Rejoicing and Renewing Daily: How to Take Your Thoughts Captive

Lately it feels like the fog of this world is fighting to blind my eyes to beautiful things. Yet my eyes are still managing to see some beautiful things with an unobstructed view. 

Is it possible for the two to occur simultaneously? 

One minute I am suffocating—enveloped by a heap of rain clouds. The next minute, I find myself coming up for air, floating victoriously on a silver lining. Maybe you’ve been there, too?

BALANCING LIFE’S BLESSINGS AND BURDENS

Perhaps you, like me, are trying to navigate the tension between acknowledging life’s burdens while recognizing the blessings all around us. We dance through our daily rhythms to the beat of both the blessings and the burdens—sometimes working together harmoniously, other times, with dissonance. 

For every mundane day added to quarantine, there’s been joy in the safety and consistency of our daily routine.

For every sleepless night, there’s been a morning that arrives with fresh coffee and new mercies.

For every new pile of laundry and dishes (do they ever end?), there’s been the grace of a gentle reminder that God is providing food for our bellies and clothing for our bodies.

For every dirty diaper plopped into the diaper pail, there’s been a redemptive baby kiss plopped onto my cheek.

For every worry over the safety of my family’s future, there’s been another opportunity to love them well in the present.

For every failure or human rejection, there’s been a timely sign from God that I am fully accepted and loved by Him.

SEARCHING FOR THE SILVER LINING

I wish I could say that as a believer, my emotions never cause my faith to fail. I wish I could say that these silver linings are always easy to find and hold onto. But more often than not, I fall victim to my emotions and cry out to the Savior when I can’t seem to save myself from the chaos. 

When the suffering in this world groans so loudly that it drowns out the sound of our praise, what do we do? 

When we forcefully catapult our requests into Heaven and God appears to be silent for longer than we’d like, where do we turn? 

When the good in our lives inevitably becomes intertwined with confusion and change, how do we sort through the weeds to discover the beauty of what is blooming in our midst? 

In the counseling world, ‘positive reframing’ is a strategy that we often recommend to people who are extremely stressed and overwhelmed. This common strategy is designed to remove the stress from daily stressors by looking at the same situation in a different way—a way that highlights possibilities over threats and limitations.

In theory, this should be easy to accomplish. Optimistic thinking should be a simple practice, right? Wrong. Negative thoughts actually alter the neurological connections in our brains. It takes intense effort and intentionality to create healthy neurological connections in our brains, instead. But the positive news is it’s possible. 

Christian Neuroscientist, Dr. Caroline Leaf, shares her research about how both scientific and spiritual factors contribute to our thought life. She teaches about how the nonconscious mind drives the conscious mind and how our thoughts are malleable as they transfer from the nonconscious to conscious. 

Her emphasis is often centered on the fact that our ability to think and choose is more powerful than our circumstances.