Janine Mason (00:01.176)
Hi, and welcome to the conversation. You're with Janine Mason and the Heaven in Business podcast. We were talking about the messy intersection between faith, family and business. I wanna talk to you today about where your focus is, where you spend your time inside your mind, the place that nobody else sees but has such a huge impact on everything that you do. And I rediscovered recently just how important that is by doing it all wrong, to be honest. And so I wanted to share
my mess up with you in the hopes that you'll learn something from it and do better for yourself. I know that when I start to get involved with all the negative self talk, all the negative meditation inside my mind, what it does is it undermines my hope, it undermines my faith, and it takes me to a place where I'm not ready to tackle the world. When we were living in California, we underwent a wildfire and we were outside of the house, we were evacuated.
and we spent three months in a different place. And then when we moved back home and I started to walk our neighborhood again, what I very quickly discovered by that stage there had been some rain and so the worst of the black soot on every surface was gone. But of course, all the burned trees were still there. And so everywhere that you looked up on the hills were the charred remains of trees.
And then if you looked a little closer, you could start to see the regrowth underneath. And so what happened is that the tops of some bushes and trees would totally burn, but the roots were still there. So once you got some water happening, they would start to regrow. And so every day I had to choose where I would look. I could look at the devastation of our once beautiful neighborhood that was full of trees, or I could, and now it's
and that's just ugly and it sort of has the stench of death and destruction. Or I could look at the regrowth and there was beautiful wildflowers and there's beautiful green new growth. And it was such a tangible reminder of what the Bible talks to us about. Set your mind on things above it says in Colossians 3.2. And so I learned that lesson pretty well and I feel like in the last few years I've done a lot better job of
Janine Mason (02:23.347)
setting my mind on things above, whatever is noble Philippians tells us, whatever is good, whatever is true, whatever is lovely, think about those things. And I feel like I'd been doing a great job of thinking on the goodness of the Lord rather than dwelling on all the negative things until I came up with a new problem. I don't know about you, but many of my friends, a lot of my family are just facing crazy hardships at the moment.
I keep getting messages from my home, from my brothers telling me about my parents who are elderly now, the one that's had the fall, the other one that split open their leg. I got a text recently, a message recently saying that your mother has ripped open her leg. They think she struck an artery. We'll give you more details soon. And even in the midst of all the craziness, all the challenging things that I was hearing,
I was able simply to come to the Lord, say, hey, I'm concerned. I'm feeling scared. I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling whatever. And I'm laying it in your lap. I'm trusting you with it. And then carry on until I came to this new challenge. And the difference with this new challenge as I reflected back afterwards was I was forced to meditate on it. Why were you forced to meditate on it? Because I actually had to prepare to talk to somebody else about this thing.
And so as I started to prepare for my meeting and I'm focused on this new challenge, what happened was I started to reflect, go back to my old ways. See, what I used to do when challenging things came was I would meditate on it. Yeah, meditating sounds positive, but really what it was is worrying. And I would look at it from every angle and I would try and prepare myself for every eventuality.
I'd think it through and I'd ponder. And before I knew it, I'd be feeling discouraged and depressed and pretty hopeless. And then I was in no place to hear from the Lord and no place to see what he was saying about the situation. Remember, I had come to this place where I've forged a new path and that's no longer my normal. My normal is to come to the Lord and leave it at his feet. But suddenly this new challenge arises.
Janine Mason (04:43.025)
and I'm forced to look at it for an extended period of time. And what I found was after a couple of days, now I've slipped back into my old patterns of meditating on the problem. And the more that I meditated on the problem, the more powerless I felt. The challenge was more about somebody else's decision making, somebody else's things that they were doing, and I have no power to influence it.
And the more I meditated on how powerless I was, the more hopeless I felt. And the more hopeless I felt, the more I wanted to fix it and the more I meditated to see if I could find a way through. And the more I did that, the more and more and more hopeless I felt. Not just now about that situation, but it started to creep into other areas of my life. And suddenly I found myself talking to a friend.
and sending an email to a friend and saying, hey, here's what's going on, please pray. And I realized, wow, I have actually come into agreement with all the negativity that I can around this situation. And actually, it's taken my faith and it's taken my hope in other areas. It's encroaching on me. Maybe you're like me.
