Over the last several weeks, I have been reading a great mini-book, Mindset forMoms, From Mundane to Marvelous Thinking in 30 Days, by Jamie C. Martin. Now, I’ll be honest, it has taken way more
than 30 days for me to get through the book and though I wish there was a magic
fix-it for my negative-bent brain, I long ago realized that there isn’t. I have been slowly working my way through
the book though and have found some great, helpful ideas which I am trying very
hard to put into practice or to practice more effectively. I’ve also written a bit about my efforts at
my real-life blog.
Today I was really struck by the snippet I read in Chapter
23, because it is something I really struggle with. “After a negative situation or encounter with
our kids, we analyze what happened a thousand different ways…” (Mindset for
Moms, p 45) Surprisingly, unlike the rest of my life, I actually don’t
spend a ton of time dwelling on my parenting missteps. I’ve gotten quite good at requesting a
do-over - admitting when I screw up and asking my sweet daughter to forgive me
(practice makes perfect!). She in turn
has gotten adept at forgiving my ineptitude and forgetting all about it. But my mental replay screen has seemingly
every other embarrassing, humiliating, uncomfortable, sinful, and stupid thing
I’ve ever done as an adult filed temporally and available “on demand” with
instant recall. Occasionally I’ll have
a random bad memory out of the blue, but more often than not it is when I’ve
done another embarrassing, humiliating, uncomfortable, sinful, or stupid thing
that starts the instant replay going and, if I give it any leeway at all, I’ll
find myself physically cringing, mentally berating myself for my past (and
current) stupidity, and feeling really, REALLY low. As a person whose normal blues tip into clinical
depression with relatively little prodding, that is not a good thing.
Over the years, I have worked very hard to overcome this
propensity and to replace every bad thought with a good one. I’m not talking about ignoring those
uncomfortable things simply because they are uncomfortable - believe me, they have already been
remembered, reflected on, and mined for any nuggets of wisdom I can take from
them. Forgiveness has been requested and
received, yet they keep coming back to “haunt” me when I am vulnerable. I truly believe that the devil uses these
instant replays to keep me from moving forward and truly experiencing the joy that lies
in life with Christ. Knowing just where those replays can lead me, I’ve begun
specifically asking God to take them away when they appear.
As a child in Catholic school, I grewup with the image of me standing
before God while he reads a list of my past transgressions from a big
book. Every time I sinned, it would be
recorded in that book and it could never be erased. If the bad things hadn’t been appropriately
atoned for, off to purgatory I would go (or worse!). Obviously that is a very child-like view of
judgment day perpetuated by one or two really hard-core nuns who didn’t like
children very much and I have since relinquished it in favor of the Truth.
God does not keep a running list of our sins that can never
be erased; God sets our sins “as far as
the east is from the west.” (Psalm 103:12)
Through the act of dying on the cross, Jesus took the punishment for my
sins – all of them, no matter how cringe-worthy they are. “But
God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.” (Romans
5:8) Through His grace, my sins are
gone, wiped out, washed away. Just by
confessing my sins and asking for forgiveness and believing in the salvation
that comes through Jesus Christ, my blackened soul is wiped as clean as
snow. (Isaiah 1:18) “He is
faithful to [me] and cleanses [me] from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)
It has been good for me to spend some time today thinking
about this issue and remembering all the biblical Truth about how God REALLY
treats our sins. With some practice, and
the help of the Holy Spirit, I know that I will get to the point that every
time that “movie in my mind[1]”
starts, I can replace it just as quickly with something from my inner Bible and
the knowledge that and I am loved and I am forgiven.
[1]
Points for the first person to tell me what show that line is from!
Miss Saigon. Had to google it though, so that's cheating ;-)
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