Visualizing God, Giving Courage, Fear Doesn't Exist In Reality
Newsletter #13 on April 22, 2023.
Discipleship // Leadership // Mental Performance. The best from this week.
DISCIPLESHIP
“As I have matured, my experience with prayer has changed. The picture in my mind has become one of a Heavenly Father who is close by, who is bathed in a bright light, and who knows me perfectly."
Henry B. Eyring
In today’s world of nauseating, constant distraction, meaningful prayer can seem elusive. Research has shown that over the past couple of decades people’s attention spans have shrunk significantly. The negative effects of shorter attention spans are wide-ranging, but maybe nowhere is it as (spiritually) deadly as with how it affects prayer.
C.S. Lewis warned of distraction as one of the adversary’s most formidable attacks against us. Particularly with prayer. Here is a brief excerpt from The Screwtape Letters, where the character speaking is one of "Satan’s minions" as President Nelson calls them.
“He (God) is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position … and to human animals on their knees. He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion. But even if He (God) defeats your first attempt at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon. The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If you look into your patient’s mind when he is praying, you will not find that. If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients … I have known cases where what the patient called his “God” was actually located — up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head ... But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it — to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him … For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers ‘Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be’, our situation is, for the moment, desperate.”
What do you see when you pray? Do you see your Heavenly Father, bathed in a bright light, with arms open, excited to communicate with us? Or do you see the corner of your bedroom ceiling? Maybe your mind is racing with all the distractions from the day.
Maybe your attention span is too short to even give God 1 minute of meaningful communication.
When you pray, do you see Heavenly Father? Joseph Smith gave it his best shot at describing His physical appearance: “His eyes were as a flame of fire; the hair of his head was white like the pure snow; his countenance shone above the brightness of the sun; and his voice was as the sound of the rushing of great waters.”
Just think of it, that is the God who wants you to know Him as intimately as He knows you. That is the Being who wants more than anything, to be your friend. To be the first person you turn to. In joy, in sadness, in grief, in excitement. Perfection personified wants imperfect you, for a very simple reason: He loves you.
What a missed opportunity it is to kneel down and pray but not even realize Who you get the privilege of communicating with.
LEADERSHIP
“Encourage: To give courage to.”
Webster's 1828 Dictionary
The prefix “en” means “to put into”. You can't give something that you don't have. Thus, to encourage is to put your courage into someone else. To encourage, one must first possess courage.
You can't encourage others if you don't have courage yourself. You can try. But it doesn't work.
Think of what it means to enlighten someone. You are putting light into them. How can you possibly enlighten unless you are pulling from your own light? It’s impossible.
The principle is the same. If someone who lacks courage attempts to encourage, it will fall flat. In contrast, when you are in the presence of somebody who has real courage, you can feel it. It emanates from them. It's palpable. When they speak to you, when they encourage you, you can feel it. It penetrates.
Moroni, commenting on the Lord showing his hand to Moriancumer, said, “And because of the knowledge of this man he could not be kept from beholding within the veil.”
When a leader, filled with passion, courage, and belief, speaks sincere words of encouragement to somebody, those words have a similar effect. They can’t be kept from within the veil of the receiver's mind and heart. Words like that, spoken by a leader like that, are felt every time. Those are the words that will be cherished and remembered for a lifetime.
Encouragement is free to give, but it could be of infinite worth to the person receiving it.
MENTAL PERFORMANCE
“What is fear? Can you show me fear? It’s not possible, is it? We can only show the symptoms of fear, we cannot show fear itself. Fear doesn’t exist in reality. It lives in our minds, in the abstract … Fear only exists in our thoughts of what may or may not happen in the future … When we allow our minds to worry about the future, we open the door to fear.”
Craig Manning, Ph.D
A simple, practical way to calm the fear you’re having: stop ruminating on the future.
Yes, you need to think about and plan for your future. But don’t do it mindlessly. Be intentional. Treat it like an appointment.
If you need to think about the future, schedule it. Plan it for a specific date and time in your calendar. And go into the appointment how you’d go into a date. You’re prepared, you’re in a positive mindset, and you’re ready to have a great time.
Otherwise, you're likely to leave the present moment way too often. And when you do leave, your thoughts of the future are likely to drift into the realm of fear and negativity.
You need to think about your future, but you can’t allow yourself to do so mindlessly. Otherwise, you open yourself up to the risk of fear dominating your thoughts of the future.
Disciple-Leadership: Jesus-led. Lead like Jesus.
Aaron @ The Disciple-Leader