It starts with a line on the wall. You notice it one evening above the bedroom door, thin as a hair, running at an angle towards the ceiling. By the time you have brushed your teeth, you have decided that the foundation is moving. By the time you are in bed, you have calculated what it will cost to underpin the house, concluded that you cannot afford it, and imagined explaining to the children why they must change schools. At two in the morning you are lying awake in a house that, as far as anyone actually knows, is perfectly sound.
Homeowners are especially prone to this. A house is the biggest thing most of us will ever buy, and it is full of things that can go wrong. Every drip, creak and damp patch can become the opening line of a disaster story. A late payment becomes foreclosure. A new neighbour’s building work becomes a boundary war. A slightly higher light bill becomes proof that the wiring is about to burn the place down.
The mind as a builder
Our thoughts are rarely just thoughts. They build things. A worry repeated often enough becomes a belief, and beliefs shape decisions. The homeowner convinced the foundation is failing may spend money on the wrong repair, or avoid getting it checked out of fear of what they’ll hear, or become so stressed that they snap at everyone in the house for a week.
Paul used a striking image for this. Writing to the church in Corinth, he spoke of demolishing strongholds and arguments, and said, “we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5, NIV). He was speaking mainly about false ideas that set themselves up against the knowledge of God, but the picture applies more widely. Some thoughts need to be caught at the door before they move in and start rearranging the furniture.
Taking a thought captive
What does that look like with a crack in the wall? It is not pretending the crack isn’t there. Faith is not denial. Nor is it simply replacing a bad thought with a cheerful slogan. More often it involves a few honest questions:
- What do I actually know? There is a thin crack above a door. That is the fact.
- What am I assuming? That it means structural failure, that it will be expensive, that I cannot cope.
- What would I tell a friend? Probably: many small cracks are caused by plaster shrinking or normal movement; get someone qualified to look at it.
- What is one sensible next step? Take a photo, mark the ends in pencil with the date, and ask a builder or engineer to have a look if it grows.
- What is true about God in this? That he is not surprised by cracks, and that he has provided for this household before.
The thought has been caught, examined and given a job. Instead of building a disaster, it is now building a plan.
Information is a mercy
A great deal of anxiety about houses feeds on the unknown. We fear the letter we haven’t opened, the statement we haven’t read, the inspection we haven’t booked. Consider a woman who avoided her mortgage statements for months because she was sure the news was bad. When she finally sat down with her lender, the situation was difficult but manageable, and there were options she had never heard of. The months of dread had cost her more than the problem itself.
Getting good information — from a qualified tradesperson, an honest lender, an attorney — is often the most practical way to take a runaway thought captive. It replaces the imagined worst with the actual situation, which is usually smaller, and always more workable.
Where the stories come from
Some of our catastrophising is learned. Children who grew up in homes where every bill was a crisis often carry that alarm into adulthood. Others absorb it from the endless stream of home-disaster videos and alarming posts about termites, sinkholes and scams. None of it is entirely baseless; things do go wrong. But a mind fed a steady diet of disaster will start to see it everywhere.
Paul gave the Philippians a different diet: “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things” (Philippians 4:8, NIV). Notice that true comes first. This is not a call to think only nice thoughts. It is a call to think true ones, and to give at least as much attention to what is right with the house as to what might be wrong.
What is right with the house
Try it one evening. Walk through the house and notice what is working. The roof kept the rain out last night. The pipes brought water this morning. The door locked. The fan turned. Children slept safely in their beds. Much of what a house does for us is silent and taken for granted, and the anxious mind skips over all of it to fix on the one crack.
That crack still needs checking. But it can be checked by someone whose mind is at rest, who has slept, who is not carrying a collapse that hasn’t happened. The house is not falling down. Most nights, neither are we.
