I've been reading the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder with my nine year old daughter lately. Every spring, the Ingalls family would do a mind-bogglingly thorough clean of their home, including taking apart all the furniture to dust it, beating the rugs, washing the mattress covers and curtains, scrubbing the floor until it changed colour and blacking the stove, whatever that entailed. Part of me finds this idea appealing but I find it hard to get motivated to do the most basic household chores so I can't imagine any house under my supervision ever getting a deep clean. However, something I could get behind is an annual sort out of my mind.
Just as a house can get a bit grimy in the corners, simply as a result of being lived in, so we can develop unhealthy, grubby habits of thought, attitudes, go-to ideas that are less than honouring to God unless we consciously stop and have a clean-up now and then. Regular thoughts create synaptic pathways in our brains, meaning we can get stuck in literal ruts. Through a process called neuroplasticity however, those paths can be rerouted. We can, as the biblical writer Paul put it, 'take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ' (2 Corinthians 10:5).
So what might a spring clean of the mind actually involve? I confess I'm making this up as I go along, so feel free to discard this approach and make up your own, but I'm going to suggest three steps.
Step one: get the thoughts out and line them up
For this, you will need a bit of space and some quiet. We need to be somewhere we can hear ourselves think, where our inner voice can make itself heard above the background noise of busyness and distraction. A good place to begin might be to pray the words of Psalm 139: 23-24: 'Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.' Then write as exhaustive a list as you possibly can of all the things you have been thinking about on a regular basis over the last while. You might find it helpful to do this in the form of a mind map or a spidergram.
Step two: give the mind a thorough scrub-down
With your list in front of you, ask these questions:
- What are the things I spend most time thinking about? Do these reflect the kind of values I would like to think I hold?
- How do I think about the people in my life? Am I critical or gracious? Am I envious or generous? Am I selfish or outwardly focussed?
- Do I have any thought habits that I feel unable to control? Are there places I let my mind wander that I know are wrong or harmful?
- Do I think more about the past, present or future?
- In what ways can I see the Holy Spirit impacting my thought-life?
As you answer these questions, talk to God about what you uncover. Ask for forgiveness, for help and for hope. The Christian life is an ongoing process of transformation. Paul's advice to the church in Ephesus remains the call for all of us who follow Christ: 'You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires, to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.' (Ephesians 4: 22-24)
Step three: make a plan for how to keep things spic and span
To some extent our thoughts are fed by exterior stimulation. If the spring clean has uncovered some thoughts you'd rather not be having, consider their source. Perhaps there is someone you spend time with whose conversation takes you to dark or sordid places. Maybe you need to see less of them. Are your social media habits making your mind unhealthy? What do you watch or read or listen to?
In the context of talking about casting out demons, Jesus told his disciples not just to empty a house of bad occupants but to fill it with good ones (Matthew 12:43-45). We are not aiming to have vacant skulls, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2). Where then should we redirect our thinking?
Ultimately, the purpose of a mental spring clean is to refocus ourselves on becoming the kind of people we were created in Christ to be. Jesus said that 'out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks' (Luke 6:45). Our thoughts are the vocalisation of our hearts, and a sort out is well worth the effort.
