If you have ever fed multiple children under the age of two, you can visualize the mess around our family table at breakfast time.
My twin toddlers will be perched in their high chairs, dropping more food on the floor than in their mouths and using their milk bottles like watercolour paints. My four-year-old daughter contains crumbs and spills to her seat but marks the start of her day with loud commentaries and very distracted eating.
The other morning, between slurps of coffee, I watched one of the twins use a spoon to flick his pancake onto the floor. The first time looked like an accident, so I picked it up for him. But by the third or fourth time of retrieving the pancake, this distraction, waste of food, and an increasing noise level from the other two was starting to make me cranky.
I was on the verge of swiftly confiscating the toddler’s spoon and his food when my four-year-old daughter looked over and we watched him flick a pancake onto the floor again.
“Mom, look!” She said excitedly. “He is flipping pancakes!”
The truth dawned on my foggy brain. My young son had watched me flip pancakes not 15 minutes earlier. He was trying to imitate me. He wasn’t throwing food; he was learning!
Truly, so many situations in my mere four years of parenthood have been positive or negative experiences not because of what was actually happening but where my mind was at the time. It’s my mindset, not the crumbs on the floor, that can determine if breakfast is a joyful family time or a painful reminder that we’re a bunch of sinners. It’s my mindset that turns getting out the door into a “ruined” morning full of arguments or an opportunity to embody the patience I’m teaching our children God has.
St. Paul wrote, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Renewing our minds isn’t a wishy-washy “think positive” idea or “manifesting” what we want to happen. It means grounding yourself in truth when your sleep deprived, stressed, distracted, or grieving brain is not quite in line.
For every ridiculous or challenging situation, there is a Bible verse that can set our hearts and minds straight. These kids are driving me crazy? “Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him.” (Ps 127:3)
I’m worried about our family’s future? “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (Phil 4:6)
Nobody sees or cares about what I do, so why am I doing it? “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” (Col 3:23-24)
It’s simple, practical, and profound. When Jesus was tempted in the desert, he turned to Scripture to beat back the devil. When we are tempted to anger, despair, or whatever, we can do likewise.
I’ve recently picked up a book that makes the case to bring back memory verses. The author, a Christian preacher named Robert J. Morgan, writes the easiest way to follow the command to love God with our minds is by “printing God’s word on the billboards of our psyches.”
“Scripture memory is our most powerful tool in changing our habits of thought and the internalized truths of God’s word keep us mentally healthy. It’s the greatest secret I know to personal resiliency. It molds our thoughts, and our thoughts shape our lives; for as we think in our hearts, so we are,” he writes.
Allowing Scripture verses to pop into our minds as easily as the lyrics to our favourite songs or the instructions for cooking our favourite meals is practical and can help orient our minds. But it is also deeply profound, for Bible verses are not just old stories and good ideas on a page.
The “Word” of God is “not a written and mute word, but incarnate and living,” says the Catechism. “If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, ‘open our minds to understand the Scriptures.’”
Renewing our minds with Scripture and painting memory verses on our minds involves a conversation, a relationship, with the God who wrote them.
“As we faithfully memorize and meditate on Scripture,” writes Morgan, “the Holy Spirit will gradually remold our minds until we see things and evaluate life increasingly from God’s point of view, and that’s the essence of wisdom.”
Having Bible verses handy (along with some time in prayer) can help us set our minds straight. The ability to recall Scripture in chaotic moments can help us reset our course as quickly as a GPS recalculates a route, or as easily as we can flip a pancake.
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