Taking Every Thought Captive
June, of Toronto, Ontario was plagued with an inability to concentrate her thoughts. She had been a committed Christian for years, and she was baffled by the problem.
"I could be thinking of seven different things all at once and I couldn't focus on one. I just kept thinking of all these things. What if? And should I? And did I? And could I? And it was terrible. It was so frustrating," she said.
I thought, "What's happening to me? I can't pray. I can't praise the Lord. I can't do anything."
But, June heard from a friend about a Christian doctor who specialized in mental disorders.
"She told me about this Dr. Mullen, that he's having a seminar at this church, and she said 'Think about it, I'd like you to go with me.' So we went and I listened to him, and he had this checklist. And every one of those things on the checklist was me. And I checked them all off and I felt worse. I thought, 'Oh no.' Right away I thought, 'They're going to put me away.'"
Her friend made an appointment with Dr. Mullen, and she went to see him.
"I did family practice for 17 years and through the 17 years, I got a real interest in mental health," said Dr. Grant Mullen. "So now I'm a mental health physician, I have a practice restricted just to mental health disorders. So I don't do general practice."
"Well," Grant said, "June Williams is just one of my favorite people. She came for the treatment of a mood disorder, and we treated it. She improved considerably."
"After three weeks of being on medication I could read a book," June said. "And I just cried, because I could actually read a book and then I was like a sponge."
Although he continued to treat June with medication for her depression, Dr. Mullen was also familiar with another source of mental healing. He was first made aware of it when his local church began to experience spiritual renewal in the same way as another church about an hour away -- Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship.
"It was like God came and personally visited and entered our church," Grant said. "No one had been to Toronto except the pastor and the board member. And all the same things were exploding in our church during our services. It was just all my friends who were being touched by the power of God. And when they got up off the floor, they were different. And so that really caught my attention."
"In fact," Grant said, "patients that I was treating here in my clinic, after getting up off the floor at my home church, they were different. They were able to forgive people. They were able to repent for things. There was a peace about them, a clarity of their mind that I had not seen before. And people were recovering faster from emotional injuries that I was trying to treat than I could ever treat. They were recovering faster than any psycho-therapeutic model. But I wasn't totally prepared to do it myself yet. I was just watching and thinking, 'this has to be God.'"
Months later, during a time of personal devotions, Grant said that he experienced insight into his own spiritual condition.
"God showed me that I had a bitterness that I was carrying. And it just became really obvious to me. And I really felt God was speaking to me that I needed to get rid of this bitterness that was holding me back," he said.
"I said, "God, I recognize it. Now I'm sorry. I repent.' And as soon as I had done that, the power of God filled my bedroom. Now, there was no tapes on, there was no one praying for me. It was just me and God. And I repented of this and the power of God just fills the room. I had to sort of peel myself off the floor to put my kids to bed, I was changed. And our family was changed."
"And so that was attracting me medically," he said. "I thought, 'My goodness, this is like rapidly accelerating the emotional recovery process.' And so that's why I thought, 'this is a powerful tool in mental health.'"
"In fact," Grant said, "as renewal went on and I became more familiar with it, I used to write prescriptions for people who live in this area. I told them that they need to take their medicines, which I gave them, and they needed to go to Toronto and stand on the red line and have someone pray for them because they had other issues the pills would never address."
June took Grant's "prescription" to heart and went to a church service at Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship.
"There was a call at the front in ministry and it was for people with manic depression that they wanted them to come up to the front and get prayed for," June said. "I just jumped out of my seat and I ran forward and then right in front of me was Grant Mullen because he was on the ministry team. He took my hands, and he prayed for me. And I had my eyes closed, and he had told me of a very traumatic thing that happened in my life. And that was 25 years ago, and it was a horrible thing in my life that I had kept inside."
"I had told him nothing in therapy," she said. "Only my friend Ruth Teakle, my husband and God knew. That was all. No one else knew about this. So as he was praying for me, I had this huge boulder and it was down here and each time he prayed and he said something more, it started rising up, this boulder, in my stomach. And I was crying, and it kept rising up. And then the last thing he said, it's like it was thrown right out of my mouth, this boulder, and I just, I relaxed, and this wonderful peace, that I've never had in my entire life, it came over me and I was delivered right then and there."
"She no longer required medications for her mood disorder. She was transformed, set free, and physically healed of what I had been treating her for," Grant said.
"And I was able to talk about this incident," June said. "I could never talk about it before. I was abused, that was the incident, physically abused and mentally abused."
Grant continued to see her and walked her through the process of slowly coming off all of her medications and verifying that she, in fact, was now well and didn't require any more medical assistance.
"Before," June said, "I used food for comfort. I would eat when I would be upset and depressed. I would just eat all day long until finally I had so many health problems because of my excess weight. Well, I've lost 90 pounds now, and I can read. I'm knitting a sweater for my granddaughter. I'm taking a computer course at the library. I'm taking a sewing course. I'm walking."
"When our old nature has been crucified and any mood disorder we might have is either healed or treated," Grant said, "then our mind is clear and we can take every thought captive. We can quickly hear God's voice of truth to replace a lie that we may have believed for many years. And that's the key to taking every thought captive. It is having your mind and heart so filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, so free of the hold of your own nature that you hear God, you hear God louder than your own voice or the voice of darkness."
