Issue 276
There may only be a two percent genetic difference between humans and some other species, but it is a massive two percent. If you fail to jump across a ravine by two percent you still plunge to the bottom; if you are two percent better as an athlete than your competitors, then you take home the gold.
One of the many golds in your two percent is your ability to engage with your own thoughts. You can think and then you can think about those thoughts – in fact you can take this to many further levels if you wish. Your relationship with your own thoughts will determine your mental health and your mental health will affect everything – literally everything. So the biblical flow has many comments about thinking – how thinking shapes us; how we can choose helpful or unhelpful thoughts; anxious thoughts; pure or impure thoughts; forgiving or bitter thoughts.
Sometimes your relationship with your thoughts is just a struggle. David, in Psalm 13 (2) describes his situation as “wrestling with his thoughts”; like some fighter, aching for the final round and bell, he asks how long he will have to do this.
And you probably know how he feels; your thoughts about your work and life can invade your space and trouble you. A deadline, a budget, a conflict or a decision can become an obsession or a monster. Every day you find yourself locked in a wrestling match, an arm twist, a head scissor, or a back breaking hold (called a Boston Crab for the specialists!). It’s tiring and it wears you down.
So David relays that every day he has sorrow in his heart. His thinking is making him sad and he is losing the battle between positive and negative.
Furthermore he is convinced that his enemy seems to be winning. Now he almost certainly had armies, traitors, and men with weapons in mind, but he also knew that the hardest battle would be for his own thoughts.
Before you take on the problem you will need to deal with your thoughts. The awfulizing thoughts that imagine future disasters; the terrorising thoughts that blow things out of all proportion; the warlike thoughts that want to destroy anything or anyone; and the destructive thoughts that drive you to self loathing and self pity.
Your questions give you permission to despair and explore your thoughts, but despair is not a place to live, just to visit and learn. David was wrestling with his thoughts but as he wrestled there was also a dialogue emerging – a dialogue with his thoughts and about his thoughts. This was a dialogue with himself and with his God – or at least about his God.
Again, you can now find the power. A dialogue has been defined as the free flowing of meaning through a group allowing the group to discover insights not attainable individually. Today we often use the word discussion – which evokes the ideas of percussion and concussion, and brings us back to the wrestling fight to the death, or at least the last man standing.
The beginnings of hope will come when dialogue flows again. Wrestling is important but not a sustainable way to live; dialogue is ninety eight percent better.
Psalm 13:2
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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