Choosing Your Mind-set165

Choosing Your Mind-set165

Lead me by your truth and teach me, for you are the God who saves me. All day long I put my hope in you.

Psalm 25:5

You’ve seen it in the movies. The weary desert traveler, barely putting one foot in front of the other as he trudges over the sand dunes. It’s not long before he begins to see distant and flickering sources of water. But do they exist? Is his mind playing tricks on him? Perhaps it’s just a mirage.

A similar scene, minus the sand, is sometimes played out in our marriages. We cultivate a mind-set that causes us to literally see things that aren’t there. For example, some time ago I was convinced Leslie had borrowed a key I keep tucked away in one of my desk drawers. It opens an outside storage room and is rarely used. But on this particular day I couldn’t find the key. It wasn’t in its place.

“Leslie,” I asked, “did you take the key to the storage room?”

Before she answered I was certain she had. But she denied it. “No,” she replied. “I haven’t touched it.” But because I take special care to place the key in the back of my lower left-hand drawer, I was certain I did not remove it. If it was gone, it had to be her. But during the entire afternoon everything she did seemed suspicious—the tone of her voice, her gestures. I was convinced she had taken the key and either lost it or forgot. By the look in her eye, I sensed that even she was uncertain.

My mind-set changed in an instant, however, when that evening I found the key in the pocket of my jacket. I’d left it there from a previous trip to the storage room and had forgotten. Still, my mind was made up. I couldn’t have lost the key because I’m so conscientious, I said to myself. That’s the power of a mind-set. It will cause to you read facial expressions inaccurately, and you’ll conjure a scenario that doesn’t exist.

One of the reasons some people can’t find a solution to their problems is because they aren’t looking for one. They’ve developed a mind-set, in fact, that filters them out.

Husbands and wives around the world are divided into two camps when it comes to their attitudes: those who have a positive mind-set and those who have a negative mind-set. The negative person defends his attitudes, while the positive person looks beyond the current state of affairs and sees people and situations in terms of possibilities. The choice is theirs, or should we say, yours.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

—Anaïs Nin