Several years ago our family relocated from our familiar city surroundings and plopped ourselves down in a small rural community looking to provide a wholesome natural lifestyle for our children where they could run, play, and squeal with delight without disturbing neighbors. We wanted them to understand eggs came from chickens rather than grocery store shelves and a hard day’s work results in an empowering sense of satisfaction that trumps the best of video games.
The whole experience has been quite a success and I could fill volumes on the interesting learning curves we have experienced. Everyone in the family has at many times done things that we would have never done before (like catching and relocating snakes out of animal coops – yikes!)
One of the adventures in our little experiment has been the farming of goats. As a city girl, I don’t know that I had ever touched a goat before, perhaps not even seen one. So herding, feeding and milking goats was a whole new world for me. If you are familiar with livestock, you know that goats and cows have a peculiar and rather nasty habit. They take food they have eaten earlier in the day – food already swallowed – and they bring this food back up into their mouths and begin to chew on it to get more of the nutrition out of it. What a shocking discovery for this city kid!
One day as my hands were busy in the dishwater of my kitchen sink, my mind was busy also. Different scriptures were coming to mind and I was considering the deeper meaning of them. I would then speak out what I refer to as the “Marjorie paraphrased edition” of scriptures where I would repeat the truth of that passage of scripture in my own words. It was then I realized what I was actually doing. By pulling up scriptures I had already swallowed and chewing on them to get more of the truth out of them, I was chewing the cud!
Chewing the cud is a wonderful practice to assist us in getting past simply reading scriptures and to begin extrapolating the truth out of them so that they become a part of us. In “Tarrying for Transformation” I showed that, even though we have been made a new creation, the mind is still used to all the old ways in which we once walked. In order to walk in the new behaviors of the new self we must have our minds renewed in knowledge, meaning the Word, so that the transformation process can be completed, making us in the likeness of Jesus Christ. (Colossians 3:9-10) Chewing the cud proves a very effective tool in your arsenal to effectuate the renewal of the mind. So, as the sheep of His fold, feast on the perfect pasture grass for hungry sheep – the Word of God. And don’t forget to chew the cud!
