One of the things about being a single parent – and I’d imagine a single adult – is that at home you don’t have any other voices (adult voices anyway) to counter your internal dialogue. In my case, at home I’ve got my precious people and their feedback is best described as plenty of, “I love you mom(my),” mixed with a little, “She looked funny at me!” and a little, “He ate part of my sandwich,” and a little “Wanna play Uno?” That’s a mixture of love with a little need for diplomacy and card games. Combined with my calls for homework, baths, and laundry, these can often be the exchanges that dominate my day. And my internal conversations.
You know? Those things we tell ourselves. Those internal dialogues where we either beat ourselves up when things don’t go well, pump ourselves up before a big meeting, or internally predict when the next shoe will fall in life. Am I the only one that, despite being really, really optimistic for everyone else, struggles with being my own internal cheerleader? And, when there is no other adult in the house to share ideas with and get feedback from, that struggle becomes even more real for me.
Add to it all the reality that I can be a worrier…and a people pleaser. That combo leaves me rethinking and analyzing interactions from my day long into the evening. And sometimes that dialogue gets me entirely off track with who I am in and what I know about God.
Paul warned the Corinthians of this temptation.
“We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
2 Corinthians 10:5
The “arguments” and “pretension” that is not coming from the “knowledge of God” for me is much more likely the whisper of the evil one using me to tear my own self down. And it’s an internal dialogue I have to actively fight through prayer and time in the word growing my own familiarity with the true knowledge of who God is.
This growing in the knowledge of God is what we’re called to do in Romans.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing, and perfect will.”
Romans 12:2
The renewing of my mind – ongoing renewal – is the aim of my prayers these days. In this busy, crazy life navigating as the sole leader of this pack of three, my only ability to discern God’s will for my family will come from allowing my mind to be transformed by spending time getting to know God on a deeper and deeper level. Only then will my internal dialogues stop preventing me from growing in that knowledge.
