More than anything else, mortality is a battle of the mind and heart.

What you think and how you think, combined with what you feel and how you feel, completely determine your character, actions, and outcomes.

In other words, it’s all about what you think and how you feel about it.

The battle for the mind and heart is entirely a matter of focus and awareness. Where you choose to send your mind, what you think about, what you focus on, and how you choose to feel about it, determines everything about you.

The good news is that, in large part, you can learn to discipline and control your thoughts and feelings by your actions.

One of the best ways to do this is to choose good role models.

Jesus is the smartest, wisest, and happiest man who ever lived. His disciples are those who emulate and follow Him. Jesus and His disciples make excellent role models. And they also make the very best mentors and teachers.

The greatest hindrances we have to emulating and following Jesus are our innate laziness, dishonesty, selfishness, and cowardice. Keeping this in mind, we should constantly make a concerted effort to be hard-working, diligent, truthful, full of love, and courageous. We should be deep thinkers, seeking truth and wisdom in all we do.

Too often, the natural man’s mind rationalizes thoughts and actions centered on instant gratification, ego preservation, and convenience. Because of this, most people seek religious and political beliefs that are not centered on moral truth, an honest desire for improvement, or justice, but rather seek to rationalize perpetual mediocrity, selfishness, and sin. This is undesirable.

In the religious world, the doctrine of being “saved by grace, not by works,” is a prime example. After all, anyone who is convinced that they do not actually have to do anything to merit or qualify for salvation gets a free pass, whereas those who maturely, responsibly, and humbly ask God what they must do, find that there is much to do indeed!

In the political world, we find numerous examples of people who desire power, dominion, and control, or for the masses, free handouts.  Either way, the predominant dishonesty is the quest for honors and riches that are undeserved.

Similarly, within the quiet passage of time, human activity is often centered on seeking an easy, pleasant, and entertaining existence. Indeed, for most people, the last thing they want to face is a lifetime of difficult repentance, improvement, sacrifice, and suffering for some holy cause. Such pursuits are altogether far too inconvenient and fatiguing.

But God calls us to something far better than fanciful earthly pleasantries. God’s call is the call to holiness, to improvement, and to Him!

When we realize that one day we will be held accountable for every moment in mortality, and that when all is over, we will be filled with the deepest regret and suffering as we consider all the opportunities we wasted, then we will take pause to reconsider how we think, how we feel, and how we live our lives.

Doom-scrolling on YouTube. Wasting time with entertainment. Complicit abduction to depression, followed by squandering the hours and days of our lives with trivial pursuits. All these addictions and self-defeating behaviors are exposed for what they are—capitulation and enslavement of the mind and heart!

But we can be better than this—much better than this. The key is to stay active, focused, and anxiously engaged in doing good. This can be accomplished by establishing good habits, wise priorities, personal boundaries, and a hierarchy of operations for doing all that we do each day.