Walking the path

(2-minute read)

Controlling my thoughts has always been a problem for me. Sometimes I need to concentrate, and my brain does not want to cooperate and brings up things that are not a part of what needs to be considered. Even during the night, when I want to sleep, my brain will suggest that we go through the events of some incident one more time. Naturally, it will then want to think about what I could have done, followed closely by what I should have done. A quick clock check confirms that I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about things that don’t matter. This frees me up to begin being concerned about how losing that time in sleep will affect me the following day, which wastes more time.

Possibly because I’m retired and have no schedule to keep pushing me along during the day, I started having more of a problem controlling my thoughts. It became more frequent, and I would think, I don’t want to be thinking about this.

My prayers about controlling my thoughts had become ineffective. Our dear friends, Dean and Patti, were at our house one evening, and I asked for prayer. When Dean put his hands on my head and began to pray, the wording of his prayer was different than I expected. I felt faith and believed God would answer. That evening when I went to bed, my mind began to roll over with thoughts just as before. Normally I would have prayed, but this night it was different. I thought the Father is taking care of that. Immediately, the rolling of thoughts ceased. Later during the night, as I was beginning to wake, the thoughts started to roll again in my brain. Generally, I would have been wide awake with this, although groggy, I thought the Father is taking care of that, and the rolling thoughts ceased again. I found concentrating very easy the following day, and those rolling thoughts were gone. They’ve tried to come back, but they are more easily controlled now.

I realized that I had been violating one of the basics of prayer. When we pray, if the Lord says yes, he will give us faith. We will suddenly believe the Lord is going to grant our request. We can pray a thousand times for something, but once faith comes, it’s time to stop praying and begin trusting the Lord. The problem I had when I was asking the Lord to stop these rolling thoughts in my mind was that even after he gave me faith, I began to pray again, which is unbelief. Once we get faith that is not some self-generated positive thinking, God wants us to trust him.

In my case of praying that God would take away these rolling thoughts in my mind, I don’t know how I got away from trusting the Lord when faith came. This must have been going on for some time. I’ve repented of my unbelief, and the Lord has set me free.