Watch your thoughts. They affect your emotions, health and actions.

If you are going to make your days on earth count, you must first make it count in your thinking. It's just as important to work on your thinking as it is to work on every other thing important to you. Your thoughts affect your emotions, your health, your wealth and your relationships. The way you think is really important.

Life challenges can sometimes be overwhelming and stressing. Knowing how to overcome your life challenges is the surest way to reign in life. The challenge to overcome is not necessarily with the problems you face in life; it’s the way you see things and the way you perceive life.

Reality and perception can be quite confusing. Reality is defined as the true state of things - basically how things really are, whether we perceive them to be that way or not. But perception is how we see and interpret reality. In a lot of ways, perception shapes our individual reality. It has a potent influence on how we look at reality. This is why we should be mindful of how and why we perceive things the way we do.

Pause and think; why do you think about the things happening in your life the way you do? Why do you think that God has forsaken you? Why do you think there is nothing good about your life? Why do you think you are a failure?

The story of the 12 spies comes to mind any time we look at the subject of perception. “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” (Numbers 13:33b). This was the report of ten of the twelve spies to Moses and the Israelites on their scouting mission into the land of Canaan. Imagine the terror in their voices.

In fact, after that report of the 10 spies, the people of God wanted to go back to Egypt, the land of slavery and oppression. They didn’t care about God’s promise to them. They didn’t care anymore about whatever blessing that was before them because they saw themselves like grasshoppers.

As a man thinks in his heart, Proverbs 23:7 says, so is he. We are not different from what we think about ourselves in our hearts, and things aren’t different from how we perceive them in our hearts. How do you see your life and how do you see your situation? How you see your life and how you see happenings around you is very important.

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