November 11, 2025

Minding Your Thoughts

A Biblical Overview of Obtaining and Maintaining a Biblical Thought Life

Job 35:2 Thinkest thou this to be right, that thou saidst, My righteousness is more than God’s?

It was 1974: I was backpacking through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Northern New Mexico. The land for Philmont Scout Ranch was given to the Boy Scouts by one of the Phillips Petroleum brothers. My crew had eight people in it, seven teenagers and one adult. We were warned. “There are bears here,” said the Ranger who started us on the trail for the first day and night. “At night you must take all your ‘smellables’ and put them in a bag then hang them in between two trees about fifteen feet off the ground. If you leave anything in your pack or take anything into your tent that smells like food, a bear may come searching.”  He also gave us warnings about rattlesnakes, flash floods, and lighting strikes.

We laughed it off until the second night when a bear destroyed our smellable bag because it was hung too low. We could hear it from our tents, chilling it was! I almost stepped on a rattler the third day and we all began trying to remember all the warnings the Ranger had given us. After the third day there were no more events including life threating animals or reptiles. We sort of forgot the warnings.

On the last day we were crossing a ridge leading to the “Tooth of Time.” This outcropping of rock looks like a tooth from a distance and was a landmark on the old Santa Fe Trail. This ridge was exposed to the elements and about the time we approached it a rainstorm came. We enjoyed the rain as it had been hot and dry for the past seven days on the trail. Then the lighting hit. There was lighting all around us; thunder rolled through that valley with a sound that to this day has haunted my memory. As young, invincible men will do, we began to taunt the lighting. “Come on, here I am, see if you can strike me.”  We yelled, jumped around, acted the fool, and basically ignored all warnings about lighting that the Ranger had given us. Until we saw the memorial carved into the side of the trail to the scouts who had lost their lives to lighting strikes on that ridge.

You see, our mocking and taunting of the lighting was something we said in the ignorance of arrogance. Once we saw the names of those boys who died on the same piece of ground on which we were standing due to the same elements that now surrounded us we rethought that which we were saying. In fact, we double timed it off that ridge and for the next few hours none of us spoke. We were a somber, wet, defeated bunch of young men.

That which we said we thought was right, but it wasn’t. Neither was some of what Job said and much of that which his friends said.

May the Lord bless and be pleased with your thought life today.

Dr. William Howe