If I’m honest, it’s easy for me to have a “half-empty” perspective. Over the years I’ve had to replace negative thought patterns with godly thinking. God’s Word gives me a great run-down of things to focus on:

Join me today as my author-friend, Jennifer Slattery unpacks some fantastic truths about the importance of our thought life and the value of remembering.

The human brain is a powerful thing. It steers our emotions and initiates our actions. It can lead us to attempt great feats or cower in fear and insecurity. And our thoughts are like kitchen fires; the more we fuel them, the stronger they grow. 

When life gets hard and uncertainty rises, we have a choice—will we fuel negative thinking by obsessing over every what-if scenario, or will we focus on truth instead? Not just the truth in Scripture, but the truth of God’s character as He has revealed Himself to us throughout life’s challenges.

In the middle of his despair, the psalmist pauses to remember and everything changes. He’s pulled from paralyzing depression into praise. And with every recollection, his memory grows. He spends the rest of the psalm recounting all the miraculous things God has done. 

Something profoundly powerful happens when we lift our focus off our struggle and place it on God and the miracles He’s performed. Our problems don’t instantly disappear, but they do shrink as we relegate them to their proper place—centered in the palm of the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving Creator of the Universe. 

Where they’ve been all along. We were just too worked up in our negative thinking to realize, or perhaps acknowledge it. 

We can’t control what happens to us, but that doesn’t mean we must live in misery. God longs for the opposite for us, actually. He longs for each of us to experience the “peace of God, which passeth all understanding.” (Philippians 4:7a) And He’s given us the tools to grab hold of that peace, if we’d but follow the wisdom He’s laid out in Scripture – like His continual command to remember.

The next time you begin to feel anxious or insecure you can feed your anxiety by obsessing over the negative and playing every possible horrible scenario in your mind. Or, you can pause, take control of your thoughts, and embark on a stroll with your Savior down memory lane, and rest in the peace that follows. 

The choice is yours. And mine.

What are your experiences with remembering? How often do you tend to remember the things God has done? Have you tried remembering His hand when you were facing a difficult situation, and if so, what was the result? 

How we think and what we think about dramatically impacts our emotions and our actions. What if we centered our thoughts on God’s truth, as revealed in Scripture? How might our confidence and faith grow? How might our insecurities diminish? Join me for a two-month long brain experiment where we saturate our minds with truth then watch the impact it has on our emotions and behaviors.

Join me at on Sarah Ruut’s blog on March 16th to learn how to take your thoughts captive. And why doing so is a powerful weapon against discouragement and defeat.

On March 23rd, join me on Ginger Solomon’s blog to learn how to develop a confident, Christ-centered self-awareness. 

On March 30th, join me on Angela Meyer’s blog where we’ll be talking about choosing who we will please, and how doing so provides peace and purpose. Then, I’ll announce when and where I’ll be discussing how to trust in God’s plan when life gets crazy and how to surrender our struggles to Christ.

Jennifer Slattery writes soul-stirring fiction for New Hope Publishers and devotions for Internet Café Devotions, the group blog, Faith-filled Friends, and her personal blog. She also does content editing for Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas’ Firefly imprint, and loves working with authors who are serious about pursuing their calling. When not writing, reading, or editing, Jennifer loves going on mall dates with her adult daughter and coffee dates with her hilariously fun husband.