I just love the line “From childhood’s hour”. You know what else I love? Words.
I found myself thinking of someone I love. There are so many so do not think it is someone it is not. Of course this made me think of the many. I was reminded of the word unrequited. That is a good word. It is not completely accurate but as far as we can throw the dice it will work for our purposes.
We accept rejection. We also reject acceptance. Isn’t that quite amusing? I think so.
We take every thought captive to make it obey Christ. –2 Corinthians 10:5
I find it most interesting the way we defeat ourselves. I am at the store and head to the check out. I count my items and realize there are not very many. This was merely a fleeting thought but it was a thought I recognized as having happened before. It was fleeting but I’ll expound because the mind does this even with fleeting thoughts. “What a loser you are. You don’t even have enough food in your basket to count for anything. Just think about the rest of your life and how this is all the food you will need because you will always be alone.” How am I to take that thought captive? I do not recall realizing this even occurred previously. Now I must take it captive and make it obey Christ.
I get in line. One of those “really good church people” gets in line behind me. They see me but pretend to not see me. You know you can just tell. Her and her husband never really liked you. You always knew when you said “hi” that they barely remembered you, if they remembered you at all. And in all honest she probably did not know you. You cannot say for sure if that makes it better or worse knowing the times you introduced yourself to the “fine” couple. Every thought captive.
Of course none of those things really matter in life. The amount of food in your basket has little to do with Christ. Whether or not someone you have introduced yourself to multiple times remembers you and acknowledges your existence is of no eternal consequence. Yet these thoughts combine to form a much larger problem.
You are reminded of your aloneness. This makes you lonely. Then depressed. So you see how important it is to take every thought captive. One errant thought leads to another and you are consumed.
To alleviate your fears, rest assured that I am not as bad off as this sounds. I was able to recognize the thought and catalog it for future reference. This will allow me to build procedures to help eliminate this specific one and ideally determine patterns of other thoughts of this nature. Of course they will only be replaced by new ones but we do what we can.