June 9, 2010 - Psalm 19:14

"Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer."

We say it in church all the time. I pray it myself. And while I generally have a fairly decent hold on the words of my mouth (with a few notable exceptions...well, maybe more than a few), but the meditations of my heart are another matter entirely.

Well, maybe I should start with the words of my mouth. I've heard it said that one should always keep one's words sweet, because you never know when you're going to have to eat them. How true! One of my major failings is that I speak first and think later. Open mouth, insert foot. And it's not always my mouth that's doing the talking...it's what I write that gets me into trouble.

I'm a great fan of "free writing." Do you know what that is? That's where you just simply sit with pen and paper, and if it comes into your head, it goes down on the paper, no matter how silly, stupid, or nonsensical it sounds. Eventually, after the random thoughts play themselves out, you get down to what is the crux of the matter. It's a great tool.

Unfortunately, I sometimes pop those things down, especially on the computer, and hit the "send" button, and then everybody in God's green earth knows what an utter jerk I am. I need to spend more time minding my own business, and less time minding somebody else's.

And then there's the whole "meditations of my heart" thing. Sometimes the meditations of my heart are not the most pure and noble. I can be judgmental, crabby, and downright mean. It's hard to shut my brain off sometimes; makes it hard to sleep.

There's a passage in the New Testament - 2 Corinthians - "...we take every thought captive to obey Christ." How does one learn to take their thoughts captive? Thoughts just come, unbidden mostly...they just are; they just happen. And once thought, you can't unthink something. So how do you take your thoughts captive?

What occurs to me is that taking your thoughts captive, which is an internal activity, has to start with external activity. What I mean by that is this...if I am focusing on how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, then my thoughts are going to go there. They're going to see the negative in the world around me. If I watch "Nancy Grace" and "Cops" and any of those other true crime shows, isn't that where my thoughts are going to go?

But if I focus on the pure, the good, the holy, then are my thoughts naturally going to go there instead? If I watch Disney, Jesse Duplantis, Touched by an Angel...won't my thoughts go in that direction?

So, by taking my thoughts captive, and focusing on the clean, the pure, the holy, then the words of my mouth AND the meditations of my heart are more likely to be acceptable to God.

Please Lord, make it so! phx