When our daughter, Bethany, was three years old or so, she memorized Psalm 23. I can still hear her little singsong voice, quoting the verses that she had learned by heart. Her pure little heart. When she got to the end of the passage, she said with extra enthusiasm: “SURELY!! goodness and mercy shall follow me! ALL the days of my life! and I will DWELL in the house of the Lord! FOR! EVER! … AMEN!!” I always felt it was my place to remind her, “Bethany, there is no “amen” at the end of Psalm 23.” But, she paid no heed. She always added it. It was HER Psalm 23, after all.
Since then, I realized that, yes, there IS an “amen” implied at the end of that passage. We do silently declare, “Amen, so be it” to the fact that, though we may be in distress in a dark place—in the valley of the shadow—we WILL remember the Word of the LORD! That He IS forever our own personal shepherd and guide. He IS right now, and He will continue to be. AMEN to that!!
So many people around us live in the middle of painful situations. They don’t just walk through—they have taken up residence in the “valley of the shadow of death.” You see some of them venting their lament and frustration into the void of social media every day. They describe their situation as if they were the first and only person ever to experience the awkward loneliness of pain. In most cases, I believe, to suffer does not make a person unique—it makes them normal. And the temptation to complain about our suffering is “common to man”—it’s par.
“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.” (1 Corinthians 10:13 KJV)
In fact, that is exactly what David was doing centuries ago when he wrote many of the psalms. He was venting his lamenting into the air …
Psalms 6:2-3 — “Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; My soul is also sore vexed: but thou, O LORD, how long?”
Psalms 22:2 — “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.”
Psalms 88:1-3 — “O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: for my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.”
It seems apparent that a big part of the problem with pain (physical, circumstantial, emotional, social) is the loneliness. Suffering people often feel isolated in their pain, with (seemingly) no one to talk to, because friends and loved ones, frankly, don’t know what to say to them. Friends admit, “It’s awkward. I don’t want to say anything to make matters worse.” So they say nothing. But the “nothing” sounds to the sufferer like, “The more we ignore you, the faster you will go away.” So the sufferer sometimes considers the vacuous void of social media as the only “friend” they have.
HOWEVER, these thoughts are purely perception. They are not real, but they can be deadly. Self-pity rarely reflects the whole truth. When we find ourselves thinking toxic thoughts while going through a valley, this is when we must come to a full stop—and start to think about our thoughts. To stand back from our thoughts and examine them carefully. The Apostle Paul said it like this: “We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV)
Jo Hargreaves, a Christian psychotherapist who posts her insight on her web page, “The Faith Filled Therapist,” talks about this powerful tool of the brain. She says: “2 Corinthians 10:5 invites us to take every thought captive—it’s a God-designed function of the human mind called ‘metacognition: to stand back and observe your own thinking.’ Instead of simply reacting to your thoughts, you can notice the thought, and name it for what it is: truth or distortion.”
What good will THAT do? Just this: it allows you to:
- Recognize when a thought is helpful or harmful;
- Choose whether to engage with or dismiss a thought; and then
- Redirect your mental focus intentionally to align with TRUTH.
In other words, to actively lasso your nagging, woe-is-me thoughts, wrestle them to the ground, tie them up, and carry them willingly to the altar of sacrifice, offering them up to God. He takes them and exchanges them for TRUTH. It sounds complicated, but our minds are empowered to do it in a moment. This is metacognition—and paired with the presence of the Holy Ghost, it becomes a superpower.
Say it with enthusiasm! “Yea, THOUGH I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I WILL (take this anxious thought captive! And I WILL) fear NO evil: for (I KNOW!) THOU art with me!” (Psalms 23:4 KJV—expanded)
We will discuss this more next time!
(Part 1 of 2)
