Choosing a Cheerful Heart
We are so excited to have a guest blogger join us today! Thank you Sarah Geringer for joining us today at The Fronchard!! We have no doubt you will be blessed by her words.
Make sure you follow her on social media and check out her website to see the incredible ways she is teaching others about God's love for them!
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Proverbs 17:22 - a cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.
As a melancholy person by nature, I admit I don’t always have a cheerful heart.
I’ve had a crushed spirit due to many problems – being a child of divorce, emotional abuse, a difficult marriage, toxic relationships, and run-of-the-mill ups and downs. These problems dried me up for decades.
Yet God has taught me how to have a more cheerful heart through Christian meditation, and I’m passionate about helping others learn the value of it.
I didn’t realize I was meditating on God’s Word when I started doing it back in 2003. That year, I purchased a One Year Bible with the goal of reading through it front to back for the first time ever. The editors put one verse in bold in each daily reading. I took that as a cue to think deeply about the verse throughout the day.
I put the verse through several filters: 1) What does this verse tell me about God? 2) What does this verse tell me about how I need to live? 3) What does this verse tell me about how I should treat others? These simple questions helped me think more deeply about the Bible truth.
In just a few short weeks, my thought life was revolutionized. Yes, I was still a victim of hard things, some beyond my control. But what I could control was the way I thought about those hard things.
God’s Word affirmed my crushed spirit. It helped me admit I had let my attitude and the actions of others have too much influence over my life. God’s truth did not ignore my problems. But it showed me the plain fact that if I dwelled on the hard things, I would dry up inside, all the way down to my bones.
Meditating on God’s Word each day was the best medicine I began using in my healing journey. God also provided healing medicine through five years of Christian counseling, involvement with small groups at my church and many Christian books. These tools helped revive my crushed spirit and opened the pathway to a cheerful heart.
In recent years, people who don’t know my full backstory have said, “You’re always so optimistic. You look for the bright side of things.” I see this as proof positive of God’s transformation in my thought life because others can see it in me. With a few minutes of daily meditation on God’s Word, I’ve learned to hold onto hope, joy and peace no matter my circumstances.
I’ll always be a natural melancholy. But I’ve learned to choose a cheerful heart to avoid getting bogged down by the hard things in life. This transformation has only been possible with God’s help. God can transform you in this same way.
A challenge for you: Choose a verse on joy or hope. Then meditate on it for three minutes each day for one month, putting it through the three filters I mentioned above. I guarantee that within 30 days, God will help you choose a cheerful heart through the power of his Word.
Sarah Geringer is a speaker, podcaster, artist and author of Transforming Your Thought Life: Christian Meditation in Focus and three self-published books. A teen girl version of Transforming Your Thought Life will be published in fall 2021.
She is on the devotional writing teams for Proverbs 31 Ministries, A Wife Like Me, Devotable, Hope-Full Living, Kingdom Edge Magazine and Woman 2 Woman Ministries.
When she’s not reading over 100 books per year, Sarah enjoys painting, baking, gardening and playing the flute. Her daily must-haves are hot tea, dark chocolate, and fresh flowers.
She lives in southeast Missouri with her husband and three children. Sarah writes and speaks about finding peace in God’s Word at sarahgeringer.com.
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