“Many people do not think very often about what they think about.”

A thought by Henry Cloud, from his book, Changes That Heal (p. 122). Zondervan. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

So true.

Henry says, “God calls us to active thinking and questioning. As Paul says to the Corinthians: ‘We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:5). When we take every thought captive, we take responsibility for it and evaluate it. We are not repressing or denying thoughts. We are owning them. We are taking inventory of them and weighing them. We need to see what they say about the status of our minds and our hearts and develop them in the same way that we develop any other aspect of ourselves. They lie within our boundaries and we must own them.”

He goes on, “Challenging distorted thinking is a way of owning or taking responsibility for our thoughts. If I think, for example, that you are going to do me harm, but I have never even met you, I need to take responsibility for the way this thinking affects my life. I need to decide whether there is real danger or whether I am just being paranoid. If I find out that I lack knowledge that I need in some area of life, I can own that lack and seek understanding in that field.

“Passing thoughts can sometimes indicate unconscious preoccupations that may need to be examined. If we find ourselves thinking and dreaming about dying, we may need to look more closely at where those thoughts are coming from. Or, if we find ourselves thinking often about how to get revenge upon a certain person, we may need to examine the condition of our heart.”

He later says, “This dynamic of ‘owning’ one’s own thoughts is very important in establishing identity because what we think is an essential part of who we are. If we cannot separate our own thoughts and opinions from another’s, we have ceased to be a person in our own right and have denied something that God will one day hold us responsible for.

“A second-grade Sunday school teacher once asked her class, ‘What’s gray, lives in a tree, gathers nuts, and has a bushy tail?’ Not one boy or girl raised his or her hand, so she asked again. ‘Come on class. What’s gray, lives in a tree, gathers nuts, and has a bushy tail?’ Again, no one would venture a guess. She asked the question one more time. Finally, one little boy raised his hand. ‘Okay, Johnny,’ she said. ‘What’s the answer?’ Johnny squirmed a bit and said, ‘Well, it sure sounds like a squirrel to me, but I’ll say Jesus anyway.’

“Many people, like Johnny, find themselves conditioned to think in a certain way in a certain context. They are hard-pressed to find their own thoughts in the midst of situations where they feel their thoughts don’t fit. We are not talking here about whether or not someone will approve of our thoughts. Our concern here is whether or not we even have thoughts apart from others. Thinking our own thoughts is the beginning of freedom and responsibility.”

That is so true, isn’t it? 

Yes, yes!