Thin Days

The hottest I’ve ever been was in Las Vegas. In August. I walked through the airport, and was freezing. For my life, I couldn’t understand why they felt the need to keep that place so cold. And then I stepped outside.

When the airport doors opened, I was smacked in the face by a blanket of heat. 106 degrees in “dry heat” feels like a weighted blanket.

For many of us, this is what the mind can feel like.

I call these thick days.

The thick days are the ones when the gap between our heads and hearts seems to be the furthest. These are days when our minds can feel like an endless loop replaying our failures and inadequacies.

I know I’m not alone, so I am saying us and our. On the worst days, many of us struggle to be or feel loved by anyone, including God.

In his book Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer makes a poignant point:

As a general rule, we become more loving by experiencing love, not by hearing about it in a lecture or reading about it in a book. Psychologists’ basic rule of thumb is that we are loving to the degree that we have been loved. This is why it’s so much easier for those who were well loved by their parents or caregivers in their early years to give and receive love as adults. That said, no family of origin is healthy enough to transform us into the kind of love we see in Jesus, and no family is dysfunctional enough to keep us from becoming people of love in Jesus. All of us have the potential to grow and mature into people of agape. But to do so, we have to experience the love of God (pg. 48)

We want that.

We want what Paul prayed for the Ephesians:

For this reason I kneel before the Father 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. 16 I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, 17 and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, 19 and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (3:14-19 CSB).

The question has always been, how do we get that?

The answer has always been we become disciples of the King.

As disciples, we are given new identities. Colossians 1:21-22 says

Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds as expressed in your evil actions. 22 But now he has reconciled you by his physical body through his death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him—(CSB).

For the minds that never stop repeating the lies. For the minds that never feel good enough. For the minds that think they are unlovable and unforgivable, Jesus says you are holy, faultless, and blameless.

This is in stark contrast to who we once were. All of the things of the past may be true. History may be littered with the most egregious of sins, but upon trusting in Jesus, we are something else.

2 Corinthians 5 says it this way: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!

The Greek word there for new is καινός (kainos).

New not in time or origin but in nature and quality. Renewed. Jesus renews us. We are not crumpled up and thrown away because of our sins; we are redeemed for his glory.

Sometimes, the lies plaguing us make it impossible to see who we are now. As Christians, our hope is always a future hope, but we must live in the present reality that we are made new.

We used to be marked by sin, but we are not today. Today, we are marked by Jesus's blood and the power of his resurrection.

There is a war being waged in our minds. The enemy's lies can feel so loud that they drown out what is true.

In his book Live No Lies, John Mark Comer offers a great practice: He encourages us to write down the lies and then write the truth next to them. Sometimes, we need to see what is true when the voice is too loud to cut through.

This practice allows us to rewire our minds; while we may not fully experience it here, we can get a taste. Romans 12:2 tells us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

The truth renews our minds, transforming us to live with others.

As we experience more of this life, we will experience more thin days. Those are the days when the gap between the head and the heart is small. Those are the days when we feel God's grace in our lives.

I know for some of you reading this, the darkness and fog have been so thick for so long that it doesn’t feel like it can ever truly end. I’m reminded of Psalm 30, which says that weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

Those mornings are the thin days. We pray for more and more of those.

Recs on this subject: