The northwest edge of South Carolina is called the golden corner. Far from the more well known tourist destinations of the state such as Charleston, Myrtle Beach, or Hilton Head Island or the allure of the Atlantic Ocean beaches, the pace is slower and instead of ocean tides the attractions are the meandering lakes and the ever changing beauty of the Blue Ridge mountains.
One such lake is Lake Joccassee. Spanning across Oconee and Pickens counties, a short drive from the city of Clemson and the hallowed halls of Clemson University, entrance to Lake Jocassee is granted at the end of a winding road dotted with farms and cattle. There is only one entrance to the Lake – through Devil’s Fork state park, and the parking lot is packed almost every day of the week with cars from all over the country, but at least 50% of them are locals – easily distinguished by the orange Clemson pawprint bumper stickers adorning their trucks, jeeps, and SUV’s.
The locals know what the tourists have been told to search out. Lake Jocassee is beautiful. A placid lake, that due to its depth, remains a refreshing temperature on even the hottest of South Carolina summer days. The water is crystal clear. At some points as deep as 300 feet, it is home to good fishing, the occasional water skier and 75 miles of coastline dotted with coves and inlets throughout. It is the perfect spot to enjoy the beauty of God’s creation… but there is irony in that statement because God didn’t make this lake.
I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way.
Welcome back after a two-week hiatus. I just got back from a family vacation, and I’m really excited to begin the next phase of this year’s Love Better topics. This year, we are learning to love better by exploring the greatest commandment – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. We’ve searched our hearts and plumbed the depths of our soul for how to love the Lord better, and halfway through the year it is time to investigate our minds. How do we love God with all our mind? What does that even mean? This week is the first in a ten-part series on learning to love better with our minds… and Lake Jocassee is the perfect foil for the mental journey we have to take.
In the early 1960’s, Duke Power (now known as Duke Energy) recognized the need for a hydroelectric powerplant to support the infrastructure of the golden corner of South Carolina. The solution was to build a dam – the Jocassee Dam. The dam would be fed from a manmade reservoir above it, Lake Jocassee, and create another lake below it, Lake Keowee. Today, both lakes cover over 25,000 acres of land, land that was originally open and dry. One of the largest roadblocks to building the dam was that Lake Jocassee would be formed in a valley that currently housed entire communities. Houses, church buildings, banks, dry good stores, and the livelihoods of hundreds of people. What Duke Power wanted to do would bring power, vitality, and prosperity to millions of people, but would displace upwards of 50 families from their homes and farms. Furthermore, cemeteries and family grave plots would be covered, too. It wasn’t just a matter of moving homes – it was a matter of changing lives and wrestling with history and ancestry, too. The project wasn’t just a financial juggernaut, it was an emotionally charged one, too.
If we are going to love the Lord with all our mind, we need to understand that changing our minds is like building a lake. It can be done, but it isn’t just an academic exercise. Mindset is about more than just changing the books you read and the movies you watch, it is about sacrificing pathways and lifestyles you’ve had for years.
The apostle Paul would speak of his journey of the mind in Philippians 3:
But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith-- that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Phl 3:7-11)
Paul understood what science has only continued to illuminate – knowledge comes at a cost. In order to know Jesus deeply, I must marshal all my efforts to shape the landscape of my mind. Paul knew that knowledge takes time – and you can’t be an expert in Jesus and also expect to be an expert in worldliness. Sacrifices would need to be made.
The most complex thing in the universe is – the universe. Scientists say that the second most complex thing in the universe is the human brain. Your mind is exactly as Psalm 139 says, “fearfully and wonderfully made” and with the advent of CAT scans, MRIs, and now fMRI’s – we have only found more to wonder over. Your brain is a kaleidoscope of beauty and an undulating landscape of neurons, glands, and gray matter. From the brain stem to the cerebellum, you can think of your brain as a world unto itself. When someone is lost in thought, what do we say about them as we see them stare into the distance with glazed over eyes, “There in their own world right now.”
The six inches between your ears is a land of your own personal dominion. Replace the rivers, valleys, and mountains of Earth with the ridges, valleys, and folds of your brain and you begin to see the comparison… and just like we can shape the earth, we can shape our minds, too.
Neurologists refer to the ability to change the brain and it’s neural pathways as neuroplasticity, and we aren’t going to get into the specifics today, but in later episodes we will talk in depth about the power of neuroplasticity. For now all you need to know is that you have a LOT of power to shape your mind – just like the Earth itself, some things are set in stone, but there is a lot that we can do to flood the valleys, divert the rivers, or build up the mountains. You can’t control everything, but humanity has done an awful lot to do exactly what God told us to – “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." (Genesis 1:26). God told us to fill the earth and subdue it – and by and large, mankind has done a pretty good job of civilizing the wilderness.
And yet, with all our roads, bridges, and hydroelectric dams – we still struggle to tame and subdue our own minds. Romans 12:2 tells us to renew our mind, but many of us spend our lives finding a way to get stuck in the rut of the same old unhealthy thought patterns. Philippians 2:5 tells us to have a Jesus’ mindset in our relationships with others, but how often does that get derailed, degenerating our relationships to shallow at best or toxic at worst? Instead of a Jesus’ mind for people, we fight, bicker, our cower and ignore the souls He died for.
