“An unexamined life is not worth living.” —Socrates

Has Holy Spirit been shining a light on an area in your life?

At our last Homeschool Moms' Night In a mom shared about changes she made in her life during 2020 after the pandemic started. We all longed to reach through the Zoom screen and give her a hug after she shared so beautifully a testimony of not just weight loss and paying off debt, but of getting her life back!

What struck me about her story was how her husband and her recognized areas of their lives that were not reflecting what they valued, and together they took steps to make changes. They didn’t blame shift, even while acknowledging there were people in their lives who were enabling them, but they set boundaries and chose change. With God's grace, leading and revelation they began the hard work of aligning their lives to their values—now that is integrity!

As I work through Wendy Speake’s devotionals: The 40-Day Sugar Fast and The 40-Day Social Media Fast I am putting my interactions with sugar and social media under the microscope. As Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” (I’ll share more about the beauty and struggle of this at the end of March.)

Struggles to break habits, addictions, patterns, and routines benefit from a holistic approach.

I've been using the word 'soul' lately to speak of the essence of an individual—the part that lasts eternally and is affected by the mind, body, and spirit! Every aspect of soul care is connected as the body, mind, and spirit impact each other.

Inner healing, the beautiful work Jesus orchestrates within our hearts/souls, comes in part through the mind.

Today our soul care focus is on the mind.

As the soul is the eternal part associated with the physical heart, so the mind is associated with the brain. Our thoughts have the power to change the physical make-up of our brains.

In the Bible, the Apostel Paul invites us to align our thinking with God’s:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.  —Romans 12:1-2 MSG

As we submit our lives to God by taking time to listen to Holy Spirit, He will speak truth into the area of our minds that are wayward and gift us with a new way to think and behave!

While this is deeply spiritual work, it is also significantly physical. The Christian phrases “take your thoughts captive” or “renew your mind” become cliche when they leave us in the dark without any tools and the heaviness of shame and failure.

The other week my mom handed me a stack of books by Dr. Caroline Leaf, a cognitive neuroscientist. Her books are compilations of research on “the science of thought and the mind-body connection as it relates to thinking, learning, renewing the mind, gifting and potential,” as it says in her bio.

I recommend looking into Leaf's books, podcasts, and Youtube videos! I would also highly recommend you watch Pastor Steven Furtick’s interview with Dr. Caroline Leaf on Youtube after you finish this blog post.

1) Can I really change my mind?

Leaf answers this question in The Perfect You saying, “I consistently saw cognitive, emotional, and behavioral changes with those students and adults who chose to intentionally and deliberately use their minds in a very disciplined, consistent, and mindful way.”

Neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to regrow in response to mental stimulation, is an enormous breakthrough discovered through brain image technology but Leaf says, "The most important facet of all my research and practice, however, is individual choice."

The ownness is on the individual, not the counselor, the medication, the program (though these may all be necessary).

Leaf reminds us in The Perfect You:

You alone are responsible and can be held accountable for how you react to what happens in your life: your future is open, filled with an eternity of possible situations and choices.

There is no greater place to begin changing our lives than by feeding our Starved Souls with Scripture. In Galatians 6:7-8 we read:

Don’t be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest. The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others—ignoring God!—harvests a crop of weeds. All he’ll have to show for his life is weeds! But the one who plants in response to God, letting God’s Spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real life, eternal life.

Like the mom who shared her testimony of weight loss and debt repayment, it started with her taking responsibility for her life and sowing daily seeds towards a harvest she knew she would value!

2) How do I change my mind?

Dr. Caroline Leaf describes a 63-day journey to transform automated habits.

The first 21 days involve the moment-by-moment practice of analysis, reflection, self-awareness, and mindfulness through recording habits and triggers. Leaf encourages checking in with our thoughts and Jesus every 10 seconds! This is not for the faint of heart but as we become more mindful and realize we are living with toxic, negative, anxiety-inducing thoughts all day long we will desire to do the work of renewing our minds!

It takes another 21 days to establish the new habit, which after another 21 days can become a lifelong practice.

After 63 days we’ve rewired our brains with new tree-like branches called dendrites!

Our mindsets—the belief systems we have unknowingly enforced through our actions for many years—greatly affect us.

In Think Learn Succeed Dr. Caroline Leaf presents fifteen different mindsets. I won’t get into them all here but in the thinker mindset chapter she says:

Learning to capture thoughts and evaluate them logically by developing a thinker mindset is one of the most significant parts of any mental self-care regimen, allowing us to become more self-evaluative and self-regulatory.

Through my own inner healing journey the past decade I have become much more aware of the “stories in my head,” as Brene Brown puts it, and have learned to reflect on my thoughts, emotions, triggers, and reactions.

My prayer for all of us is to grow in a relationship with Jesus to the point where our minds recognize that whatever we choose to turn to, apart from the Lord, will not satisfy the insatiable hunger in our souls.

Matthew 5:6 says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied."

What do you hunger for?

Fasting creates space to be more mindful. The pull I feel to turn to something other than Jesus in the nitty-gritty of most late afternoons begs this question:

3) Is Jesus really enough?

At the end of March, I plan to reflect more on this question. I want to get to the bottom of the lies we nurture.

Psalm 42:1-2 describes this vivid image, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?”

Are you spinning your wheels, trying to fill your God-shaped hole with cheap fixes that send surges of dopamine to your brain but leave your soul panting even harder for living water?

We are all on the continuum of learning what a life of surrender, hunger, and fullness looks like.

My church is studying the life of Joseph, found in the last few chapters of Genesis. Over and over Joseph's actions reveal strength and depth of character formed by entertaining wise thoughts day after day—whether in a literal pit, jail, or as second in command in Egypt!

Lao Tzu cautions us in his famous quote:

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

If you are stuck today and don’t think you can change I hope this is a launching pad towards research and the first step of choosing change! I am so grateful we have an encouraging coach, kind counselor, best friend, and lover of our souls to journey with us.

You can change your mind!

Today I am praying for you, the one who read this all the way to the end. May you experience hope as you continue the practice of transforming your mind in Christ!

Do you have a testimony of God’s transforming work in your life?