During the day, bustling activity occupies my mind. I work, converse, yell, drive, listen to music and daydream. Evening rolls around and it certainly slows down, especially after being lulled into a food coma by some  ridiculously large meal. If the television comes on, one can reasonably assume my brain is on vacation. Just like an industrial park, there are regular hours of operation when business is as it should be and I’m functioning like a regular human being.

There’s nothing scary about an industrial park during the day, because people scamper about every sort of direction between eight and five, but after everyone has clocked out and driven back to their home in the suburbs, it’s not uncommon that the whole area has been abandoned. That’s when one should be careful.

Hoodlums and other individuals of questionable character show up and do only God knows what on random nights. Evidence of their presence and activity comes in the form of empties, graffiti and abandoned McDonald’s bags (to name a few). They could be doing drugs, taking part in ritual animal sacrifice, or are looking for something terrible to do like playing loud screaming music, dancing around in circles and making mean statements about political leaders (I thought I’d cover the gamut of bad, here).

My mind operates in a similar way. When the busyness and action of life has slowed down for the night, it leaves room for thoughts to come in. Lightning bolts of negativity reminding me of mistakes, hope deferred and other generalities that fall under the category, “Life’s ugly little details”. If it gets bad enough,  I begin to squirm. I get hot in the face and within minutes, I’m contentious.

This doesn’t happen every night, of course.

When the daily activity of life has abandoned my mind to these ugly apparitions, I have to take action. I can’t allow anything like these wretched, thug-like thoughts to kill my rest, because then I really will arise in the form of a grumpy ho in the morning and nobody likes that (sometimes, it makes me laugh-not always).

What do I do?

Psalm 4:4 states, “Be angry and do not sin.

Meditate within your heart on your bed and be still.”

That’s right, I meditate. I take control of my mind and tell it what it is going to do. Truthfully, meditation isn’t much more than that. I divert my “stream of consciousness” to something that won’t make me crazy. Sometimes I focus on a Bible verse, other times it’s thinking about someone I love, sometimes, it’s running through a field on a sunny day, wearing no pants. That last one was weird, Jake.

Some of my best thoughts and blog posts have come about because I chose to focus my thoughts before going to bed.  Sometimes, God talks to me, too. Some Christians believe that meditation is a time set aside for the singular purpose of hearing God and what He has to say, I’m not convinced though. He can talk any time He chooses, we don’t always have time to unravel our thoughts and explore deeper meanings behind Bible verses, conversations, and the metaphysical significance to red gummy bears.

Don’t be afraid to Meditate.

It’s not so new-age, and you won’t be excessively weird if you do it. It’ll probably be some sort of trendy practice in the years to come anyway, so if you start on it now, you’ll be able to say, “I was doing that before it was trendy.” Then you’ll get to feel like you’re really super ridiculously awesome.