Or how about meditation? Psalm 104:34 says, “May my meditation be pleasing to Him.” The deep waters of our mind should be filled with the wellsprings of life – things that are true, pure, lovely, praiseworthy, and honorable according to Philippians 4:8… those are all adjectives I'm pretty sure that TikTok and Reddit don’t consider in their business models. The things we flood our brains with are often things that are of the lowest spiritual value and the highest sensationalism. Placid things like goodness and virtue aren’t nearly as powerful in the algorithms as the storms of political venom or human degradation. Still waters run deep, but anger and blood sell advertising slots.
So, if we know that the wrong things destroy our mental health, why do we continue to let the landscape of our brain be shaped by them? Short answer? We aren’t willing to displace our existing intellectual communities for the greater good of renewing our mind.
When Duke Power wanted to flood Jocassee Valley, unsurprisingly, those fifty families weren’t really happy about it, and it is hard to blame them. Sure they would be compensated for the land and helped with relocation, but who likes change? Certainly not this guy – I still have t-shirts from junior high. Change doesn’t come easily for most of us, but without change – the wilderness goes unchecked.
So, how did they build the dam when the folks living there didn’t want to move? The legal term is ‘eminent domain’. In American Law, ‘Eminent Domain’ comes from the 5th amendment in the U.S. constitution which allows for private property to be taken for public use if just compensation is provided. Unsurprisingly, eminent domain is a hot button topic. Everyone likes the idea of highways, airports, schools, and indoor plumbing until the place they want to build those things impacts me. Eminent Domain means sometimes somebody is going to have to be unhappy for the greater good of civilization.
When you take eminent domain of your brain, the same thing happens. Do not believe the silly saccharin sweet preaching that says renewing your mind and knowing Jesus is all unicorns and rainbows all the time. It isn’t. Taking dominion of your mind means making yourself uncomfortable. You might need to drain the swamp of mindlessness and fill it with study and contemplation. You are likely to find some dead ideas that you’ve turned into habits that will have to be dug up an moved (that, by the way, is exactly what they did with the old cemeteries – they relocated almost all of them to higher ground). And when it comes to mental toughness, you have to do hard things to learn how to be resilient under stress. Old ideas must be challenged by better thinkers than yourself and you will need to re-evaluate beliefs you’ve assumed without Scriptural study for yourself.
In short, mental change requires you to take eminent domain. Eminent refers to authority or supremacy. It isn’t that everything you spend your time thinking about is bad. From crochet to the latest pickleball craze – there is room in your mind for all sorts interesting things. Want to learn about the effects of Operation Paperclip on the scientific revolution? Go for it! Fascinated by HAM radio? Learn away! There is plenty of space on the landscape to learn and dwell on a plethora of topics – but never forget eminent domain when you are making space for things. When it comes to our minds, if it gets in the way of following Christ it’s time to re-evaluate.
From Martha being distracted with all her preparations in Luke 10 to Paul’s admonition that Timothy should act like a soldier and not get “entangled in the affairs of everyday life” in 2 Timothy 2 – eminent domain is a way of auditing your own priorities and usage of mental bandwidth. In my experience, the problem for most folks in the digital age isn’t unethical mental fillers (although things like that certainly exist, too!) it is just too many mental fillers period. Our mental bandwidth is limited, so what are we doing with it. We waste the moments because we have set up little communities of habits, interests, and distractions in our life that we are unwilling to give up to flood our minds with spiritual wisdom.
In John 4, Jesus told the woman at the well, that He had living water to offer her. In His words, "Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life." (John 4:13-14)
Jesus was referring to the Holy Spirit, and the wisdom of the New Testament gospel the Holy Spirit would bring, that if implemented would change her mind, her heart, her life, and save her soul.
Today, Lake Jocassee provides beauty, a place for boaters and beachgoers to enjoy, refreshing water, and a steady source of hydroelectric power for millions… all because a decision was made to build a dam that would change the landscape.
If you want to change your mind – you are going to have to change your boundaries. If you aren’t happy with your Bible knowledge and your spiritual mindset - Take a hard look at your habits and start building some dams. If you want change, it may just be time to become uncomfortable.
Learn to love better. Learn to change the landscape of your mind.
As always, thank you for listening and hopefully we've done something to help make your life a little bit better. If you have a chance to rate, review or share the podcast it would be a blessing. By sharing with others or leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, you help us reach more people.
And if you are ever in the Louisville, KY area, I’d like to invite you to worship with us at the Eastland congregation next Sunday. If you want more information about Eastland, visit us at eastlandchristians.org. Or if you are looking for more tools to enrich your Bible study, visit my personal Bible site, Biblegrad.com, where you can sign up for daily Bible devotionals called Biblebites and receive them in your email each morning, take online Bible classes, or find videos that will help you study through the Bible throughout the year.
And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”
