Where we direct our attention has a direct impact on our life. When our attention is constantly focused on our affliction, the result is often discontentment.
So says Jeremiah Burroughs, the seventeenth-century puritan:
“Let not men and women pore too much upon their afflictions: that is, busy their thoughts too much to look down into their afflictions. You find many people, all of whose thoughts are taken up about what their crosses and afflictions are, they are altogether thinking and speaking of them. It is just with them as with a child who has a sore: his finger is always on the sore; so men’s and women’s thoughts are always on their afflictions. When they awake in the night their thoughts are on their afflictions, and when they converse with others—it may be even when they are praying to God—they are thinking of their afflictions. Oh, no marvel that you live a discontented life, if your thoughts are always poring over such things. You should rather labour to have your thoughts on those things that may comfort you…
When afflictions befall us we should not give way to having our thoughts continually upon them, but rather upon those things that may stir up our thankfulness to God for his mercies.”world.”[i]
[i] Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2013), 222–23.
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