MIND OVER MATTER
records in alphabetical order... Scripture verses in the dentist... belief as a prisoner on Robben Island...
(my script for Pause For Thought on Owain Wyn Evans BBC Radio 2 on March 19th 2026… the theme was mind over matter…)
A few years back I was supporting some friends on their bid to cycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats raising money for a good cause. I was the official driver and before you call me soft I was the first to get cramp. All that work on clutch, break and accelerator… got to get through the pain barrier. Often I would get ahead and park and watch the team struggle up the unrelenting hills. One time as I looked down on the road somewhere in the Scottish Highlands my friend Kristie, one of the team, cycled past. She looked up and said, “I am putting my album collection into alphabetical order.” Brilliant, I thought.
Kristie was battling from the physical and mental challenge and the mental boredom. And to help her get through, her mind went to her album collection, a good one might I add, to overcome the hurt and the tedium. Mind over matter.
I play a similar game when I am in the dentist’s chair. As soon as that seat reclines, my eyes are closed and I am meditating on a verse of Scripture that I have thought about earlier. A favourite are these words of Jesus, “I have come that you might life and life in all its fulness.” Maybe that is soul over matter.
Best of all might be faith over matter. When I used to take University students to Cape Town, we’d visit Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was a prisoner for so many years. When you tour the island you spend time at the Lime Quarry where a former prisoner will tell you of the torturous tedium of hammering limestone into little pieces. While there they will tell you they started to study. English. Maths. Economics. Politics.
When you ask them why they would be studying under the strict white regime they would say, “We were getting ready for freedom before freedom came”. I marveled at their faith.
American writer and activist Jim Wallis called this “believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change”. That happened to those prisoners. It happened to South African church leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It happened to South Africa.
As so many believed in spite of the facts before them, they not only believed but as they waited they got prepared for when things changed. That’s a faith I want to live.