Cultivating Peace of Mind in the Midst of Turbulence
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We live and lead in turbulent times.
A pandemic, political conflict, war and threats of war, inflation, the hype machine of cable news where everything is sold as a crisis, social media echo chambers that ignite the flames of tribalism and animosity, the rising levels of anxiety and stress among our students and staff, conflict with parents over policies and protocols, and more all conspire to produce turbulent minds leading to unproductive and unhealthy stress.
Our turbulent minds are in sharp contrast to Jesus’ promise to give us peace.
I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)
Why do we so often lack the peace Jesus promised? Where is it? Why don’t we have it?
The key to understanding Jesus’ promise of peace is found in the context. He tells his disciples of their coming suffering and persecution but he also tells them that their sorrow and suffering will turn into joy that no one can take away. Jesus uses the illustration of childbirth to illustrate his point.
When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. (John 16:21)
Jesus does not sugarcoat the realities of life. He forthrightly tells his disciples that they will suffer and die cruel deaths. Hardly words that would lead to peace of mind!
But he goes on to explain that while we suffer in this life, there is something better and everlasting coming. To have the peace he is promising he tells them to adjust their focus.
This is not pie in the sky religious sentimentality. This is the hard reality for finding peace. Peace does not just happen—it is the result of a believing, disciplined mind.
This is not easy, which is why it is a discipline. Our natures, our culture, and our circumstances conspire to orient our focus on what is wrong rather than what is right. But, we have the tools to promote peace of mind for ourselves and for others.
Here are practices that can help us calm our minds in the midst of turbulence.
1. Practice the But —> Positive Technique
In his book The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work1, Jon Gordon suggests the But —>Positive Technique. It works like this. When you realize you are complaining, you add the word but and then add a positive thought or positive action.
If Snoopy can do it, so can we.
It was Thanksgiving and Charlie Brown was enjoying a feast with his family. Poor Snoopy wasn’t invited. Snoopy was all alone on his doghouse with dog food and a dog bone. He wasn’t a happy camper. But then he had a thought that changed everything. He thought, It could be worse. I could have been born a turkey.
I recently had occasion to practice this technique. I was scheduled on a non-stop flight to Texas to join a school evaluation team. This should have been a short uneventful trip. Instead, it was everything but. Here is how the events unfolded.
I was scheduled to leave at 12:50pm and arrive at 1:50pm in Dallas. Instead I arrived at 2:30am the next morning!
The Dallas airport was nearly deserted at 2:30 in the morning. I had a hard time finding the ride share platform let alone an Uber driver.
At a little after 3:00am I was standing at the hotel check-in desk. The computer was not working. I stood there, exhausted, for a long while before I was able to check in.
I finally entered my room looking forward to a much needed shower and rest. There was no hot water.
I was not in a good mood. I was exhausted, stressed and frustrated.
But, remembering that I had just read about the But —> Positive Technique, I had a choice: focus on the stress, weariness, and frustration or on the fact that I’d arrived safely and I had a warm bed to sleep in. I worked hard, it was not easy, to focus on the latter. It did help.
2. Let Go
This is a simple technique for promoting peace of mind. We live in a world in which we are immersed in a sea of information—much of it negative and about things over which we have little or no influence or control. Focusing on and fretting about things over which we have no control serves no purpose, it saps energy from things we could be influencing and controlling and it adds an undercurrent of unproductive stress to our lives.
The remedy for this is to adjust our focus on those things over which we have some influence or control.
To promote peace of mind we should focus on the things that we have the power to change and letting go of the things that are beyond our control. One way to do this is to reduce our consumption of cable news and social media. This is not to suggest that we should become uninformed and indifferent citizens. We are called to seek the welfare of the city (Jeremiah 29:7). This does not mean, however, that we should immerse ourselves in the “newstainment” “rage-machine” that is cable news, which is more interested in advertising dollars than serious journalism.
