“I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.” Psalm 81:10

“Worldly sorrow brings regret” 2 Corinthians 7:10

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” Matthew 5:5-6

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Romans 12:2

God, I’m so bored of looking at what’s wrong with me and hoping to fix it. I can’t seem to fix any of it!

I once heard Bill Johnson recall the time when he was fed up with getting discouraged and depressed with his own introspection. He told God one day that he wasn’t going to look inwards anymore and be constantly trying to fix himself. If there was anything he needed to pay attention to, go ahead and let me know and he would give it attention: until then, he was going to assume he’s doing fine.

That’s a stunning thought to me.

Lately a lot of music I’ve stumbled upon seems to share the theme of Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’. I had wondered if God was telling me I was trying to fix people. Now I think maybe it was myself I was obsessed with fixing myself. 

What if God wants us to realise that it’s the enemy’s nature to accuse, and it’s our job not to agree with him? It’s the enemy’s nature to be deceitful too, so if I’m constantly looking down and trying to address concerns that I assume are valid, I may be spending a whole lot of my leisure time (and perhaps some work time too) responding to the enemy’s agenda. Maybe that’s why I can often feel like I’m not getting anywhere, that I’m full of problems (which dangerously leads to comparison with others). And if that is what my days are like, and days turn into weeks, this will just carry on my whole life, until I decide I want something different.

To change my life I need to change my thoughts. I’ve been trying it that way for 30-odd years; maybe it’s time to admit it’s not working.

How to change? Firstly, not to anxiously work out what’s wrong with my current pattern in order to spot the failure and fix it. This is part of the problem. It doesn’t work like that.

The only way we get creativity into a system is to open it up to something new. God is the source of creation and love. Love is the only force in the universe that creates something out of nothing. God creates and re-creates. He is the one who can offer an alternative.

So, Father, I want to do something different today. Instead of being led around by the nose worrying about first one and then another anxious thought, I’m going to practise thankfulness. I can never get over how quickly one’s mood changes when one starts to list things that are lovely, uplifting, or for which one is thankful. There’s a reason God gave us the commands he did. He knows how he made us.

Once we start with thankfulness, we are tipping our heads up to open our mouths for God to fill them with good things.

I tried it and it helped. Then I wrote a resume, and applied for a volunteer position. Where did that come from?