Thoughts

"My thoughts are not your thoughts". Isaiah the prophet speaks succint words on God's behalf to a world that did not pay heed, Despite a thousand years of the earth spinning on its axis, these words still dispel into the ether today, hardly heeded. (Isaiah 55:8).

Thoughts are the demonstration of the soul, the vignette of actions yet to be completed. We pay so much attention to our clothes, our job, our families, our bank balance. How much attention do we really pay to our thoughts.

The danger of not heeding Isaiah's warning is evidenced starkly in lives and stories of institutions gone awry, where a step sideways embarks them on a course that eventually heads tangentially away from a founding principle. Leaving them stranded on a desert island with no alternative recourse and wondering quizically how they got there in the first place. Like a set of rail tracks these thoughts carry our lives forward. All our industry remorselessly drives us headlong into the mist of our unclear destinations, unless we examine our thoughts.

All our sophistication and intelligent developement deludes us that thoughts originate in our minds. Jesus had raised a query when he asked the scribes and the Pharisees, the intelligentsia of that generation, "Why do you think evil in your hearts?" (Math 9:4). He was uncovering the key to the crucible of our mind, our heart attitude. In a way, our thoughts are a helpless mare, led by the bit and bridle of our attitudes, which actually originate from our heart condition. Guard your heart above all things, is another injunction that often falls by the wayside unheeded.

What do we do with all these injunctions. The key to all these was summed up by a very wise king, Solomon, who wrote that the the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. In all our accounting, planning, deliberating, dreaming and industry, let us seek hard after our giver of Life, the Lord, our God. This is our only compass, lodestar of a charted course that has any guarantee of avoiding shipwreck, sailing between the Scylla and Charibdis of good intention and horrific disaster.