Spurgeon warned long ago not to allow the turbulence around us to trouble our minds and side track us from our work:
What have you and I to do with the times, except to serve our God in them? ... The benefit of railing at the times would be hard to discover, for railing does not mend them. What have you to do with the times? Do your own work. "Let God take care "for the times," let us take care of our calling and work. It is not for us to decide when and where we serve, only how we will serve.2
3. ReFocus
What we choose to focus on has a dramatic affect on our mental state.
And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful ... And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him (Colossians 3:15,17).
Notice Paul used the word let and rule. In other words, we choose what to focus on and in turn that focus determines our state of mind. What are we letting rule our hearts and minds?
Paul wrote those verses while in a Roman Prison. Roman prisons were designed to psychologically and physically torture a prisoner into confessing. They were filthy, poorly ventilated underground dungeons with no individual cells. Prisoners were crowded and chained together. There was little food in the prison because friends and family were expected to supply the prisoners’ needs.
It’s in this context that Paul writes to the Colossians. He is in a dark, filthy crowded dungeon surrounded by violent men, with little air, little light, and little food. What air there was must have been heavy with the stench of dirty sweaty men. Here is how Paul responds while in such a dreadful place:
And when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, “These men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city. They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.” The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods. And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks. About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them (Acts 16:19–25).
How is it that Paul was able to sing in such a place?
Paul gives us the answer. He tells us that the right way of living in this world is to focus on heavenly rather than earthly things, to focus on eternal blessings not our temporary circumstances and trials. And to focus on the good, not the bad.
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me including how Paul responded to dreadful circumstances—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you (Philippians 4:4–9).
And in Colossians 3:1–3 he writes:
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.
Turbulent minds are largely a result of being near-sighted.
If we are nearsighted we see things that are close up just fine but struggle seeing things that are further away. They look blurry. Our nearsightedness causes us to focus on earthly things – particularly our difficulties. They are clear but our heavenly destination and heavenly blessings are distance and blurry; they don’t capture our attention and focus as easily as our earthly troubles.
Nearsightedness is called myopia which the dictionary defines as “only thinking or caring about things that are happening now rather than things that are in the future. Myopia is narrow in perspective.
Both Jesus and Paul are telling us to be farsighted.
When we are farsighted, we see objects that are far away clearly but objects that are near appear blurry. In other words, the things of this world—the arena of personal experience—should not preoccupy us—we are to have an eternal and heavenly perspective that shapes how we respond to temporal trials, temptations, and tempests. We can cultivate peace of mind in ourselves and others when we refocus our attention on the transcendent and eternal rather than the immediate and temporary. This is hard but it is the key to peace.
Tim Keller, who has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, provides a profound example of adjusting one’s focus even in the midst of dying.
To our surprise and encouragement, Kathy and I have discovered that the less we attempt to make this world into a heaven, the more we are able to enjoy it.
No longer are we burdening it with demands impossible for it to fulfill. We have found that the simplest things—from sun on the water and flowers in the vase to our own embraces, sex, and conversation—bring more joy than ever. This has taken us by surprise.
This change was not an overnight revolution. As God’s reality dawns more on my heart, slowly and painfully and through many tears, the simplest pleasures of this world have become sources of daily happiness. It is only as I have become, for lack of a better term, more heavenly minded that I can see the material world for the astonishingly good divine gift that it is.3
If you want to calm the troubled waters of your mind, practice these life skills.
Practice the But —> Positive Technique.
Let go of what you cannot influence or control.
Refocus. Focus on the good, the excellent, what is right rather than what is wrong, and on the eternal rather than the temporal.
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Gordon, J. (2009). The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work. Wiley. ↩︎
Spurgeon, C. H. (2020). An all-round ministry. Counted Faithful. http://books.google.com/books?id=HN8IEAAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbsapi ↩︎
Keller, T. (2021). Growing My Faith in the Face of Death. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/tim-keller-growing-my-faith-face-death/618219 ↩︎