Have you ever heard the saying, be careful what you pray for? It is a great saying indeed! Recently, I’ve been praying to be free from sinful anger and negative thinking patterns. You’d think that if you pray a prayer like that those things would start to lift and life would get a little better. That hasn’t exactly been the way it’s been going.
I was encouraged because my Church just offered a 5 week brain class on the very thing I’ve wanted to improve. I couldn’t attend the class; however, I listened to all the audios and am going back over them. So you’d think I’d be really on my way by now. Nope, not quite. If anything, I’ve been angrier and struggled with feelings of anxiety in the morning. Something I had gotten away from until recently. And my thoughts? They are seriously like a runaway freight train. Even though I teach classes, I do spend a good part of my working day alone. Being alone allows me to be very clued in to the way I’m thinking. I am amazed at how quickly my thoughts can go negative. I can be focused on something good and then, before I know it, I’m ruminating on something from the past that wasn’t such a good experience.
Now, I do teach Grief Recovery and I know that often those conversations in our head point to undelivered communication of an emotional nature. However, these are past events that I’ve already done the emotional work on. Which tells me that what I’m dealing with is habits and learned ways of thinking and coping.
The truth is that if there are unresolved memories and events in our hearts then getting to a good place in our thinking is much harder if not nearly impossible. Those unresolved events will pop up anytime something in the present is a reminder. Even if we are unaware. Then we overreact and are left wondering what happened. Yet, what do we do if we’ve worked at resolving those events and are still not experiencing life the way we know we should?
That is where I am. I am realizing that my brain has been so trained to respond and think a certain way that I’ve really got to focus on correcting the habit. And you know what else? I’m really excited. Yes, it seems that my prayer has lead to the surfacing of the problem in a way that is hard to avoid, but isn’t that truly what I wanted anyway? So over the next several weeks I am going to blog about my journey. It’s a new level of growth and one I’m looking forward to.
And how could I not be grateful to God who loves me so much that He won’t let me get away with good enough?
