09/06/2026
About 7 years ago, Orlando and I signed up for one of those muddy endurance races. Tough Mudder is an obstacle course race series, roughly 5-6 km long, featuring a bunch of physical challenges. Some of the more memorable stations involve running through hanging wires that deliver little electric shocks, plunging into a dumpster full of ice water, and sprinting up a curved, slippery quarter-pipe. Going in, I was nervous, I didn’t know what to expect, and a back injury had me approaching the whole thing timidly. At the start line, they fully hype you up: loud music pumping, excited runners, people in costumes, chants rippling through the crowd. Then you start running, and before long you hit the first station. Then the next. And the next. Run, climb, crawl, run again, a seemingly never-ending cycle of exhaustion.
But what scared me more than the course itself was the anxious anticipation. Was it my imagination, or was each station harder than the last? The way our minds can inflate something into far more than it actually is can be debilitating. 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 reminds us “Although we live in the world, we don’t fight our battles with human methods. Our weapons that we fight with aren’t human, but instead they are powered by God for the destruction of fortresses. They destroy arguments, and every defense that is raised up to oppose the knowledge of God. They capture every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
So how do we take every thought captive? How do we stop a spiral of ruminating worry before it keeps us up at night? We might start by asking ourselves: Is this true? Is this thought from God, or is it fear? Would I let a friend believe this about themselves?
Many of us are entering a season of new beginnings, September brings new classrooms, new jobs, new teachers, new routines. When anxiety starts creeping in and threatens to take over your mind, remember that Jesus is present, and He defeats anything that isn’t of God. Taking a thought captive is not pretending that everything is fine and dandy, it is stopping every anxious thought from having a permanent spot in your mind without being checked against what is true. What is one thought you need to stop in its tracks today, instead of letting it sit in your mind unchecked? Name it. Write it down. Surrender it to Jesus. Here’s some Scripture to carry with you into whatever battle you’re facing this season: Psalm 94: 19, Lamentations 3:22-23, Philippians 4:8, Proverbs 3:5-6, Isaiah 55:8-9, Psalm 18:2, Isaiah 41:10.
~ from Pastor Liz’s heart
