Reactions and Responses

             “I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything. You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body… Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. (I Corinthians 6:12-13 & 19-20)

In Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote about learning to insert time between stimulus and response. His words led me to differentiate between a “reaction,” which is what we mindlessly do in response to a stimulus, and a “response,” which is what we choose to do after we’ve taken the time to think. The time involved may not be long, but there is consciousness about our choices.

As Dallas Willard described us, we tend to “farm out” a lot of our lives to our bodies. Think about cooking a meal. You may read or remember an instruction, but you carry it out without thinking through every movement. You open the cupboard door without telling your muscles, “OK, bicep, you stretch. Now flex. Finger muscles wrap around the door handle. Arm, pull.” We might be a little more attentive when cutting something with a sharp knife. Maybe. It’s the same with driving. That’s why we think we can text while driving. We trust our reactions.

The problem comes when our bodies do things and react to specific stimuli in a way that isn’t in our best interest. We eat something we don’t need to and don’t intend to. We smoke cigarettes. We drink alcohol. We watch or read something that we call a “guilty pleasure.” It might even be as simple as staying up later or hitting the snooze button. It could be feeling pleasure, feeling stimulated sexually, or even feeling guilty or ashamed. The point is not the content of the thing but the fact that it happens without our conscious decision. We may kick ourselves for doing it while doing it.

I plan to memorize today’s verses so that I have them to help me when I react. They’re a weapon, I hope, that might give me a few seconds to have second thoughts.