I used to be owned by the thoughts I had at night, as I would unwind and get ready for rest.

All the stuff that didn’t get done, all the stuff I needed to remember for tomorrow, all the concerns I had about the what-ifs involving people when they were a part of my tasks/assignments. I used to rehearse conversations in my head, and imagine what I would say if they said…

From there my thoughts would race to loved ones. I would worry that the worst possible things would happen to them. I would forecast disasters and illnesses and falling away, and relationship breach…

My body would be tight by that time. My breathing was shallow. My heart raced to try and prepare for all these terrible things, just in case they happened.

As you can imagine, this did not result in restful sleep. it left me prone to anxious dreams and invited the enemy to amplify it all even more.

These days there are a couple of tools I use.

One is, that I set my heart towards memorizing a passage of Scripture. Psalm 23 is a good place to start. And each time one of those thoughts came, I would use it as a prompt to see if I could rehearse my passage. This was a great way to still my anxious thoughts, as well as a great way to write God’s promises on my heart.

Another tool I use is to recognize the thought as something I get to entertain, enlarge, or refuse, shrink. I would let myself experiment with focusing on blessings to see how big I could get them to become. Then I would analyze the anxious thought and see how far away I needed to turn my mind before it collapsed altogether.

And if I am feeling particularly introspective, I can examine the thought and ask myself- what am I really afraid of, and why? As soon as I get to the root seed that allowed that thought to birth, I can cast it away as the vain imagination it is.

That’s what I do with some thoughts at night, these days.

What does it mean to take thoughts captive? And why is it in the passage about the weapons of our warfare? (2 Cor 3-6)

When I was younger I spoke like a child and thought like a child. And in my youth I heard a lot of voices in my head. I heard demons. I heard the Lord. I heard the voices of my parts. I heard the entities through the frequencies I had been attached to. I heard light. I heard creation. And I was confused. My brain had a low grade fear running in the background all the time. My brain knew no rest.

It wasn’t until my thirties that the Lord brought the tools I would need for my recovery. I remember the portion of verse he spoke in kindness to me one day, shortly after I had started recovering blocked memories from my childhood. He promised that when it was something he was saying, he would follow it with that portion of verse. I was not to say it out loud, lest the enemy try and steal the peace of that promise. It was just between him and me. This brought a foreign idea of safety in being able to recognize the voice of the Lord. A short time later, he gave me a butterfly net. He encouraged me to capture my thoughts. He told me to capture them with the net, and hold them up high. He would examine them. if they were eternal they would remain. If they were not, they would burn into ash and blow away. it was mercy for me to learn to parse thought. If I had tried to sort my thoughts by what felt familiar or even ‘right’, I would have been using a database that had been trained by darkness for darkness. There was much defilement and corruption in my heart and soul and flesh. Even my spiritual gifts had mixture. I ended up laying those on an alter before him once I met him as love. I had no desire, and a lot of fear, that I would use my gifts in unclean ways, and I would rather not have them than do that. He held them for several years, then returned them to convince me that the gifts themselves were good. And that using them, the right ways, brought him pleasure and glory.

Recently I have begun thinking of those days, and am comparing those ways with how I capture my thoughts these days. I think it will be fun to explore over the next set of blogs. Maybe it will inspire you to find your own language.

What is vain imagination? What do I do with thoughts that circle but don’t solve? How do I follow the trail to rest? I think we all need to know. I am interested to hear how it works for you, too!

More, on a different day.

Blessings

Sometimes, while going through loss, the ability to process gets stuck.

There are a lot of different tools to address this. But only if the time is right. Sometimes getting stuck is the acknowledgement of how impossible this is, or feels. If time passes, and the ability to process has not changed, there are some ways to explore it.

Dr. Karl Lehman believes there are five parts that must be successfully navigated to process pain. 1. maintain organized attachment. 2. Stay connected. 3. Stay relational. 4. Navigate situation in a satisfying way. 5. Correctly interpret the meaning.

For some brains, this works.

Some people need to check to see if their emotional faucet is able to come on. As in a bathroom faucet, negative and positive emotions flow through the same outlet. When it is scary to feel, the faucet gets turned off and the person stops being able to feel.

An exercise to discover clues on why things are stuck is to ask internal binary questions. Is it my soul or my spirit that is struggling? Is it with the Lord or with man that I am upset? Is my body in agreement with my spirit or my soul?

We can also scan truths that we hold as eternal or constant in our life. If any of those no longer feel true, that is a clue on where the pain got stuck.

How about the understandings we have of God. Is he still good? Does he still heal? Do I still feel his faithfulness? Has anything changed?

If we know the voice of our body, we can ask, where in the body is this being held? Is it my shoulders, or my digestive tract, or my heart?

Are there any previous situations that are coming to mind regularly, that don’t seem to connect to this one?

In other words, are there any trees that are birthing seeds/thoughts in the heart that are obscuring the path forward? These would be circular thoughts I can’t stop thinking.

How is hope? Can I describe what it looks like? Are my emotions involved in hope at all?

Do I need more cognitive answers, do I feel a need to solve a problem that can’t be solved?

Drawing a map of where I experience things inside of me is another tool to locate where movement has stopped. Where do I feel joy? Where do I connect with God? Where does anger go on my map?

I also ask my spirit if there are any spiritual hindrances involved, in addition to my humanity and current imperfection.

When I have enough clues, I float strategies. There’s no altogether right way for everyone. Part of the process is having permission to buy in to the strategy that is right for me. And there is no way that will always work, for every time I experience loss.

The pain the brain knows, when I can’t be with the one I love, attachment pain, is some of the worst pain the brain can know. It must not be minimized.

When it is able to be processed, it also opens up levels of intimacy with the Lord that are exquisite and transformational.

I bless each reader with the gift of finding their pathway and the peace it yields.