Finding Grace For Us Over-Thinking Types

I recently had a conversation with a spectacularly gifted student who was trying to figure out how to deal with the malady of many of my spectacularly gifted students: the inability to stop the critical-analysis-over-thinking of all things that went on in perpetuity in her head.

In other words, she couldn't stop analyzing everything, breaking everything down, questioning everything. Including and especially her faith. She was stuck inside her head. We were discussing what it would look like to get out.

This death by over-analysis is a critical problem for many of us over-achievers and over-achiever wannabe's. We feel that we get to where we are only by virtue of our ability to figure everything out and to decode situations be they social, academic, religious, or whatever--decoding them gives us power over situations.

It seems that there are a number of ways that healing can and needs to take place:

1. The gift of analysis is just that, a gift. Like all our gifts, it needs cleansing, healing, redemption. Apart from the submission of our gifts to God, who gave them to us and who ultimately we will need to give an account to, our gifts become our curse and they have the potential to destroy us and everything and everyone that we care about.

2. Operating healthily in critical thinking gifts requires the ability to recognize when the gift of critical-thinking "tips" from healthy thinking to obsession and fixation. Growing in recognizing when we get past the point of health is part of what it means to grow up into mature use of the gift. That's the work of the Holy Spirit.

3. Those of us who tend to over-function in the critical thinking realm need to learn a crucial discipline: the discipline of simple receiving. There are times when we are given things in our lives that we are invited to think deeply about. And then there are times when we are given things that we simply need to receive, to take in, to not deconstruct and analyze and freak-out about what to do with this in every moment of every day.

Simple receiving. That's a discipline that helps those of us who get stuck in our analysis enjoy life a little bit more.

4. Finally, freedom from over-functioning critical thinking is fundamentally freedom that comes from God as we learn to truly walk in grace. Grace reminds us that it's not all about us to figure everything out, it reminds us that God's the primary actor and not us, that God is in control, not us.

Grace puts us over-thinkers back in our place. It humbles us. Humility is freedom. The world revolves around God, not us. There's a tremendous weight lifted off of us when we realize that the Father delights in us too much to give us too much importance.

We are far less important than we think we are; instead, we are loved far more than we ever hoped or imagined. That's good news for us over-achiever, over-thinking, stuck-inside-our-head types.