Maybe you've been doing great and now you're facing some new challenging circumstances and you're starting to focus on the charred trees as it were instead of the regrowth, instead of the possibilities, instead of what the Lord can do in the situation. So here I am, I'm in this place now full of negative thoughts and struggling to climb out of the hole that I've dug myself. So what did I do? Four simple steps.
And you can do those steps too. The first one is I simply had to repent. I had been focusing on the challenge and in my mind, the challenge had become so much bigger. It had become honestly insurmountable. It felt like it will never change. My life is doomed because of this one small slice of my life. And as I meditated on it and as I let the life and the hope and the faith get sucked out of me, I started to partner with negativity.
Janine Mason (06:59.531)
And so I came and simply said to God, I realize what I have done and I have messed up. I've lost sight of your goodness and your bigness. And the Bible says that anything that's not done in faith is sin. So God, I confess my sin and I ask you to forgive me. And of course, he's always gracious and he forgave me. The next thing I did was I prayed, so I repent and then pray. Well, haven't you just been praying? Yes, I have.
but I actually came and although I had been doing this, come to the Lord, like I give you this situation, please help, please do something. This time I came and I released it to the Lord. And I said, God, I don't know if it'll ever change. And if it doesn't, it's okay because I know that you will give me grace and strength to see it through. And I know that your word says that all things work together for good. So even if nothing ever changes, you will give me grace.
and you will give me strength and somehow you'll turn this around and it'll work for my good. And God, I'm releasing it. I'm not gonna meditate on this anymore. I'm not even gonna think about it. I'm just gonna simply put it in your hands, do what I need to do and then trust you to do what only you can do. The third thing I did was I just started to get back into thanksgiving and praise. When you start to, it says that we enter his.
with thanksgiving. We enter his courts with praise. And I just simply came to the place of like, what can I be grateful for? I have so much to be grateful for. Lord, I'm thankful for my family. I'm thankful for my husband. I'm thankful for this house that we live in. I'm thankful that I get to sit and look at squirrels and chipmunks and things running past my office window. I'm thankful.
for air conditioning in this hot season. I'm thankful for so much. I'm thankful for your goodness and for your faithfulness. And then I just began to praise him for who he was again. See, when you're focused on the problems, God seems really small and powerless. And when you're focused on how big he is and how good he is, now you've got the right perspective. So I spent time, I committed to go back into a place of praise.
Janine Mason (09:11.349)
I'd been doing that honestly, even the midst of meditation, I would stop and I'd praise the Lord, but then I would go back to focusing on the problem. And so I made a fresh commitment to keep a thankful attitude, to keep an attitude of praise. And then simply I made the decision to change my focus. Just like I had to after the wildfires in California, I had to choose every day what I would look at.
And so I'm in that season again. And once I made the decision to change my focus to the bigness and the goodness, the graciousness, the faithfulness of the Lord, it was easy once again, because I have changed the way that I do life. And I have learned to focus on His goodness. I don't know about you. I know that many people right now are struggling. I've got friends that are facing serious health issues and financial issues, business challenges.
all sorts of things going on. And I don't know what it is for you, but I do know you are often powerless to change what's happening around you. But you always have the power to change who you are or how you think about things. You'll always have the ability to choose how you will respond. And so I want to encourage you today to respond with thankfulness, with praise. I want to encourage you today to respond by keeping your focus on the Lord.
Don't do what I did. Don't slip into old ways where you just start meditating and worrying about all the things that could possibly go wrong. But bring it to the Lord. Repent, pray, do thankfulness and praise, and then choose to put your focus on the Lord. And it will change everything about how you're experiencing what you're facing. To be honest, my challenge is still there. Nothing has changed.
but everything inside me has changed. I now have hope again, I now have faith again, and I have the grace and the strength of the Lord to take me through. So I wanna pray for you today before I go. I bless you to be able to focus on the Lord, even in the midst of very challenging circumstances, that you would find his goodness, that you would find his graciousness, that you would focus on his faithfulness, and that as you do, you would find fresh strength.
Janine Mason (11:33.665)
to face whatever it is that you are doing today. Hey, I wanna encourage you to go onto the Heaven in Business website. We've got some exciting events coming up. The main one that you wanna check out is Dallas, it's in Dallas at the end of August. And you can find all the details on heaveninbusiness.com. Bless you, have a great day.
