I just started to think differently…

Her bright eyes shone without apology. This was new for her. She told me about how she was learning and growing. She told me how her life was changing. She used to apologize after almost every sentence. Today her eye contact was steady, even confident.

“I’ve been through inner healing,” she said, “and I’ve been through deliverance, and neither one seemed to help me”.

These meaningful and helpful forms of ministry often help people break through the barriers in their lives. The breakthrough can in many cases be sudden and radical. In her case, she felt she had failed almost every form of help she knew. The apologies had been as much about her own sense of failing as they had been about feeling like everyone around her was constantly disappointed with her.

She had seen several counselors along with these other forms of ministry. She said all of them had said the same thing.

“You’re a runner,” they said, referring to her strategy for coping with painful circumstances. She had heard it again and again from trained professionals. Surely they must know. It was our conversation about this very idea that had begun to tear down the walls for her. She told me what she had come to embrace as true.

“I’m a runner,” she said one day, defiantly and with a touch of sadness.

“What if you’re not?” I said, “What if it’s just something you’ve learned to do when you’re afraid, but it’s not really who you are?”

She later told me that this was the moment she began to dismantle a wall which had been built over years of believing The Big Lie. She stopped. She asked herself the question. “Yeah, what if I’m not”.

This interruption in her well worn rut of cognition, prevented her from racing down a path which was deeply familiar. But more than simply stopping her, this interruption allowed her to envision and then follow a new path.

“If I’m not a runner, what might actually be true about me?” she pondered. “And if THAT is true, then how might I see and think and feel…?” With this new picture of herself she had dared to live out what she was seeing.

Sitting in front of me this day was the real her. The her who had decided she WAS NOT a runner. The her who had followed a new path because she paused on her way to the familiar. She paused and turned on a new pathway.

“All my counselors told me I was a runner, I have been through deliverance and inner healing, this time I wasn’t even trying to get free. This time I just started to….I started to…think differently.”

Now she was speaking my language.

Ruts in our thought processes can pull us into a pattern of thinking that we simply believe is “The Truth”. What if it’s not? What if that persistent thought backed up by years of experience isn’t really representative of the real you? What if you pause for a moment, consider an alternative and allow yourself to Think Differently?