How to Embrace New Thoughts about Old Things – with Kelly Balarie
“What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history.” Mark Twain
As Caleb bangs plastic toys into one another like there’s a war happening in his bedroom naptime, I watch sun gleam through smudged window panes and read these familiar words: “And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself’” (Luke 10:27).
Hidden in the midst of this command given by Jesus, my eyes gravitate to three small words: “all your mind.” Throughout the past months, it seems the recurring theme making waves in my life is the idea of living with a renewed mind.
This has been a journey toward learning to look for what’s right in my world instead of dwelling on what’s wrong. It’s been a journey of focusing on what is pure, lovely, and good. It’s been a journey of reframing my moments and looking for God’s eternal perspective in the midst of temporal circumstances.
The process is teaching me to think new thoughts about old things.
We can’t often control what will be set before our eyes and what obstructions will arise in the pathways of our lives. We can’t change the past or erase memories of pain, grief, and trauma. But we can learn to create new thoughts – thoughts infused with the Truth – about these old things.
In her new book Battle Ready, Kelly Balarie writes:
Don’t doubt the power of your mind. This football-sized mass has the power to create and recreate everything in your life. This is why Jesus tells us not to conform to the pattern of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind.
If we renew our mind, it is like getting a re-do on life. Rather than continuing with old patterns, ways of doing things or habits, we get an upgrade.
You know, when my boy was a baby: he spent nearly every waking hour of every night screaming crying.
My mind now occasionally hears that baby voice of his crying late at night. He’s 6.
This traumatic time was emblazoned in my mind. The trauma is still there. The memory is still there. The fear is still there.
Another example of this is my finger. When I was a kid I had to feel for a little bump on my right hand finger (where I sucked my thumb) to know the difference between right and left. I still when, deciphering right between left, mentally think about feeling for that bump. My mind was trained in this.
When we experience something again and again, we expect it. We expect a husband to treat us a certain way. We expect pain to keep hitting us as it always has. We expect people to abandon us. Our mind tells us: this is normal. The pain you dealt with from back then is going to happen…
…unless we renew our mind.
To renew your mind is to dig up all the old lies, mistruths, perceptions and fears and to replace them with God’s truth, hope, life, grace and fullness.
When you know God is I AM, and you let your mind conceive that truth, He overpowers all the ways you tell yourself: I am not…, I am never…, I am going to…
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So how do we actually allow God renew our minds and teach us to think new thoughts about old things? Kelly offers many suggestions, but here are five that are changing the way I see my world:
1. Reframe the moments when others hurt or offend you. Extend grace by recognizing that hurt people hurt people. Give the people in your life permission to have a bad day.
2. Acknowledge your feelings of fear, anger, resentment, and pain. Feel your feelings instead of burying them and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Validate your feelings. And then lift them to God and ask him to show you how to walk through your emotions with an open heart.
3. Surrender those hurts to the Lord. We don’t acknowledge our emotions so that we can wallow in negativity. Instead, we release our pain to the Lord. We believe in him to offer peace, life, freedom, and joy in return.
4. Bless those who hurt you. Instead of secretly meditating on how those who offend you will receive what’s coming, pray that God will bless them. This is the kind of prayer that transforms hearts, and the greatest transformation will likely be in your own heart.
5. Always return to a heart of love. Thank God for his love. Soak in the reality of his love. Allow his love to be the foundation of the love you extend to others. When we live grounded in our identities as beloved children of God, we are free to love without needing affirmation in return, and we can overlook the offenses that threaten to steal our peace.
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After the tenth request for snacks, Caleb emerges from naptime without any sort of nap whatsoever. My head throbs, and I didn’t manage to accomplish even a third of what I hoped to get done while he slept.
Crawling onto my lap, he presses his head into the gap between my collar bone and my chin and hugs me hard, like he means it. In an instant, the cares of the day, the to-do list, and the window I shattered while trying to solve our problem of moths overtaking our home all feel menial. I find myself surrounded by reasons for giving thanks, and I begin to believe this might just be the best summer ever.
Thanks to Kelly Balarie for her wise words. You can buy Battle Ready for yourself here.
