Tag: meditation

Guardians of the Synapses

Overwhelmed. Exhausted. Anxious. Fearful. Pushed past the breaking point. Done. I’ve heard others recite these words, and also myself. There is a sense of uneasiness that seems to have arisen since we have all made it through the worldwide pandemic. It has felt as if the world has turned upside down and hasn’t righted itself yet. Many people I hear from are feeling very anxious. It is as if we are waiting for the next “bad” thing to happen, whether a disease, recession, war, or another type of violent act.

This anxious feeling has not spared people of faith. Mental health issues affect those without faith and those with faith. The only difference is that help can come from both the church and from professional mental health workers. Mental health is not a secular issue with secular solutions. It is a human issue that God understands and offers help for.

This isn’t to make light of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues, but rather to realize God actually cares about these issues. The Bible speaks about anxiety, fear, worry, and the healing and peace that comes from following God’s ways. It speaks of taking hold of every thought. It speaks of shifting our focus from ourselves to God. And of practicing meditation on God’s word, bringing our requests to God, leaving them with Him, and offering thanksgiving.

Here’s an example;

“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.” (Philippians 4:6, NLT) The result is this:

“Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7, NLT)

And Jesus said, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:34, NIV)

Solomon in his wisdom made this observation in the Book of Proverbs, “Anxiety weighs down the heart, but a kind word cheers it up.” Proverbs 12:25, NIV)

These verses are just a few of the ways the Bible speaks about anxiety. And this isn’t to make light of anxiety, but to point to a God who understands and cares about us, His creation.

God has given us wonderful bodies that can do amazing things. We have emotions and feelings. We have minds that have powerful abilities to control body functions in milliseconds that we are not even aware of consciously. Our brain is amazing and has been shown to grow and change with new research into neuroplasticity. We have truly been fearfully and wonderfully made. Our thoughts can overwhelm us and bring about neuro and physiologic responses. Some responses mimic heart attacks and are so convincing it sends many to the ER.

Our thoughts are wonderfully executed blends of chemicals, neurons, dendrites and synapses. This is according to my brief research from Google. I’m not a brain expert, but just someone who wonders how it all works. And it all is amazing. And powerful.

The good news is that we don’t have to go it alone whenever we feel overwhelmed and our synapses are all firing randomly. We can find a peace from God. We have this amazing ability to stop and breathe to get ourselves and our minds back down from the over firing of neurons.

Studies have shown that prayer and meditation can lower our heart rates and blood pressure. Reciting Bible verses that bring God’s peace and hope can help us to shift our focus off of the fears and toward God. Stopping our thoughts from wandering toward the negative can be done by stopping and making a list of our blessings. A gratitude list can do wonders for our attitudes. It is hard to complain when you are thanking God for all He has done so far. This attitude of thankfulness reminds us of all the times God has come through for us, or has gotten us through the tough times before and we stop looking at the storm around us and fix our gaze on Him.

We can not stop the stress of the world from affecting us, but we can limit its affect on our minds and bodies, by guarding our thoughts and shifting them to God when they start to go south, into a place of overwhelm and worry. -God Bless You – Nancy

A Little Bit of Jesus

So, it’s been a while since I posted and while many of you might have been waiting with baited breath, you might not be after you read the post. You see it has taken me some time to wait to hear from God on what to write. Yes, I wait until there is something that He puts on my heart to write about. This will probably make some uncomfortable, but maybe that will be a good thing.

Early on in my undergrad degree I learned something called religious syncretism. It by definition is ” An amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.” (Google). In my coursework it generally referred to Christians in non -western areas that incorporated Christianity with their old religious beliefs. Generally, it might have involved the use of icons or fetishes with prayers to God. It could be a bit confusing for missionaries working with syncretisms biases.

But the question I want to pose for us all today is how much have we been affected by syncretism in our own faith? Do we pray and then consult a horoscope? Do we sing along to Hillsong praise and worship and seek out palm readers? This may or may not seem obvious to you, depending upon your knowledge of how God feels about occult practices, but are there others areas in which you have blended an eastern religious practice with a Christian one? Meditation is another example. meditating on God’s Word is scriptural, but emptying our minds to seek nirvana is not.

This is just a brief example and many will not agree with my observation, but if we truly want to grow in our faith we must leave the childish things behind as the Apostle Paul says;”When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”(1 Corinthians 13:11, NIV). We will only grow when we follow Christ with our whole hearts and minds. We do not need to blend Jesus in to our own beliefs but rather follow what He teaches in the Bible. Too often we add Jesus onto our lives, similarly to adding sprinkles on top of our ice cream. We want just enough to look good on the outside, or just enough so we can talk with other Christians in church, or maybe as a sort of good luck charm or last resort to get our prayers answered. But, No, Jesus want to be all, not just added in or sprinkled on the top of our lives. Faith might be small like a mustard seed, but Jesus should be greater in our lives.

Focus

So, I need to ask you a question. Are you, like me, having trouble focusing on life? I mean there are so many distractions out there, that at times I just find it hard to keep the main thing the main thing. Since this post is all about dealing with change and moving forward in life, I think it is important to take a look, no pun intended, at our focus these days. I have been trying to keep pressing on, working from home, attending online classes and adjusting to a different way of doing things,but, honestly, I can’t focus.

I know the stuff I should be doing, but I have gotten pretty bored of all the shoulds and wanna do all the cant’s. Like going to eat out, and by out I do not mean outside in our car, while we drive back to our house after picking up through the drive up window. I mean at a real restaurant, sitting down at a table. Or what about going to the beach? Yup, the beaches are open, But……. You can’t actually go to them unless you happen to live at the beach. I secretly suspect that the beach house homeowners wish they could come to my neighborhood, because they are bored with going to the beach all the time. Well, maybe they aren’t. But I’m guessing they are having trouble with focus too.

So, how do we get back our focus? I asked myself this question quite a bit this week and searched for answer. The answer I found was this; it is not the should’s and the oughto’s I need to focus on and get back on track with doing life, but it is the who. No, not the world health organization, but the WHO: God.

With everything that is happening around us, it is easy to lose our focus on God. We start to look at our problems and they get bigger and bigger in our field of vision, crowding out our focus on God. Let me give you an example to think about:

I’ve mentioned before that my sons are photographers/ videographers and I have learned quite a bunch about the technical side of the industry. You see, their professional equipment has specific guides for the focus of a shot. Whatever lines up within the box will be in focus, whatever is outside will be blurry. when you look through the viewfinder the whole scene is before you, but you can choose to only place one object within the yellow box, with the background completely blurred. Or you might focus on the background with the closest object to you blurred. The scene is the same, but the object of focus changes, as you decide to change it.

I realized whenever I am feeling overwhelmed or uneasy, it is when I have changed my view finder to focus on the problems right now, and take my focus off of God. When I stop and catch myself feeling anxious, I stop and get back into my focus of Jesus. Practically, it looks like this, stop, pray, pick up my Bible and read a passage, close it, then meditate on what I just read.

Hebrews 12: 2 tells us what we should be doing during the difficult times; “Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.”  We have a race to run in this life. A race of faith that isn’t always easy, but let’s keep our focus on Jesus, and not the distractions along the way, which are only temporary. God Bless- Nancy