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The mind is the glue that holds our life together. It is the most treasured possession that God has given to mankind. A little of disorder in the mind will affect the overall life of an individual. Around the world people suffer from diverse ailments, however the man who suffers from mental disorder is the one that I pity the most. The most painful thing about a man who suffers from mental disorder is the lack of awareness that he has mental disorder- in his own little world everything is fine. This further makes it difficult to administer help to such a man. A man who is suffering from Malaria, knows that he is sick, he can visit the doctor and describe his pain to the doctor and accept whatever medication that the doctor prescribes for him. Such a man can keep a schedule to take the prescribed medication, the reason being that he is aware that he is sick and needs to recover. A man with mental disorder is a special case, he is not aware that he is sick. If you are to try to take him to the hospital, he may run away not because he does not want to get better, but he is not aware of his condition. A man with a mental disorder fights the very thing that looks to help him. What a tragedy! This has become the greatest challenge that one faces when addressing people concerning mindset problems. Most people will not heed because they think they do not need the help. The bible says in the book of James 1 vs 5 that “If anyone of you lacks wisdom, let him ask from God.” The first thing is not asking for wisdom but admitting that you lack it. Your journey of mind transformation does not start when you begin to seek wisdom. It starts with awareness, that you lack wisdom, hence you need to seek it.
If you take a mentally disordered person and you bath him and give him nice clothes, you will need to repeat the process again everyday. This is because the filth he has is not emanating from his environment but his mind. So, the first thing is to bath and clean his mind before improving his outward appearance. The bible says Jesus met a man who had a legion of demons. He had run away from home and was living in graveyards. He would walk naked. Jesus casted out the demon and people saw the man now smartly dressed. He did not start by dressing him outwardly but he first addressed the thing that made him naked in the first place. We must dress the mind before we dress the body, for the nakedness’ of our body and lives, is a reflection of the state of our minds.
The first step in bringing about change is changing our mind and the way we reason and think. We must have a positive mindset over success and believe that we are called to live a life of abundance. Any change made outside without the mind being involved is a waste of time. It took Moses a short amount of time to take the children of Israel out of Egypt, but it took him forty years to take Egypt out of their minds. In their journey to Canaan, they would always talk about the fish and the garlic they ate in Egypt, Pharaoh was no longer their problem, but their very thoughts tangled them with memories of Egypt and delayed realizing their promised land. Some of us we are just a positive mindset away towards realizing our biggest of dreams. The bible in Luke 15 vs 11-19 talks of a man who left his father’s house. The bible says that he started living with pigs and wanting to eat what the swine ate. I like vs 17 which says, “When he came to himself,” meaning when he came to his senses. He changed his mind. He said to himself it cannot be me; I cannot eat like this and I cannot wear such type of clothes. There is a better place. All this was happening in his mind. The change you need is in your mind before you drive that dream car, build that house or achieve that dream, you need first to come to your senses, to have the mind of God. You first drive a car in your mind before you physically have it. Although he needed food and shelter, the first change that occurred in his life was not the food or shelter, but it was the change of mind. Sometimes you do not need new clothes to become a better person, you need a change of mind, Such change of mind ushers you into a healthier future. The young man was excited because he knew that if his senses were back, everything was going to be ok.
When he came to his senses, he said “I will rise and go.” The father did not come and fetch him. The very change of mind energized the young man to walk towards his place of abundance-The Fathers House. One of the visible and notable signs that shows that a man now has transformed his mind, is the willingness and the ability to walk away from places that do not promote growth, peace and sanity. The young man left the place of swine and journeyed towards his father’s house. You need to embark on such a journey and leave some places. Some of these places are friends. If we spend most of our time around negative people, people that do not believe in the beauty of tomorrow, people with minds that are consumed by fear then we need to change that place. We need to be in places where we find people that touch our minds positively. People that can challenge us and not around folks that always talk and blame the government for their misfortunes. Try to be with people that have developed a way of thinking better than yours and the odds are that you will sway to that direction.
As a young person be in places that challenges your thinking patterns, even If you stay in squatter camps, make time to visit the low-density suburbs and look at how they built their houses and you will surely be challenged. Your mind will feel the need to reach better things. Do not fence yourself in a stagnant environment. Sometimes we do not think far because we have not seen much. The more we expose ourselves to better things, the more our mindset is upgraded. It is time to move away from certain places and see how others are doing it. It helps in challenging our mind. A challenged mind is a developing mind.
When we do not visualize things greater than us, we can never think greater than ourselves, whereas true success comes when we think and reason beyond our environment and surroundings. In the mind transformation process, we need to cultivate the culture of reading, unlearning old things and learning new things. We have heard from old that poverty is the will of God, but that is not it. It is time we exercise discipline on what we allow our minds to feeds on, for what we feeds our minds with affect both the pace and direction of our mind’s growth. Some minds are suffering from malnutrition. If you have a disease caused by malnutrition, you cannot perform as expected. If we ask you to run for five minutes, you can only do half of it because you are not healthy and strong. This is the same with the mind. If your mind is sick, it cannot perform as expected. The times you expect it to work for you, it cannot because it is not healthy and strong, and which then brings frustration.
It is time we take meticulous care of our mind. It is the primary conveyance that God has given us to use in travelling into the future and take charge of our lives. In my short experience as a young man I have discovered that the number one food for the mind is the WORD OF GOD, the bible. Read, study, and meditate on it day and night and it will develop your mind. It is a balanced diet. You do not get healthy by eating a special type of food once a week but unquestionably you can get healthy by eating standard food every day and at the right time. In the same way, you do not change your mind by just dedicating one day of your life to read the word, but surely you can change your mind by taking small portions daily. What matters is not the amount of information you read but the consistency in which you take the information. In whatever approach you take to develop your mind, consistency is key. Consistency shapes, grows, and builds.