How Good Is Your Filter

What kind of coffee filter do you use? I’m talking about Paper Filters, right? Cone or basket? White or Brown? Name brand, or no brand.

When I was growing up the only coffee I knew anything about came from a drip pot or a percolator. Filters were never ever used!

Drip was the first, and somewhere along the way, a percolator showed up. Neither used a paper filter, and I’m not sure why the switch, but the drip was by far the easiest because the only thing it required was hot water, and you could get that from a pot on a campfire, or on a burner in your home, and from any place that produced heat that water could be boiled from. The perc required electricity… the drip required hot water, no matter its source!

The coffee basket was made of perforated metal. You simply bought the grind that made the style of coffee you desired. Fine. Medium. Coarse. Perc’ or Drip. Yes. Coffee used to be sold by the type of device you were using! Pre-ground to your satisfaction!

This was long before Mr. Coffee became the standard of the drip pot, with its own water heating element!

Simple. Right?

Maybe… If all you are thinking about is coffee, then this about covers it. But if you are thinking about other areas of life, then maybe you need to rethink it all. Again.

Recently, I received a twitter message from a friend who stated:

Your perspective is influenced
by the voices that speak into your life.

If this friend reads this, I did not name you because I had not asked for your permission to use your name… But your tweet made tremendous sense in light of my thoughts this morning!

As usual, my mind went down a rabbit trail of thinking about the recent elections, today’s political landscape, and the world events that create stress. Whoa, pony! I reigned my thoughts back in and considered a lot of other equally important avenues of life.

What did I discover?
You can control your thoughts! 
You do not have to get lost on that trail that leads to endless circles!

It was the Apostle Paul who said (2,000 years ago!), “…bring into captivity every thought…”. (2 Corinthians 10:5) And, if I were to look even further back, I’m sure someone else said something similar long before him. Our thoughts are wayward children than need to be captured and controlled!

Filters and Buffers

We are easily influenced by the voices that we allow to speak into our life. Unless, and this may be very important, you do not have a filter to screen out the bad from the good! I mean, have you ever taken a sip of coffee and suddenly those grounds you thought you were filtering out are now in your mouth! Try straining Turkish Coffee with your teeth!

Equally, a good filter helps me to identify my values, question if this voice is speaking to my values, at the same time it turns away those words and ideas that speak directly against the foundation by which I live.

The Filter acts like a Buffer!

Think about it. Filters control what makes it in, but it should also control what makes it out!

How can every voice that speaks into our lives something factual, good, and true? It can’t. Now. Listen to the opposite voice describe something different and declares it to be factual, good, and true. Can both be valid? That’s what the filter is for.

We need to filter and buffer those clamoring sounds before we go insane!

I can remove the filter while you and I have a discourse about something. Why? Sometimes I need the opposite perspective! I choose to listen and not filter you out. When it’s all said and done, I re-install that filter for regular living, then I am in control of what I allow into my world.

That unfiltered discourse does not change who I am. It only allows you and me to discuss another point of view.

Without a filter, we get clogged with all kinds of weirdness!

Filters Are Necessary

I have a filter for the water from the well on my property. Perhaps you remember this photo… Without a filter, all this sediment makes into my house, appliances, and into anybody who drinks my coffee!

Gasp! What have I done to you?
I am responsible for filtering out the debris that could cause you harm.

When new, the filter is as white and clean as the cap on this device… but after a few months, the filter clogs up and must be replaced. Or, I will eventually lose all the water flowing into my life! Change it out, immediately I notice the water flow rate picks up. It had slowly clogged and the water flow had slowed down almost enough to not get noticed.

Side thought…
Why do cigarettes have filters and some do not?
We probably do not even want to think about it!
And I cannot filter against second-hand smoke!

Another side thought…
Air intakes for our A/C, automobiles, and a host of other devices, require filters to capture all the things
that can mess up the insides of the device.  
Imagine all the debris that could clog up your life!

Think about it again. When we do not filter our world then we are saying that nothing matters and blindly accept every little speck of dirt and sediment into our lives. What happens? It takes root! And remains! That debris clogs all of those important parts of our body where we do not want to have a doctor repair. If possible.

Without a filter… I’m just saying.

Here’s My Thought Today

Do you even know when you have no filter? Where is it? What was it back in the days when you were raised by your family to a certain thought process? Did you rip the filter out and simply start accepting everything? This may be a generational thought, but if we continually reject the prior decades of life then we are always recreating something that may be based on poor and immature choices!

Sometimes we do not realize that we have no filter, or that it’s clogged, or that it’s not working the way we want. You get what you put in, right? In my tech days we simply called it:

GIGO – Garbage In. Garbage Out.

We learned to scrub data before we fed it to the processing program. Clean it up. Get the capitalization in the correct place. Fix misspelled words. Test the number fields for valid numbers. Make sure every byte of data was analyzed so that is could be properly presented. Then we knew there was no garbage going into the system, and all the output would contain only validated data.

Know Your Filters

A long time ago, as a boy growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, we were taught how bad words. They were spoken behind a sniggering hand to the mouth or shouted inappropriately.

Equally bad were the attitudes that produced those words!

Hence, we were taught to think differently.

Was it easy? No. The influence of the crowd often produces lemming effects and you go with the flow. But when your filter is working properly? Then you knew what was wrong, and right, and you made better choices.

We were taught about filters but we didn’t call them that. To this day I cringe when those 4 letter words fly from those close to me. It’s so inappropriate! Some use it for the shock value, others think since Hollywood has lost its filters then it must be okay for our everyday language to contain foul words… and the thoughts that go along with them.

From A Different Angle

Wise ol’ Solomon made a point. Not everything we think is pure happens to be what God thinks is pure. There is probably a substratum of our identity that the unfiltered world coming in simply reinforces the choices we’ve made in the past, whether they were good, or not.

All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes,
But the LORD weighs the spirits.
(Proverbs 16:2 NKJV)

This often comes from a filter that is non-existent! It seems Solomon had another thought about this.

For as he thinks in his heart, so is he…
(Proverbs 23:7 NKJV)

This probably means that a filtered person controls the source of what is filtered into their life, and an unfiltered person uses nothing to weed out the bad from the good. You can tell the difference of filters some choose to install, and you can easily find those who have no filter at all!

Finally…

Think about the voices that influence your words and your actions. Think about the subtle and outlandish world around us that influences us to change our filters! Ask yourself this question, “What is my filter saying about me?” Garbage in. Garbage out. Or, do I still have filters that allow me to make choices that will produce the person I want to be?

There is another point of view that says others want to “filter” us, and make us all the same. That can never happen in this present world. We all have too much baggage of our past. Call it our “permanent filter”. It’s almost impossible for us to change who we are unless we toss our past into the garbage… Then what? We simply change into something someone else says we should be.

Just thinking this through makes me pause and analyze… Pros and cons… Positives and Negatives… How about you?