Talking to Myself this Morning

This morning as our family was working very hard to get out the door to co-op, I was having a seriously purposeful conversation with myself. It had to do with me being more patient and gracious if other families are late to my opening/theology class AND with me not freaking out if kids were coughing and wiping drippy noses all day (because some sort of upper respiratory bug is having a hey-day in Billings right now). I was taking myself a bit to task re: having been, at times, sinfully impatient about late starts last semester. And after the petri dish of the hacky-est, cough-filled church service Sunday morning, I realized that I had a decision to make: either I could keep our family entirely out of EVERYTHING (church, Sunday school, co-op, violin lessons) OR I could get over myself, wash hands a lot, use disinfectant, and deal with it if we get sick. Without complaining.

So, this morning, I resolved to be kind. Patient. Long-suffering. I wanted to have a happy and supportive heart even if our family pushed hard for an hour to get everything set up and no one came at all! (But then, of course, the other families were actually EARLY. It was classic.) I wanted to be happy and patient handing Kleenexes to sniffly kids and gracious when I asked them to cough into their elbows. And by God’s grace I was! It was a great day at co-op.

All of this reminded me of that excellent D. Martyn-Lloyd Jones teaching on a similar topic. And since I re-read it myself tonight, I thought I’d share it with you too:

“The main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Far from it. This is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problem of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment [in Psalm 42] was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself, ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ he asks. His soul had been repressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you’. Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have but little experience.

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’–what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’–instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet priase Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures, pp. 20-21

Thanking God for the grace to talk TO myself this morning (and to listen too).

Goodnight and God bless!

Your friend,
Tara B.