer full of processed frozen pizzas and continual trips for fast food are killing her, her truck driving husband and her already obese children. He quizzes and informs her with hard-hitting questions and health based facts about diabetes, heart disease and other related issues that await them. Does she deliberately want to usher in a life time of health problems and shorter life spans, all for the sake of current convenience?



Manipulative perhaps, but you can’t help but agree with his assessment and admire his concerns. The mother tears up as most mothers would, and agrees that something has to change. He teaches her new ways of grocery shopping, meal planning and provides her with recipes to get started. He even encourages the kids to get involved for he knows that teaching them how to cook is one of the most empowering tools for shaping a healthier future.

Cut to a week later. He revisits this same family. Upon opening the refrigerator, Oliver discovers that most of the produce bought last week remains untouched. He directly asks the mother if she cooked the recipes he had provided. And although she claimed she did, the full refrigerator tells a different story. It was only after asking the six year old daughter what her favorite meal of the week was, that the truth was revealed.

“Pizza!” she exclaimed, and the mother knew she had been busted.

Our life reflects our loyalties.



What we are loyal to day after day, thought after thought, decade after decade is what shows up in our daily existence.

Define loyal – well, it’s exactly what we think it is – devotion.  If I am devoted to someone or some thing, then I give them or it my profound dedication.

When one begins a path of self awareness, we begin to take responsibility for all our profound dedications – be they powerful allies or crippling barriers to our good. We make the simple yet startling discovery that nothing outside of us can make our lives change. We carry the key and we begin by unlocking a door called willingness.

Our life reflects our loyalties according to a creative process, a spiritual law beautifully outlined by everyone from Jesus the Christ to Henry Ford with axioms that tell us, “It is done unto you as you believe,” and “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.”

It’s a nifty, all-encompassing thing this Spiritual Law, and each of us are blessed to have it operating 24/7 in our lives. Whether conscious of this law or not, it is always operating - the same way the laws of physics/gravity are always operating whether we understand or are conscious of them. We learn gravity through our continued attempts at standing up as babies. If you are going to pick up that plant and move it across the room to where it can get more light, you know that because the Earth’s atmosphere is pulling on that object, that you must apply the same force when lifting it to keep it from crashing to the ground.

I was recently reminded of human laws and our need to take them seriously after being pulled over in Florida for a “little thing” called speeding. Each law carries with it corresponding consequences.

If that mother is sincere in wanting to create healthy change for her children, then her loyalties must change. Regardless of how many generations before her did as she did, she possesses the ability to start anew. As outsiders observing her situation, it is fairly obvious how to begin doing that. Stop buying processed food. Create budget friendly menus. Enroll your kids in the process. Exercise. And yet, as great as all those things are, they are still only effects of greater controlling loyalties.

What about the loyalty to self loathing, unworthiness and plain ole fashioned not being good enough? What about core beliefs that have simmered in an energy of futility for so long, that one can’t even recall when they felt that life offered them anything to be hopeful for?

An astonishingly talented photographer will not put forth any effort to showcase their work and scrapes together a modest, safe living by working as a set decorator on various television shows. Not that there is anything wrong with being a set decorator, but accompanied with having that job is the long suffering complaint about artistic suppression and not being appreciated.

The solution seems easy – showcase your photography. Put it out there for the world to see. What’s the worst that could happen? But a seeming loyalty to unworthiness, fear of rejection or not being good enough rusts the wheels of creativity before they’ve ever had a chance to even roll down the track of possibility.

A start up business person has high aspirations for their home based endeavors but is short the funding necessary to really take it to the level of exposure it needs in order to generate the customer flow required for measured success. They begin short changing the few customers they do have by cutting corners and quality. They repeatedly talk about how hard things are with other start up business colleagues and stop all philanthropic giving and tithing to sources of their inspiration. What is their loyalty? How hard it is – how cut throat the market is – how limited their customer base is and how they need to find a way to outsmart the competition.
These loyal thoughts (i.e. can't afford, not good enough, can't catch a break, or the other end of the stick; the Universe supports me, everything I need shows up in the perfect time and in the perfect way, I am willing, there is more than enough, this too shall pass) are the molds that shape our day to day outcomes.

• When we give only when we feel obligated to or when there is absolute certainty of surplus, we are loyal to the idea that God is limited, life is a game of chance and that our connection to that Source is hit and miss.

• When we respond lovingly only when others love first then we are loyal to feelings and beliefs that love, in and of itself, is unsafe and must be proven before allowed in to our experience.

• When we take an action towards our growth, well-being, creative endeavors only when we are absolutely forced to, we are loyal to beliefs that undermine the value of who we are and that what we have to offer is second-rate and disposable.

and

• When we set clear-cut tangible goals and corresponding intentions, then what we are loyal to is the expectancy of demonstration(s) meeting us in ways expected and unexpected.

• When we joyously give of our time, talent and treasure because we are loyal to the spiritual truth that God is our Source, then God IS our Source and we lack for nothing.

Our life today is a reflection of what we are loyal to.

If we are dissatisfied, unhappy or afraid of certain areas of this current life, the question then becomes, “How willing are we to alter our loyalties in the way we think, act and be in order to invoke real, effective change?