CHOICE - The Space Between Thoughts

Woman sat thinking on top of a mountain

Recently I was listening to a podcast when I heard this quote:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In that response lies our growth and our freedom”

It is a quote by Victor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and renowned neurologist & psychiatrist.

When I heard the quote it sent shivers down my spine. I was half listening to the podcast on my walk to work, paying attention to the natural beauty of the canal, but when I heard this quote it gripped me. I knew that it had power, that it resonated with where I was.

When we are exposed to a stimulus, we are immediately struck by a sea of emotions and thoughts, brought on by all of our life experiences, as well as the hard-wiring in our genes.

These emotions and thoughts lead us to want a particular response, to react in a certain way; whether that is to run or hide, or strike back, or hug someone, or buy a donut.

However before we come to this action, we have a moment, a moment where we can choose what that response is.

Whether it is going to be destructive or redemptive.
Whether it will sow discord or peace.
Whether it will give death or life.

As followers of Christ, when we are faced with this choice we know what path we must choose. It must be the path that honours the God image within us, the path that makes the world a little brighter.

As you go about your day today, may you pause between stimulus and response, may you find the path that gives life, and may you walk it.


What opportunities can you think of to catch these thoughts and make powerful decisions? I would love to know what you come up with, leave a comment below.

 Image Credit
Denys Nevozhai

Comments

Post a Comment

* indicates required

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the f...
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in ...
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich com...
Keep reading