Emily Hatesohl

If you had told yourself ten years ago where you’d be today, would your old self believe it? Maybe you never expected to have a large family, but here you are. Maybe you never expected to be in the same old job, but here you are. Maybe you never expected to be in a nursing home, but here you are. Maybe you never expected to live in this city, or state, or even country. But whether we planned for it or not, here we are in this season of life. 

How often do you think about your thoughts? Hmm, let me think about that.

Thoughts matter a great deal to God. The Bible says, “the word of God is living and active, . . . discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). Psalm 139:2 says, “You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You discern my thoughts from afar.” Jesus says in Matthew 15:19 that “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” And we confess every week in church that we have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed.

Ten years ago, my mom and I were tying pieces of silky purple ribbon to the top of dozens of lovely wedding bulletins. It was a few weeks before my wedding, and she and I had had so much fun getting everything ready for the big day. After all the months of planning, it was starting to all come together. 

“Everything will be okay.”

“Don’t worry. Be happy.”

“Hakuna matata.”

These feel-good yet frothy phrases center around an issue that is near and dear to my sinful heart: worry.

My three-year-old and one-year-old had just thrown F5-level meltdowns for the first fifteen minutes of church (some of it in the pew, some of it in the nursery, some outside … you get the picture). We somehow rallied and stumbled back to our tornado of a pew.

We are now entering the one time of year in our world that is focused on being generous, giving back, and serving our neighbors. Bell ringers at stores, social media posts of friends serving meals at soup kitchens, and mailouts requesting donations during the “season of giving” are everywhere. Good works seem to be very visible this time of year. 

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17).

We’ve all felt the struggle. When you’re sitting in an awkward waiting room, when your kid asks you the same question over and over, when you’re tired at the end of a long day—we struggle to be present. We struggle against the distraction in our pockets, that glowing rectangle that can instantly fix our boredom. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else. Smartphones are seemingly essential in today’s world, but they also make it so hard to stay focused on the people around us. We are easily pulled away from reality, easily disinterested, and easily tempted to avoid giving someone our full attention.

In college, I attended a Bible study hosted at a pastor’s home. One week, he said our homework was to make a list of our biggest questions about faith, and we’d discuss them and seek answers in Scripture. So the following week, a group of twenty-year-olds bombarded him with all our burning questions. Can you guess which topic was most common?

It was a month or so after our second child was born, and my almost two-year-old decided he wanted to join the rest of the family and stop sleeping too. Fighting bedtime, skipping his nap, waking up at night, you name it. We were all feeling cranky and out of sorts.