Don’t Leave Your Soul On Its Own
By Michael Kelley
There are certain things you can control… or at least you can try to. What you eat? You can control that. How fast you choose to drive? Again, you can control that. What you choose to watch? Once again, that’s within your control.
But there are many things - most things really - that no matter how hard you try you just cannot control. You can choose what you eat, but you can’t choose whether or not you get sick. You can choose how fast you drive, but you can’t choose how fast or recklessly the other person does. You can choose what to watch, but you can’t choose what movies are being made.
And here’s another thing you really can’t control - your feelings. Oh, we can try to control them, but in the end, we are going to feel what we feel. And many times, we feel things that don’t match what we know we should feel.
We might feel sad for no good reason. Conversely, we might feel happy even though things seem to be going badly in our lives. Things sometimes just pop into our heads, changing our disposition, and we don’t know where they came from. But just because we can’t control those things doesn’t mean we have to be subject to them.
The book of Lamentations embraces this dynamic. Written in a time of great sorrow and destruction, the prophet Jeremiah looked around him at what had become of God’s chosen people. Their land had been invaded. Their city destroyed. The temple of God ransacked. All seemed to be hopeless. And here is how Jeremiah reflected on it:
I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him” (Lam. 3:19-24).
There are two dynamics in this passage. First of all, Jeremiah remembers all that has happened to him and his people. Perhaps he woke up one day, and the first thing that popped into his mind was everything wrong with the world around him. He didn’t plan it; he couldn’t control it; he just remembered. He felt. And his soul was downcast. But it didn’t stop there.
That first dynamic is passive; Jeremiah’s soul was downcast. He didn’t cause or direct or point it toward being downcast - it just… was. And if he did nothing about it, then his soul would have remained in that condition. But that’s when things changed, because the second dynamic is not passive; it’s active.
How did Jeremiah respond? He didn’t leave his soul on its own. He took action upon himself. While his soul was downcast, Jeremiah actively chose to call something else to mind. He directed himself to remember the faithfulness and compassion of the Lord.
This is a powerful principle for us: We cannot leave our souls on their own. If we do, we are assuming a passive posture. What we need instead is to actively remind ourselves of what we know to be true, even if we don’t feel it to be true.
Friends, perhaps today you had something similar pop into your mind. Into your heart. You look around you and see sadness. Discouragement. All the reasons to question God’s presence and active love. But don’t leave your soul on its own. Talk to it. Point it. Direct it.
Be active when it comes to your own soul.
Michael Kelley is a husband, father of three, author, and speaker from Nashville, TN. His latest book is a year-long family devotional guide called The Whole Story for the Whole Family. Find his personal blog at michaelkelley.co.
