Can the radio change your life?

  I received an email from a friend in response to one of the devotions I sent out in which he mentioned how he no longer listened to talk radio and found himself uplifted by the message on Christian radio stations.

  I've noticed a similar effect.  I love to listen to music in the car--just about any kind of music, and my taste tends to vary wildly depending on the year, although I'm in a pretty deep country music groove right now.  (To be honest, though, I listened to a top 40 station for a few years when we first moved to Chattanooga.  I can't remember what the phase was before that.  When I was in seminary I drove so little that I didn't spend much time listening to the radio.  Most of my trips entailed 7 hours in the car, and over the course of the drive from Atlanta to Cincinnati I'd listen to anything that would keep me awake.)

  Right now, I listen to a lot of podcasts.  My car has a direct plug-in for my iPod, which makes it easy and it sounds a lot better than some of the radio adapters I've used.  I listen to a lot of sermons, as well as the ever-important CarTalk podcast and a leadership podcast from Michael Hyatt.  I've noticed how much I enjoy listening to these, and I find myself reflecting on them throughout the day.  They shape how I think and often lift up my mood.

  I never gave much thought to what I listened to in the car--it's not one of life's major decisions.  But there's a powerful opportunity there to shape your mind and your spirit, depending on what you listen to.

  I can't help but wonder how many other things like this exist in our lives, things that we don't give much thought to or do automatically, but they shape much of our attitudes or our moods for the day.  Imagine finding out that the cereal you've been automatically eating for breakfast every day for the past 10 years was making you drowsy and wearing you out--you'd wish you found out about that sooner, right?  And you'd immediately change it, so that the automatic idea of eating breakfast became something that fueled you, something that charged you up rather than depleted your resources.

  How might your life be different if you went about some of these automatic tasks in a different way.  Maybe listening to something constructive on the radio might help you grow.  Maybe listening to something fun rather than something serious might help you relax.  Perhaps time spent mindlessly surfing the internet could be offered in prayer or used for silent times of peace.  I once heard a great point about taking a notepad to church helps shift the attitude of the worshiper--because you're expecting to hear something worth recording during worship, rather than just hoping something is meaningful enough to remember.

  I would imagine that each of us, if we examined our days and our patterns of being, could find pockets of time that are wasted and habits or routines that don't feed us in the way other activities might.  The question for me, and for others, I imagine, is whether we are serious enough about changing that we're willing to set aside chunks of time to examine deeply our lives and let God speak into the depths of our hearts and call us into more intentional discipleship.