I discovered an unattractive feature about myself the other day: my issues (and I have plenty of them) tend to run together. Do yours?

I noticed that I can be stressed out or discouraged about something trivial, and then if I’m not careful, it can attract all of my other discouragements and create a snowball effect that overwhelms me, and ruins my peace and confidence. On the really bad days a minor bump in the road can remind me of all of my prior crashes.

It’s sort of like that word association exercise where you find yourself mulling over an odd topic, so you backtrack your thought life to see what string of thoughts led you to ponder In-N-Out burgers in the middle of a wedding (please tell me you do this sort of thing too). Sometimes I can backtrack my thoughts and discover that my sinking began when something small touched on one of my issues that touched on another one that rallied the rest of them to stage a coup.

Wisdom would probably tell us to arrest and isolate the initial thought before we allow it to take too deep of a root in our soul. A bad day doesn’t mean that we’re still in a bad season some bad news doesn’t mean that all hope is lost, and one bummer doesn’t have to automatically suck us back in to all of our hurts, discouragements, and fears.