ONCE IT'S IN THERE...

Wish I'd never downloaded it in the first place.

When I got my new phone a few months ago, I was excited to download a few apps. One of them was the People Magazine app, which keeps me in the loop of what's going on in the (unreal celebrity) world.

Because who doesn't need to know what Gwen Stefani's kids wore to the park today, right?

The thing is, very little of what's streamed onto that site is of any value to me. And I wish I could tell you that I'm so spiritually mature that I don't care about what people wear on the red carpet, or what new couple has been seen together, but I can very easily get sucked into all of that.

But once I want out of it, it's not so easy.

I can't figure out how to get rid of that People Magazine app. It's on there, and I've tried a few times to delete it. But I can't figure out how!

The best I can do is to put it in the HIDE folder. Sure, it's still there. I may have removed it from my sight, but it is still there and I can choose to access it when I want.

I think it's that way with ANYTHING we allow into our hearts and minds...

Once it's in there, it is in there.

Sure, we can regret allowing it in, and can resolve to tuck it away into some HIDE folder in our minds. But should we still choose to access it, we can find a way to do it. And once we've downloaded certain things into our hearts and minds, we can try to make it more difficult to retrieve....but it's still there.

Seems that God SO knew what kind of battle we'd be up against with our minds, and really desires that we keep ourselves far from those destructive downloads in the first place:

"Whatever is pure, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is true, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things."

Philippians 4:8