Dear Ones,
Hope you wake with peace-filled thoughts. I woke with a praise song going over and over again.  This morning, I plan to go to Women’s Bible Study and then this afternoon we are having friends over for coffee and fellowship.
Devotions from Judy’s heart
Our thoughts are very important for it says in Proverbs 4:23, “Guard your heart more than anything else, because the source of your life flows from it.” We are to guard our hearts aggressively and to choose our thoughts, filling our minds with what is good and true. What we think about has a direct effect on our body, especially our heart, for it communicates with our brain and influences our emotions and body. Dr. Don Colbert wrote on Crosswalk.com about how our heart rate is influenced by our emotions and attitudes and when we are anxious or frustrated and fearful our heart rate becomes erratic and disordered. But when we have positive emotions like appreciation, joy and love our heart patters have highly ordered patterns and a reduction of stress. Dr. Colbert shares an illustration that impressed me of how important our thoughts are. I will share his words.

 “The heart has a magnetic field that is approximately five thousand times stronger than the brain and an electrical field is forty to sixty times stronger than the brain. To illustrate this point, consider this story.
Christian Huygens was a seventeenth-century clockmaker who invented the pendulum clock. One night, while lying in bed admiring his clock collection, he noticed that all his pendulum clocks were swinging in unison with one another. He knew he didn’t set them that way, so he got out of bed and reset all the pendulums so that they were all out of sync with one another. However, after a short period of time all the pendulum clocks were back swinging in unison with one another. He never understood why. Years later it was discovered that the large clock with the strongest rhythm was able to pull all other nearby pendulums in sync with itself. This is called entrainment.
The heart, by practicing gratitude and thanksgiving, is able, with its powerful magnetic field five thousand times stronger than the brain, to hijack the very thoughts of the brain and bring them into the pendulum motion of gratitude instead of the brain’s programmed emotions of fear, worry, anger, bitterness, grief, depression, and so on. That is why Proverbs 4:23 instructs us to keep our heart with all diligence, for out of it flow the issues of life. If we keep gratitude, peace, joy, and love in our heart, then it is able to control the brain, and gratitude, peace, joy, and love will flow out of our mouths.” May we guard our hearts and be careful what we let our thoughts dwell on.

Challenge for today: Quickly catch yourself when you start thinking negative thoughts and ask the Lord to help you think His thoughts!
Blessings on your day and prayers and love, Judy