The Compounding Power of What We Say to Self
"4 Therefore my spirit is overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is distressed. 5 I remember the days of old; I meditate on Your works; I muse on the works of Your hands." Psalm 143:4-5, New King James Version
I was thumbing through the beginning of Gary W. Moon's promising Becoming Dallas Willard. The author roots one of the philosophy professor and Christian author's earliest realizations in a spelling lesson. Willard's older sister hints that little Dallas can imprint the spelling of a word on his mind by saying it to himself several times.
Oh, what a gift of grace it is, and what a momentous impact it has to be able to choose what we continually think about! It is no exaggeration to say that the cumulative impact of these tiny choices changes us. The author of Psalm 143 knows this. He understands that more than success in the school room is at stake.
In Psalm 143:4, he takes an honest appraisal of the state of his heart, and God sees fit to preserve it for the ages. The bottom line is, he tells us, my spirit is overwhelmed. The current situation is too big for me. To borrow Alan Wright's phrasing which seems to apply to the psalmist's self-diagnosis of the results of an overwhelmed heart, my emotions are perfectly obedient servants to my overmatched thoughts. He calls fear fear.
What's next is worth the risk of the potentially paralyzing honesty at the end of Psalm 143:4 that comes with admitting despair. The psalmist, like Willard's older sister, knows the power of choosing what to dwell on. In the resolution of the next verse is his refusal to measure all of life by the panic of the current moment. If thoughts and emotions dye our souls, as asserts Marcus Aurelius, this psalmist is going to choose different shades than the black which is currently closest to hand.
I meditate, he insists as he lifts his thoughts, his eyes, his words vertically, on the days of old. God has, he remembers, been good to me in particular in ways that are immediately evident at this point in time. In former times, for days upon end, God's goodness was my take away. God's bounty remained in my lunch pail after I had eaten all I needed. The days of old, in the shift between Psalm 143:4 and the next verse, give him a broader and fairer frame of reference.
He doesn't give anxiety a chance to catch up in this re-tallying. With a mental foothold in hope and faith as he reflects on his experience with the Lord, he broadens what he chooses to think on. Not only, he continues, has God been good toward me in the former days, this sovereign goodness is interwoven in the essence of God's character. Having gotten a little mental momentum, this psalmist sees even this distressing day as an opportunity to meditate on God's works. Perhaps the same things that frightened him moments before are reframed as he sees their loving Creator behind them and still in control of them.
This sense of Divine control, sovereign yet intimate, is his parapet of mental rest so different from the state of his heart moments before. The psalmist's situation may not have get changed, but by insisting on seeing God behind every circumstance, he now has the mental space to speculate. I shifted to see You, Lord, in the days of old. I begin to see telltale indications of Your design even in here and now. Thus invigorated, I can by the close of verse five, muse, imagine, consider what God is doing and will do next.
What would we dwell on in our thoughts, then? Surely opportunities to despair or disparage in what we think about will always be available. Yet, worshipful gratitude seems to be one thought, one verse away. By these incremental choices we can strengthen our resilience for the next battle with distraction. As a friend who knew Willard for 40 years observes of him, we can see character-forming realities broaden and thicken in us as we make more discerning choices and what we think about.
I was thumbing through the beginning of Gary W. Moon's promising Becoming Dallas Willard. The author roots one of the philosophy professor and Christian author's earliest realizations in a spelling lesson. Willard's older sister hints that little Dallas can imprint the spelling of a word on his mind by saying it to himself several times.
Oh, what a gift of grace it is, and what a momentous impact it has to be able to choose what we continually think about! It is no exaggeration to say that the cumulative impact of these tiny choices changes us. The author of Psalm 143 knows this. He understands that more than success in the school room is at stake.
In Psalm 143:4, he takes an honest appraisal of the state of his heart, and God sees fit to preserve it for the ages. The bottom line is, he tells us, my spirit is overwhelmed. The current situation is too big for me. To borrow Alan Wright's phrasing which seems to apply to the psalmist's self-diagnosis of the results of an overwhelmed heart, my emotions are perfectly obedient servants to my overmatched thoughts. He calls fear fear.
What's next is worth the risk of the potentially paralyzing honesty at the end of Psalm 143:4 that comes with admitting despair. The psalmist, like Willard's older sister, knows the power of choosing what to dwell on. In the resolution of the next verse is his refusal to measure all of life by the panic of the current moment. If thoughts and emotions dye our souls, as asserts Marcus Aurelius, this psalmist is going to choose different shades than the black which is currently closest to hand.
I meditate, he insists as he lifts his thoughts, his eyes, his words vertically, on the days of old. God has, he remembers, been good to me in particular in ways that are immediately evident at this point in time. In former times, for days upon end, God's goodness was my take away. God's bounty remained in my lunch pail after I had eaten all I needed. The days of old, in the shift between Psalm 143:4 and the next verse, give him a broader and fairer frame of reference.
He doesn't give anxiety a chance to catch up in this re-tallying. With a mental foothold in hope and faith as he reflects on his experience with the Lord, he broadens what he chooses to think on. Not only, he continues, has God been good toward me in the former days, this sovereign goodness is interwoven in the essence of God's character. Having gotten a little mental momentum, this psalmist sees even this distressing day as an opportunity to meditate on God's works. Perhaps the same things that frightened him moments before are reframed as he sees their loving Creator behind them and still in control of them.
This sense of Divine control, sovereign yet intimate, is his parapet of mental rest so different from the state of his heart moments before. The psalmist's situation may not have get changed, but by insisting on seeing God behind every circumstance, he now has the mental space to speculate. I shifted to see You, Lord, in the days of old. I begin to see telltale indications of Your design even in here and now. Thus invigorated, I can by the close of verse five, muse, imagine, consider what God is doing and will do next.
What would we dwell on in our thoughts, then? Surely opportunities to despair or disparage in what we think about will always be available. Yet, worshipful gratitude seems to be one thought, one verse away. By these incremental choices we can strengthen our resilience for the next battle with distraction. As a friend who knew Willard for 40 years observes of him, we can see character-forming realities broaden and thicken in us as we make more discerning choices and what we think about.
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