We all have what you might call “infected thinking.”
This comes in many ways: anxiety, doubt, fear, thoughts that tell us “you’re not going to get well,” “you can’t accomplish that dream,” and so forth, a popular preacher tells us.
It’s something to think about as we cleanse during Lent—and really all year around.
You’re a failure. Maybe a bad person. God has abandoned you.
These are negative thoughts, and they count. Negative thinking isn’t just psychological; spiritually, it’s an infection.
And like any infection, when it takes hold, it can spread.
If we let it, the “redness” may engulf our entire being. “When we dwell on it,” he tells us, “you’re giving it permission to become a reality.”
As a Carmelite priest says during Confession, the more we focus on the positive, the more we see God’s actions in the world, and the more positive we see in others.
Thoughts are powerful—positive or negative.
And the negative ones are too easy to conjure.
Studies have shown the average person spends nearly half his or her time thinking negative thoughts of whatever kind.
These forty days, ask yourself: What is your first mental approach to a person, place, or thing? Does the negative dominate your cogitation?
Scripture says to bring every thought into “captivity.”
“We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 10:5.
It’s about controlling the mind rather than letting it wander into harmful or ungodly territories.
Do we—or do our thoughts, particularly a niggling one—capture us, imprisoning joy and bowing to the world?
It’ll take away your peace; it will make you feel stuck. Or useless. Inferior. You’ll lack confidence.
Pray on it, and ask Jesus to specifically wash away the gray and black thoughts that haunt you. And stop contaminating your self-image.
Harmless thoughts can end up anything but.
“Thoughts” that equal “distraught.” Thought can haunt.
Yet we can turn them into hope, faith, victory.
Quit hosting the wrong thing.
When you give it time and space, it distorts your vision and perverts faith.
Negative thinking is faith in what we don’t want to happen.
God does not create losers; He created you to rise above it, like His Son.
He created you for joy despite the trials of life.
He created you to win.
