Do you remember when you were a child playing with an Etch A Sketch? Perhaps we are dating ourselves, but after working those dials to draw a picture, you would shake the box and start again with a clean slate.  Or perhaps you have written a letter or a story, only to toss it in the trash (or hit delete) and start all over.  Or, if you are like me, started to build something, only to find out that it’s all wrong, needs to be taken apart and started over.

Perhaps you have done something the same way for years, only to find out the way you were doing it wasn’t the best, or realized that there is a more efficient, practical or less expensive way to do something simply by utilizing a bit of common sense that was previously blinded by habit.

Over time, we can get so engrained in habits and ideology that make no common or scientific sense, yet we continue to believe them, usually because it seems everyone else does.

Have you ever wondered what your starting point might be if you could just erase all the preconceived ideas you have about how things apparently work?  Maybe start by applying some common sense and going from there?  If so, I think there are two main paradigms that we would want to revisit.

First, when you think about the miraculous marvel of life, and the amazing intricacies of the human body (not to mention everything else in the world!), it’s hard to believe that life is a result of random chance and that we crawled out of a swamp at some point in our ancestral past.  It just seems to make good common sense that we are the product of Divine creation, fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God.

Secondly, considering the amazing design of our body to be self-regulating, self-sustaining and self-healing (see this post), doesn’t it make good common sense to invest in what will allow our bodies to function optimally, concentrating on achieving and maintaining wellness as opposed to engaging in symptom based sick care?  Believing that we need a host of drugs in our system to be healthy, from birth onwards, defies common sense.

Both of these lines of thinking go against popular opinion, and both are influenced by our worldview.  Sometimes we need to give the Etch A Sketch in our head a shake and start over with a clean slate.