Love Letter 4

Dear Daddy,

I was really struggling to get out of bed today to write you. I kept telling myself, "It does not matter. An invisible, intangible god. What evidence is there that he receives the letters?" But then I thought that these are the types of thoughts that precede an emotional downward spiral, which I want to avert. Plus, bedtop reasoning is notorious unlucid, so I decided I had better get out of bed.

I watched a video on Sunday that talked about renewing the mind. The speaker talked some about biology and how You designed my previous decisions to be stored in my brain as ACH-encoded patterns. Once in a pattern is encoded, it is very easy to follow that pattern again in the future. And the more I follow that pattern, the easier again it is to follow it. Thus, a model to understand "wrestling with the flesh" is that of struggling to make decisions contrary to ungodly, ACH-encoded patterns. If that was all there was to the model, it might be illuminative, but not hopeful. But there is another aspect where Your grace shines through. You design the brain to be self-monitoring and to notice long-term decisions consistently contrary to an existing the ACH-encoded pattern. When it notices this, it uses another chemical named GABA to block the old pattern so that the old pattern ceases to be the easy pattern. This is a biological example of what it means that You come along side of those who have chosen to obey you. Of course, obedience is the prerequisite; otherwise, the brain will not notice that having the old pattern around is inefficient and setup a GABA roadblock to it.

So, thank You for encoding Your grace into my biology, and thank You for allowing me to hear this picture of Your grace. Please now, enable me to recognize the old destructive patterns of thinking and obediently to think in a different way. I know that as I do this, You, my loving Father, will come alongside and help me.

Love,
Philip