An idle mind...

"An idle mind is the devil's workshop" - you've heard it often said. And yes, it can well be the case. An idle mind is pretty much always the space where worry, anxiety and doubt brew and fester. It really is where the devil does his best work..

And so we do everything to stave off the idleness - take up hobbies, bury ourselves in work, take on the mountain load of household chores, or we resort to mindlessly scrolling through reams and reams of social media. One of the things that I tend to do is to look at my Google newsfeed and tell myself that I'm only getting to know what's happening around me. That couldn't be further from the truth, though. My newsfeed has only stuff about IPL, movies and Bollywood, although this last one, I can't quite comprehend how or why it shows up on my newsfeed 🤷‍♀️. Oh, well..

I read sometime back that we fill our minds with nothingness. Because really, we're not gaining anything from all this mindless scrolling. Nothing is really going into the brain. Have you noticed how you could have just spent an hour on your phone and you've gathered absolutely nothing of value in that time? Come on, let's be honest. How many times has that happened to you in the past week alone?

You're starting to get tired of this now. What is the point of my tirade? Well, here it is -

The idle mind need not be so unproductive or dangerous. What if we did allow our minds to be idle? Only instead of allowing that spiral of self-destruction to take over, we consciously did something else? I mean think about it - how many times have you sat still, only to have the fear and anxiety of the unknown take over, but because you don't want to be consumed by it, you distract yourself with that mundane baking or DIY video or those charcuterie boards or something else that catches your eye?

"Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful." - Joshua 1:8.

What if instead of being lured into that dark alley of doom, we worked consciously to focus on the truth of the Word of God and meditate on it? What if we fixed our minds on the encouragement that comes from the Psalms or the practical instruction from the Epistles on how we are to live as individuals and in the Church or on the work and teaching of Christ in the Gospels? What if we took the time to see God's hand at work in the lives of every single person that the Bible talks about and sought out to find those same patterns in our own lives too? Not so much the devil's workshop now, is it?

Father, help us intentionally work on freeing our minds from the humdrum of the temporal things that lure us, so that the Spirit can teach us all things and bring to remembrance all that Christ has told us.