All the while your brain is performing up to ten quadrillion calculations per second using only ten watts of power.5 A computer would require a gigawatt of power produced by a nuclear power plant to pull off the same performance.

Instead of exclusively focusing on what's wrong and trying to fix it, you identify what's right and try to replicate it. Appreciative inquiry is playing to people's strengths. It's catching people doing things right. It's celebrating what you want to see more of. And it's bragging about people behind their backs.

Goodness is not the absence of badness. You can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right. Those who simply run away from sin are half-Christians. Our calling is much higher than simply running away from what's wrong. We're called to chase lions.

There is a theory in organizational development called appreciative inquiry that I subscribe to as a leader and a parent. Instead of exclusively focusing on what's wrong and trying to fix it, you identify what's right and try to replicate it. Appreciative inquiry is playing to people's strengths. It's catching people doing things right. It's celebrating what you want to see more of. And it's bragging about people behind their backs.

This verse is not just about capturing sinful thoughts and getting them out of our minds; it's also about capturing creative thoughts and keeping them in our minds. It means stewarding every word, thought, impression, and revelation inspired by the Spirit of God.

Each of us has an explanatory style... And our explanation is more important than the experience itself. In the words of Aldous Huxley, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

We don't see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.

Journaling is one of the most overlooked and undervalued spiritual disciplines. In my estimation, it's on a par with praying, fasting, and meditating. It's the way we document what God is doing in our lives.

Don't cohabitate. Don't fornicate. Don't look at pornography. Don't create a standard of beauty. Have your spouse be your standard of beauty. This is one of the great devastating effects of pornography: you lust after people and compare your spouse to them. It's impossible to be satisfied in your marriage if you don't have a standard that is biblical; that standard is always your spouse.

Optimist: Day-dreamer more elegantly spelled

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.