A clinical psychologist named David Stoop wrote about a transient who traveled across the country by hiding out in freight trains. (His story is found in a book I read recently called Tame Your Thoughts.)

“One night he climbed into what looked like a boxcar and closed the door. Somehow the door locked shut and he was trapped inside. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he discovered he was inside a refrigerated car.

He pounded on the door, but no one heard him. As he tried to fight against the cold, he scratched part of a message on the floor on the car. He never finished.

Sometime late the next day, repairmen from the railroad found the man dead. He looked like someone who had frozen to death.

The mystery was that the refrigerator units on the car were not working. The repairmen had come to fix those units. The temperature inside the car probably did not go below fifty degrees during the night.The man died because his thoughts told him he was freezing to death.”

Oh, how unbelievably sad! The guy died because he believed a lie.

But I wonder how many of us are stymied by our own boxcars of untruths. As we go through our regular daily routines, I am wondering how many lies we believe.

Often as we glance in the mirror in the morning, our self-talk squawks like a bull horn trying to convince us that we are ugly, useless and unimportant. But it is a lie! We have forgotten Ps. 139:14 “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made, your works are wonderful, I know it full well.”

Maybe later in the day, a co-worker makes a snide comment and suddenly our self-esteem is thrown to the wind. We forget that the Lord thinks about us all the time and those thoughts are precious. Ps. 139:17 “How precious to me are your thoughts O God. How vast is the sum of them.”

We say to ourselves: “I am not pretty or handsome enough. I am not smart enough. I think too slowly. I am not creative. I can’t handle my own children. My spouse doesn’t respond to me anymore. My boss thinks I am an idiot. My adult children ignore me. I have no talent or ability to invest in serving others.”

Those are all boxcars of untruths. That refrigerator is not turned on. Let’s grab a sweatshirt and keep going!

“When I am awake, I am still with you!” (Ps. 139:18)