Think Again!

122 • Think Again: Transformation That Yields a Return on God’s Investment

you, but in your heart, you may feel like you disappoint God and he simply tolerates you. You wish you could believe what the Bible says about his love for you, but instead you feel distant from God. Write Playfully is the step that harmonizes the truth with your feelings, eliminating cognitive dissonance. This step is important because faith grows as you bring emotions into alignment with truth. Faith is having rock-solid confidence that what the Bible says is true. Faith is the perfect blending of truth and feelings. According to Heb. 11.1, faith is the assurance (feelings) of things hoped for (truth), the conviction (feelings) of things not seen (truth). If you have cognitive dissonance, you don’t have faith. So it is important to wrestle through the step of Write Playfully until you comfortably reconcile feelings with truth. Self-help Solutions The self-help industry ignores cognitive dissonance by suggesting people can simply “visualize” or “verbalize” a desired outcome into existence. In other words, just “seeing it” or “saying it” will make it come true. The problem with this theory is that people may visualize and verbalize with all their heart, but deep down they don’t really believe it will ever happen. Research shows the “see it-say it” approach often makes people feel worse when their dreams do not come to fruition. 66 Part of the problem with this approach is that it leaves the Holy Spirit out of the equation, placing all the burden on you to visualize situations into existence. The way to overcome cognitive dissonance is to ask the Spirit to reconcile what you feel against what God says is true. Having uncovered your beliefs, you can cross-examine them, so lies can be put down. You can interrogate your feelings against Scripture. Regardless of how you feel, you can use truth like a thermostat, setting the temperature to control your reactions to situations. By affirming