{First photo from Unsplash, yoshua girl} Bob and I enjoy finding an author we like who has written an abundance of books. Then we try to work our way through the books in their order of publication. One such author is Louise Penny. The books are usually set in a small town named Three Pines. Inspector Gamache and his fellow Sûreté du Québec officers speak French Canadian phrases which Bob adores and I translate in my own way.

Louise Penny weaves wisdom through her writings. There are 17 books in this series so far. I came across this quote recently and had to share it.

He tried not to go to the worst possible conclusion. That they were down because everyone who might communicate was down.

No. He forced his mind away from that. Stick with the simple facts. He knew how catastrophic a rampant imagination, driven by fear, could be.

How The Light Gets In, Louise Penny

Fear occurs about 1,025 in the Bible and first appears in Genesis 3. Fear has been with us a very long time. Fear not or be not afraid appear many times (unlikely the 365 count is accurate according to most scholars).

Regardless, we are prone to fear, even Louis Penny knows, and we are told not to go there. Fear not, Be not afraid. It is something we have a choice about.

When did you recently force your mind away from the worst possible conclusion? Were you able to take those thoughts captive to Christ Jesus?

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV

This is a discipline that truly takes practice. We must learn not to let ‘awfulizing’ become the way we think. We must turn our thoughts and our ways to His thoughts and ways. You can likely tell by my catching and quoting this from a fictional novel that I have been at this practice for a while. No, I have not mastered it, but like my other spiritual disciplines it does help me grow closer to Jesus.