Another class I attended at the Christian Book Expo was by Jennifer Rothschild. I didn't realize when I went to this class that she was the author of a book that I had begun reading awhile back, "Lessons I Learned in the Darkness:walking by faith and not by sight". It wasn't that the book wasn't good that I didn't finish it, just I am really bad about starting books and putting them down and starting another one (the reason I currently have 20 books around my chair!)
Anyway...you would not know it to look at her but Jennifer is blind. She lost her sight at the age of 15 to retinal pigmatosis. She walked into the room with her husband, and I became fascinated watching her interactions because whereever the voice was that was speaking she looked directly at them. As she gave her talked she looked back and forth across the room and I could have sworn she was making eye contact with me. She told us she does not see anything.
Jennifer's talk was entitled "A Makeover For Your Thought Closet: Turn Your Self Talk Into Soul Talk", which is the name of her new book. She began by showing us her Clothes Scanner, which when she held it next to the material would tell her what color it was, so that she would be able to match colors. She made the anology of how we all like to clothe ourselves well physically, but what about the way we clothe our lives? She suggested we clothe our lives through our thought closet.
Here are a few quotes from her talk:
1.The song does not say it is well with my circumstances, but it is well with my soul.
2. At some point in her life (she is now 46)she realized she was giving the enemy the opportunity to steal her joy.
3. All of us talk to ourselves either constructively or destructively.
4. If you sow a thought you will reap an action. If you sow an action you will reap a habit. If you sow a habit you will reap character and if you sow character you will reap destiny.
5. There is a difference between the "what if's" and the "What is"
6. Who you are and what you struggle with are not the same thing.
7. Let struggles refine you not define you.
8. We must trust God more than we trust our feelings.
She used the 2 Corinthians 10:5 passage as her text "we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." She had some practical advice on how to do do that.
1. RECOGNIZE what you say to yourself. What would happen if you wrote down everything you said to yourself and gave it to someone else to repeat to you? Philippians 4:8 is the standard of what we should think about "Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise."
2.REFUSE those thoughts that do not belong. Visualize a door to your thoughts and that each thought has to knock to gain entrance. If I invite a negative thought in then chances are I will treat it like a dinner guest and feed it. If I take it captive then I take authority over it and do not allow it entrance until it speaks truth.
3. RELABEL by replacing the negative thought with truth, i.e. "I am an idiot" with "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
4. REPEAT leads you to a habit of believing the postive thought and be clothed in the libertating truth of God.
She mentioned that she has a 10 year old son and when he says "I am stupid", she says "I am sorry, but you are not allowed to talk to my son that way."
I really needed these words of wisdom from Jennifer because my self talk is often pretty critical and destructive and she gave me some great tools for turning it around into what my loving Father God would say to me.
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