Intersections: Where Faith Meets Life – by Bob Weathers

Is the mind a playground? Maybe. Psychologist Avrum Weiss thinks so. He researches daydreaming, and his studies have demonstrated that daydreaming can be a relaxing distraction in a world of stress. While our society tends to condemn daydreaming as a waste of time, and daydreamers as lazy or unfocused, Weiss says the truth is that daydreaming may be one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself.

Bob Weathers

The benefits of daydreaming, he says, are evident when it is contrasted with night dreaming. Night dreams are involuntary meanderings, and they may even create more stress as our minds stagger around in the hallways of our subconscious. But daydreaming is a conscious escape, and it draws us into a future, an ideal world, even though our everyday lives remain stranded in the present.

For that reason, Bill Zimmerman, who has authored a book about daydreaming, suggests that our daydreams should not be resisted. Nor should they be censored. They help us deal with life, with present realities and frustrations. The daydreamer is using healthy fantasies of a better life as a way to cope. So, go ahead and fantasize, Zimmerman instructs. And don’t stop your mind from whatever fantasies wander your way. It’s a playground. And you don’t even need a fence around it.

True, even in our Christian culture we extol visionaries and dreamers, people whose minds create a playful and compelling image of the future. They daydream about a better tomorrow. That’s good for them, and good for us.

But should the mind be permitted to roam the hallways of its fantasies without restriction? Nope.

The Bible pictures the mind as vulnerable and fallen. More of a battleground than a playground. So we are to give our mind to Christ and to let it be changed. For instance, we are instructed to worship God with our minds (Matt. 22:37), listen to God with our minds (1 Cor. 2:15-16), house God’s word in our minds (Heb. 8:10), focus on God with our minds (Col. 3:2), and submit to God with our minds (Rom. 12:2).

But if you decide, after all, to spend time in the playground of the mind, keep the fence up. The enemy is looking for a way in (Matt. 5:28).