FINDING THE CENTER OF THOUGHT

The mind is often a maze of desires that creates walls of distraction to keep on wander from discovering the center of real motives. It is so incredible how easy it is to lie to oneself. To be so collectively justified in terms of regarding one’s failures and weaknesses as victories and strengths.

When this process is one you have to deal with as a teacher, supervisor or anyone in a position that you have authority over another, it can be very difficult to learn the truth in a person’s thinking. And it becomes very hard to know the right way of dealing with a problem in terms of someone’s behavior when you don’t know the real facts.

Of course as Proverbs points out “the ways of every man are right in his own eyes.” There is just something within the nature of our souls that doesn’t like to admit we do anything wrong. So we end up rationalizing our sins and failures in a way that spares us any guilt or reason to change.

And sadly church life at times seems to inflame this problem. For too often Christianity is translated into a set of rules to follow. Or in some cases it becomes an issue of hunting and picking out of scripture the verses one can either actually obey or the ones somebody wants to beat others to death with his or her inability to do.

Is any of that nonsense God’s will? I say no. I believe God’s spirit will bring us to the juncture where we must fact the real center of our thought. And that is where the truth lies about how we really are.

What is so wonderful is that even though sin lies at the center of our thoughts in this life, God in his love and abiding grace still accepts us as we are. Yet so often it seems that emphasis is on how we are somehow suppose to change in a way to be worthy of that love and grace. If one examines the heart of that thought the reality is that it stems from a need that some spiritual leader has to control. So by inspiring guilt and a pressure to conform to gain his or her approval he controls the presumed pace of one’s spiritual life.

Eventually all of this chasing the fantasy of conformity and the need to somehow be deceive about living a perfect life one is slowly sucked into the delusion of being worthy in God’s eyes. And thus salvation becomes a reward by such thinking.

In truth though such a point of view only shows how a person has not actually matured in their relationship with God. For if one looks at some of the saints of scripture we find that the more the walked by faith and came closer to the center of thought in terms of God they saw more of him and less of themselves. And that is the true measure of spirituality in my view. We simply see how much more important Jesus is in the scheme of things and how we are not the center of the universe.

Then a real appreciate for his bountiful grace can come into our lives. We can feel free to celebrate his love and forgiveness and avoid the pitfall of becoming off center in our relationship. To live by faith is to never forget that Jesus is the one who is perfect.