Keeping our eyes on what's important: not getting ourselves distracted by the worries of the world

I am sure I am not the only one that has struggled a lot with worries and negativity (and still do).  I have been reading the devotional of "The Battlefield of the Mind" by Joyce Meyer over the past few weeks. This has helped me a lot. Certainly, reading the Bible is incredibly helpful in a general sense, but I have also felt immensely helped by Joyce Meyer's book for that specific problem of the battlefield of the mind.

In that devotional, I learned that it is deceptively easy for us to get tricked by Satan into turning our attention away from God and into the worries of the world. Sometimes this can even happen due to good intentions on our part, e.g. a desire to empathize and be compassionate. However, if we are not careful, we can all too easily become distracted with all of the negative things that are happening around us, without any thought for a) God and Jesus, or b) any of the positive things that are also happening.

Now I realize that God never meant for us to live life in a constant state of worry and concern. That's silly! The minute we start worrying, we start taking our eyes off God and Jesus. I remind myself that I do not want to be a weather-vane, swinging to and fro with the worries of the world. Many of the things I worried about were things I had no control over anyway! Yet instead of focusing on the Lord, I still worried about those negative things (including what-if's: problems that had not happened but that I was worried would come to happen). How ridiculous is that!

A year or two earlier, I had managed to stop worrying as much (see my previous post about that), but then without me fully realizing, I'd let the worries creep back in. I also learned from The Battlefield of the Mind that it's an ongoing battle. It's not like we win a victory and never have that problem again. It's normal that we keep having battles - but with each victory we win, the next one comes easier. I also learned the importance of picking ourselves up when we fail, and not giving in to negative thinking. We always have hope, we always can do battle again - unless we allow ourselves to be defeated by our own hopeless attitude. This was also helpful for me to hear this clearly stated.

Learning to choose our own thoughts, selecting positive thoughts over negative ones, allows us to live the way God wanted us to.

One thing that has helped is for me to pray specifically for this issue during my daily prayer time. "Lord, I wish to keep my eyes focused on you. I want my mind to be a stronghold for you. I do not want to get distracted from you the instant I hear some distressing news." Confiding in the Lord, and repeating it daily has helped me a lot. I still get tempted to slide into negativity, and I do wind up failing on occasion, but I simply pick myself up and keep my eyes on the Lord again.

Although I do not see the Lord particularly clearly, I would at least like to keep my eyes on Him even when I fall. And I also think that the more I keep my eyes on the Lord, the less frequently I will fall.

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