Thought for the Day 5/28/2021

 Friday Tale - Mental Prisons

 Habits play an important role in your life. Like many aspects of your life, habits can be considered both a blessing and a curse.

    Dr. Jay Dishman wrote, "Recently I visited Alcatraz Prison. Once it housed the most hardened of criminals. Today it is open to tourists under the direction of the United States Parks Department. Many men have tried to escape Alcatraz; no one is known to have succeeded. As I listened to the tour guide explain the impossibility of escape, I thought of other prisons equally confining but where the doors are never locked, no guards walk the halls, and escape is encouraged and possible. That prison is Habit."

    Our habit is thinking about ourselves and our environment as a jail or a paradise. We need but to look around us to see people who are rich emotionally and materially because they think and feel rich. We also see people who are laden with emotional and material debt because they think lack. Some are inspired with vision; others are encumbered with doubt. Some are moved by ambition; others feel safer in monotony. Some reach for the mountain tops, others huddle in the pits. Some seek opportunity, others wait for it to knock. The sad fact is that more people are confined by their thoughts than are fed by them.

    Negative thinking shuts us in a prison, but there is a way out. The apostle Paul said, "Be transformed by the renewal of your mind." Paul knew a lot about prisons, both physical and mental. You renew your life by renewing your mind. You renew your mind when you change your habit of thinking.

~ Dr. Jay Disman

 In reference to your former manner of life,
you lay aside the old self, and that you
be renewed in the spirit of your mind.
~ Ephesians 4:23