How To Hack Your Mind’s Default Settings: Choose Love

Machines have default settings, lower than max output.  Minds also tend to default to basic, and need upkeep. Change your setting to love!

All machines have a default setting, a basic mode which allows the machine to keep working, but not at the desired level for top output. 

While our minds are not machines, they also tend to default to a low level when left to themselves. Our natures tend to skew to the negative, ending down at basic.

So we have to “hack” the settings.  We can’t allow the default to control our thoughts and actions.  We have to pursue a higher, positive level of action. The highest level of Christian living equals love. Choose love for your default setting!

Speaking of machines, I’m disgusted with my new printer.

I have to go in and change the printer tray settings every. single. time I want to print something.

If the default was set right the printer would do the right thing.

Like a happy robot.

It wouldn’t need that constant little tweak.

What’s your mind’s default setting?

Because, you know, our minds have a default.

Our thoughts have a default tray they feed from.

What’s in your tray?

A friend of ours was sick, in the last stages of the cancer that later took her life.

It was a type of cancer that gave her a lot of pain, pain that woke her up at night.  She could never sleep through, and she had to find a way through all those long, dark hours…

…To find a way to change the default of feeling on the constant physical pain and the mental conflict of blaming God for her pain.  The physical pain wouldn’t going away.  But her thoughts were free to go where she chose.

(Why do idle hours at night pass so much slower than in daylight??)

She refused to settle for the self-pity default.

Instead, she used “the imagination of the thoughts of her heart” to bless all the people she knew.

Night after night she got into an imaginary car and began to “drive” through her community.  When she “arrived” at the house of someone she knew, she put her foot on the brake and stopped the car.  In the night, in her thoughts, she prayed for the people in that house, lifting each one up to God and asking Him to bless them.

Then she lifted her foot off the brake and drove on to the next house.

And the next.

She went on to “visit” all her neighbors, and in spite of the pain, kept her heart focused in prayer.

(Do you see angels right now, floating from that car to every bed in those houses?)

And night after night, after “seeing” all her neighbors, she prayed for every grandmother, grandfather, parent, child and grandchild of her Church family.

Two trays: Wallow or Love.

Her default tray, after all that prayer, became love.

When a conversation teetered on the edge of gossip, she couldn’t take part. The imaginations of her heart couldn’t even go there after all those hours of prayer.  She had no judgment, only love.

Our minister used to say, “Pray for that one person you can’t stand, and you’ll end up loving them.”

When the default of our imaginations is prayer, we will only have love in our hearts.

If the imaginations of the thoughts of our hearts are stayed on Him,
our default setting is love.

Choose love – today and always – until it becomes your default setting.

Read other posts that talk about life choices and changing our mind’s default settings.