It's funny. After having completed a diploma in counselling and even run my own counselling business, albeit 10 years ago, I still fall into some very basic thinking errors. You have probably seen the lists or diagrams of cognitive distortions at some stage. They tend to be sorted into ten or twelve categories, depending upon the therapist or training, and each has its own particular way of hooking you in. They become habitual and like a drug, especially addictive. But they are poor ways of thinking and responding in life and cause no end of trouble.

For me it is doubly troubling. because thinking errors undermine faith and subsequent actions without one being aware of them. The counsellor in me should have been far more alert to the fact that without constant revision, lifelong patterns of thinking will return. It was only when I was reading a devotional by the late Rev. Selwyn Hughes, himself a trained counsellor. that I realised that the tools that I applied in secular circumstances equally applied in the realm of faith. Of course.