"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear" (Mark Twain).

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Thanks in advance for your prayers for Jeff Bearden (see my entry from yesterday). I spoke with Jeff for about 25 minutes yesterday and it was good. Jeff is so sincere and his heart is so good. Amazing that in the midst of such chaotic uncertainty in his own life, his single focus yesterday was on the manner in which his treatments would impinge on Michelle's daily life.

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Are Jerry and Lynn Jones hitting it out of the park or what? The Marriage Matters Seminar that began on Sunday and continues through tomorrow evening has been outstanding. The melding of psychology, theology and personal experience has provided a rich blessing for every person who's attended.

Last night, in the course of their discussion on "communication barriers," Jerry and Lynn spoke at length about a barrier called schemata. Schemata is simply a $10 word for those mental maps which guide our thoughts and behavior; they are the substructures of our paradigms.

Now to be honest, no one of us has a perfect paradigm; no one of us sees with pure accuracy reality. Our self-centeredness jades our understanding of reality. Consequently, some of our mental maps, even though we've held them long-term, perhaps a lifetime, to be true reflections of reality are actually proven to be false.

And how do we typically respond when a cherished mental map that is our norm is proven to be untrue? Jerry and Lynn say, "the longer a person believes a certain way, even when outside information disproves the truth of that belief, rather than acknowledge the new truth we typically deny its reality. We've invested too much over time."

That's why we'll fight to the death of a relationship (in a marriage...and in a church family).

Funny how we see expending effort to fight for a cherished, though false, presupposition as no real effort but the effort to change for the good of the relationship as cataclysmic.