The Sinkhole and the Mountain, Part Two

You have to think differently.

"Sinkhole Thinking" (organizing yourself around your anxieties) is consuming your time, cloaking your options, and limiting your availability to God's highest and best. It harnesses you to a fear-based life and limits your imagination.

You have to think differently. But how?

Four things are required if you want to change the way you think:

* Grace
* Mental Discipline
* A Compelling Vision or Purpose
* Close Relationships With "Mountaineers"
(those who organize themselves around God-given vision, purpose and imagination)

The problem with many would-be mountaineers is that they have only taken on one, two or three of these required components when all four are actually necessary.

Beginning with this e-newsletter, we will examine these four components more closely.

Grace:

In my book, "How Healed Do You Want to Be?", I describe grace as "holy electricity". This is so you can remember that grace is an active power that surges through your life through faith in Christ. It is the divine power to create change in anything it touches. It is the "juice" we need to scale mountains - and you cannot conjure it up yourself. You must get it through direct contact with God's Holy Spirit.

Often, the side of grace that represents God's mercy (His kindness and compassion) is presented as the whole picture. But grace is not only mercy, but power:

"But by the grace of God I am what I am," wrote the Apostle Paul, "and His grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them -- yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me" (I Corinthians 15:10).

Praying Gracefully

Many of our prayers do not treat grace in this manner. "God give me the grace to get through this" is not a bad or wrong prayer, but if we think of grace only in terms of the power to "get through stuff" we betray the fact that we are still organized around avoiding what we fear.

When we tap into the electric side of grace, we find ourselves praying Mountaineer prayers:

"Lord, rock my world! Shatter the limits, O God, and fill my limbs, my heart and my mind with divine energy to grip the side of the mountain of my inspired imagination and PULL UP!"

(If you remember the sound of William Wallace's rag tag army shouting and shaking their ad hoc weapons right before they charge the fully-armored English soldiers in the movie "Braveheart", you might throw a similar shout or two in here).

Sinkhole Prayers, and I have prayed thousands of them, are usually not filled with zest or hope but with resignation and pleas for survival. Fine.
But how many such prayers have you prayed compared to Mountaineer prayers that are full of vision, purpose, energy and imagination? What does that tell you about how you see God? See yourself? Frame your possibilities? Approach your day?

You have to think differently.