Changing Your Mind

By Audrey Stallsmith

How we think actually changes our brains. I came across that (apparently recently proven) concept recently. And, although the book which contained it proved too dry for me to finish, the idea did intrigue me. 

Although science has never been my strong point, I believe the author meant that the pathways in our brain are—like real pathways—kept clear by being frequently trodden. Neglected ones become overgrown and unusable.
So, when some lanes seem to be blocked due to brain injury, all hope is not lost. It may be possible to reopen them again by repetitive use.

Apparently even the organ that does our thinking is more influenced by that thinking than we previously realized. I almost said “does our thinking for us,” which would have been incorrect. 

Too often we assume that our thoughts are automatically generated by our brains and fatalistically believe that we have no control over them. Granted, the book I mentioned seemed to be talking about rewiring the pathways that enable us to think rather than changing the thoughts themselves. But it occurred to me that we wear certain grooves with the latter also.

So cognitive therapy long has concentrated on getting people to realize that they actually are in charge of how they think. In other words, they don’t have to listen to that critical voice in their heads, but can “switch stations” to tune in a more positive one instead.

Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on how truthful the first voice was! There are some things, of course, that we should feel guilty about until we get them confessed and forgiven.

Like an abusive husband, though, our “conscience” often will blame us for things over which we had no actual control. In that case, the lying voice isn’t the Holy Spirit convicting us. It may be an evil spirit attempting to control us through oppression or it may be just our own hurt pride lashing us because we aren’t, after all, as superior as it thinks we should be. And that is evil spirit enough!

The tone of the voice often will give away whose it is.  Although the Holy Spirit is fully aware of our deficiencies, He chastises us as a loving Father does—for our own good—to build us into stronger Christians. The evil spirits, on the other hand, aim at our destruction, and often have a hard time concealing their venom and hatred.

So we need to ask ourselves whether that voice in our heads is moving us closer to God or farther from Him. If it convinces us that we have to change before God will love us—so we had better stay far away from Him in the meantime—it obviously isn’t His voice speaking. Since He is the only One who can change us, we need to keep as close to Him as possible, no matter how painful the contact between His purity and our grubbiness must be. 

In James Watkins’ recent book on The Psalms of Asaph, he talks about how life and our own selves so often disappoint us. He concludes—as Lewis once did—that we Christians too often make the mistake of thinking of this life as the be-all and end-all, when it actually is a training ground. And even those of us who have no military experience know it isn’t the easy stuff that makes a soldier stronger.

This brings to mind an old movie from my college days, An Officer and a Gentleman, of which I only saw the censored TV version which probably left out some things! In it, Zach Mayo was never wanted by his father. So we can perceive that his lashing out at authority in the person of his demanding drill instructor, whom Zach never can seem to please either, is really his lashing out at his unsatisfactory parent. 

(Incidentally, in a more recent film, The Case for Christ, one character points out how many of the world’s most influential atheists—including the one the movie is about—had distant, and critical fathers. So it’s no wonder that they have a hard time believing in a good Father of the universes.)     

In the military movie, it is the job of the drill instructor, Emil Foley, to weed out men who aren’t strong enough either physically or mentally to be aviation officers before the Navy wastes valuable training on them. Although he initially doesn’t believe that Mayo has what it takes and hassles him to get rid of him, Foley eventually changes his mind. His job then becomes the even more difficult one of convincing the recruit not to quit. But how do you rewire a person who is so “programmed to fail?” Who, in fact, has been told by his father that he will fail?

Because we all are born with a bent to sin, we too might excuse ourselves on the grounds that we are programmed to fall short. But it wasn’t our heavenly father who made us that way. That bent resulted from the choices of our earthly father, Adam. 

Maybe all of our difficulties in this life are a necessary part of rewiring our spirits. Christ purchased our reentry into Eden for us. The angels no longer will be blocking our way but fighting for us. However, we still need to work backward through the results of the fall, by reopening the communication between ourselves and God, to reach those gates again. 

Too many of us really have never changed the Adam frame of mind which listens when the tempter talks about all our heavenly Father is keeping from us. That is pure effrontery on Satan’s part, because it was he—the destroyer—rather than the Creator who caused all this chaos in the first place. God simply allowed the first man and woman to have what they had chosen to have. 

When Jesus accused the Jewish leaders of being “the children of your father the devil,” he was saying that they had replaced their original Father with one who delighted in untruth. So, every time we decide how we will respond to challenging circumstances, we need to close our ears to the tempter’s lies and choose for God just as Adam and Eve chose against him. Too often, our first response to difficulty is a lashing out at the One Whom we still think is to blame for it—the One Who actually has never quit trying to make something out of us and no longer has the best material with which to work.

I can’t now recall whether the drill instructor in the movie ever found out about Zach’s father issues. But apparently Foley knew enough to realize that he would have to let the younger man fight him. Their struggle might be compared with Jacob’s wrestling with the unidentified Man in the Old Testament. And, come to think of it, Jacob had some father issues of his own.

What Zach and Jacob were fighting for wasn’t really victory but validation. In fact, I think both would have been disappointed if they actually had won. We don’t want our authority figures to be weaker than we are, after all.

Instead, both men were in effect saying “I won’t let you go until you bless me.” And Foley did, in the end, give Zach the acknowledgement, the respect—the salute—he’d never gotten from his real father. We can guess that all our own scrambling after validation will never be satisfied either until we hear “Well done” from our heavenly Father.