Building a Better Me: Blue Steel

Our thoughts are Things! Everyday, One after another,one moment at a time, the hidden conversations that you hold in the privacy of your own mind are determining your destiny. It’s about building your life. It’s about becoming a better person. The reality is in life, one thing controls who we are, one fundamental activity. Your thought life, it controls almost every aspect of your life.

Romans 12:2, Proverbs 23:7, Proverbs 4:23, Job 3:25 anyone of these passages confirms the power of your thought life.Scripture speaks volumes about what goes on in your head. Romans 12:2 – It says – “don’t be conformed to the patterns of this life, but be transformed by renewing or changing your mind. Then you’ll be able to attest what is God’s will. His good, pleasing, and perfect will.” God has an intention for your life and it’s in 3 set stages – God allows the acceptable and the good. Just as better in the enemy of best, God would have us live at a level that is more than just acceptable or good. To get the most out of every day God is teaching us that WE have to retrain our mind and our feelings. It’s our responsibility, there is a facet of life where God says “this is exactly where I’ve destined you, this is the perfect will I have for your life; this is exactly who I want you to become; you’ve molded yourself into the expressed image I have for you.”

The battle wages in our human nature is an invisible one. We’re not always fighting an enemy we can see or feel and this battle will be won or lost in the mind. Proverbs teaches that as a person, whatever we think in our heart, that’s what we become (23:7). Whatever you internalize as an inward image of who you are, that is exactly what you’re going to become. As you stare in the mirror the person you see reflected back at you has nothing to do with who you are in the moment, but who you thought yourself into being days prior. There is always action steps taken to build a persona, to build the person you’ve become. In Job 3:25, we are warned that the things we intensely fear have a tendency to become reality. And Jesus repeatedly reminds us that what we receive will be the result of what we believe.

My wife is a perfect example of an outward expression of an inward persona. I watch my wife as she approaches any mirror in order to touch up her cosmetics. To see her apply makeup is extremely entertaining. She starts with a massive contortion of her face. Anytime she looks in the mirror it’s automatic. Her face just changes, her lips pucker, she squints her eyes, and displays her best “Blue Steel” pose. After she has ratcheted down her contorted face she applies the cosmetics. Her inward image is trying to escape as she puckers to apply the daily dose of lip gloss. She has an image in her heart of what she wants to look like, of who she wants to be. She manipulates this outside figure to look like what she has in her heart.

James sums it up like this – “a double minded man is broken, unstable in all his ways (1:8).” Being fake or being a poser is a broken way of living. Not being true to the inward perception of who you are is the biggest way to be a unstable individual. You will be striving to be something that the inward person, the person in your heart, in your thought life, can’t mimic.