Our internal monologues

A man named Troy wrote an appreciation for his friend that's been on my mind since I heard it on Thanksgiving: "Thank you for being a person in whom the believer always wins the argument."

We all have internal dialogues all the time. Those poor souls you see muttering to themselves on heating grates in the city are only different in that they have lost the cultural censors the rest of us maintain.

Or maybe it's inaccurate to talk about an internal dialogue. It seems to me we have monologues, at least I. And it's the wrong voice that's doing all the talking. (I think of the lizard on the man's shoulder in Lewis' The Great Divorce.)

Troy's toast to his friend struck me because I am in the midst of a breakthrough myself --- pulling out of a lifelong mental habit (that's what it is) of "protecting" myself from falling by staying down on the ground. Ray Stedman wrote in Authentic Christianity that the first mark of an authentic life in Christ is "unquenchable optimism."

The world has a thousand solid arguments, and rafts of statistics, for why you can't change, why marriage is always a disappointment, and why you'd better settle for getting by rather than knowing joy. I'm plugging my ears to it all and listening to the Bible. "Stop doubting and believe" (John 20:27).