Battle Ready by Kelly BalarieSample

Day One: Your MindPhone

Consider your mind as a smartphone. Let’s call it your MindPhone. It is what you carry with you, what you use to keep your day straight, what gives you information, what dictates the kind of life you want to live. It also is programmable, compartmentalized, and maintained almost entirely by you. Imagine that. You are the boss of it. 

Now, what may surprise you is, without realizing it—over many years—you’ve customized your MindPhone. You’ve put messages into it. Messages from the world, TV, friends, and family; God’s truths; labels from the past; demands of others; inner thoughts and repetitive phrases; things you see and ideas you have; perceptions both real and unreal; and world outlooks. 

What you feed your mind matters. You see, feedings turn into your feelings: a sense of being overwhelmed because you’ve got thirty text messages, anxiety after hanging out with critical friends, a wavering belief in God because you don’t spend time with Him. 

This is a silent epidemic: we fail to mind our mind. Instead, we walk around in a haphazard mess of busyness, disorganization, and fast-paced happenings, forgetting where we placed what matters most. Yet what we search for is right in our back pocket, waiting to be renewed. 

Our mind is the MindPhone we keep misplacing. Even more, our thoughts are usually spam. Seriously. We have no filter. Piled high and overloaded, our mind mailbox gets filled with icky, old, negative, and unproductive messages. It doesn’t have to be this way. Just because a message comes in doesn’t mean we have to keep it. 

If you pay no attention to your MindPhone, it won’t do much. Great, untapped potential will go largely unused. The mind of Christ, the precious gift Jesus gave, won’t incredibly change your life. And the Word of God likely won’t become the words you live by.

In other words, at the end of the day, you’ll feel inside: I’ve blown it. 

Maybe this is precisely how you feel right now—like you’ve blown it or used your mind against yourself. That’s okay. Starting now, things are about to change. 

We are going to dust off our MindPhone to discover what it was made for, what it can do, and what God says it is all about.

What messages about yourself go through your mind most often? Where do those messages come from?

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