What does it mean to “renew your mind?”
This Week’s Quick Hits:
Americans spend an estimated $2.6 billion dollars on candy for trick-or-treating. It is now the nation’s second largest commercial holiday!
CDC says that trick-or-treating is a high risk activity!
Click to check out several inventions that put a new spin on trick-or-treat for 2020.
Book
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
Chris Voss is a former investigator turned businessman. Public speaker, lecturer, and author. Never Split the Difference is a fascinating book about negotiation techniques. Voss believes that psychology, empathy and rapport play crucial roles in the process. If you have ever felt completely out of your comfort zone when negotiating for something, this book will open your eyes and give you confidence for your next negotiation. The book is informative and although I did not embrace it entirely, it was a great read.
Awesome Marriage Podcast
In this week’s Awesome Marriage podcast episode, “Love Even When You Don’t Feel Like It,” Christina and I discuss whether it’s okay to not “feel the love” for our spouse, how to love when we don’t feel like it, and lots more.
This week we have a bonus episode,“Making Your Relationship Matter Now and For Generations To Come” premiering Thursday. My special guest is Dr. Crawford Loritts, who is a nationally known speaker, author and senior pastor of Fellowship Bible Church in Roswell, Georgia. Dr. Crawford brings us so much wisdom. Don’t miss this one!
Insights
November is celebration month at Awesome Marriage! During the first two weeks, the Dispatch will take a two-week break as I share how Awesome Marriage has grown over 10 years and introduce people God used in the process. You will meet our amazing team, Awesome Marriage’s Mount Rushmore, and see all the ways we help couples have the marriage God designed for them!
This week we wrap up our four-week journey. We have looked focusing on the temporary versus the eternal; we saw how anxiety, depression, and fear can cripple us, and we looked at “joy” through God's eyes.
Today let’s talk about our minds. Here are some interesting brain facts:
No one knows for sure, but the most recent estimate is that our brains contain roughly 86 billion brain cells.
In general, men’s brains are 10% bigger than women’s, even after taking larger body size into account.
However, the hippocampus, the part of the brain most strongly linked with memory, is typically larger in women.
Technology has forced most of us to be prodigious multitaskers, but your brain can’t learn or concentrate on two things at once.
What it can do is quickly toggle back and forth between tasks. But doing so decreases your attention span, ability to learn, short-term memory, and overall mental performance.
Your brain's storage capacity is virtually unlimited.
There are so many fascinating things about our brains but I want us to focus on this: “Our brains cannot learn or concentrate on two things at once.” So what do we focus on? What do we make a priority? What falls by the wayside because we focus on something else?
I think there’s good news and bad news. If we focus on things that help us grow and become who God created us to be, that is awesome. But if we direct our brain to anything that is detrimental to us and our walk with God, we can go down some rough roads.
Have you ever been praying, reading the Bible or focusing on something that is good for you and then in an instant your focus shifts - sometimes to the opposite of the good thing you were thinking of? I think most of us have been there. It can be really frustrating, at best. What we do not realize is that we made the choice to change our focus. It happens so quickly that we are usually not aware it was a choice.
Let’s tie this all together:
Our brain can only focus on one thing at a time.
We get to choose what we focus on.
What we choose to focus on can be life-changing.
That life change can be positive or negative.
God gives us freedom to make choices. Some choices lead us to Him; others lead away from Him. The apostle Paul writes about how our mind needs to be renewed. So what does it mean to “renew your mind?” In light of the brain facts I shared, I think Paul is saying that too often we focus on the wrong thing, and we need to switch our focus to the right things. It’s replacing the junk in our minds with what is good, right and healthy. That’s what it means to renew your mind. My experience is that renewing the mind takes effort - sometimes a lot of effort.
Step 1: Know that God is in this with you.
Step 2: The desire to renew your mind.
Step 3: Redirect your focus as soon as you realize it has shifted.
Step 4: Do this consistently day after day.
The payoff is becoming who God created you to be. Your life will be better and your marriage will be better.
Challenge:
What choices in focus lead you closer to God?
What choices in focus lead you away from God?
What will you focus on today?
Final Thought:
Commit to go through the four steps above every day for 30 days. Then let us know what God does!
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