“Can anyone hide himself in several places, so I shall not see him?” says the Lord.

Jer. 23:24

Stick your head in the sand and you don’t have to know what’s going on around you. People who play this game think that if they deny their problems or put off facing them, the problems  will go away. But the problem with the head in the sand trick is you eventually have to come up for air.

Sometimes we as counselors feel like lifeguards going around the beach and saving people from suffocating by pulling their heads out of the sand and then some of them want to stick their heads back in! I once  had a patient I had rescued say to me,” If I had known sane people were so crazy, I would have stayed crazy.”

Very few problems disappear when we avoid them; we must eventually face what we’re hoping will go away. Denial is like believing in magic. We somehow think  that pretending a problem isn’t there will cause it to be solved by someone else or simply fade away. That rarely happens.

Avoiding pain by procrastination and denial is usually the route to prolonging problems and making them worse. Let’s pull our head out of the sand and face the challenges of life today.

Thought:  Denying my conflicts causes significantly more personal pain than facing them and devising plans to overcome them. I will ask God’s help in facing my problems today.