James Hatt

Trusting in God's Word for the care of souls | Common Grace informed | @ABC Certified | DMin | Retired USAF

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

If you’re a pastor, biblical counselor, or ministry leader, and your public presence here is mostly argumentative and tribal…

how will hurting people see you as safe?

Shepherds are called to be gentle.
Counselors are called to be patient.
Leaders are called to be examples.

If your tone is combative, sarcastic, or constantly “us vs. them,” don’t be surprised when the anxious, grieving, or struggling keep their distance.

You may win arguments.
But you might lose trust.

And trust is the doorway to ministry.

[Paul David Tripp @PaulTripp]

Let me remind and encourage you again: God is sovereign; you and I aren't. This isn't just theology we should proclaim on Sunday; it must be the foundation of our identity every day of the week. God is in absolute control, and he's infinitely good.

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@jasonkovacs Just signed up

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@jasonkovacs @gospelcareco I need to look into this

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@MelodyHLee @806_reformer @BobKellemen Yes, preventative counseling is a great way to describe what I have been thinking.

I have counsed so many people who would not have had to talk to me is they had been discipled and I am sure I am not alone.

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@MikeBales Me too, good old days

[Jason Kovacs @jasonkovacs]

What I continue to observe in biblical counseling is the importance of seeing people holistically.

We are not merely looking at behaviors. We are looking beneath behaviors to wounds, beneath wounds to sin, and beneath even that to the profound reality that this person is made in the image of God.

Every person who sits before us carries both deep brokenness and deep dignity.

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@BobKellemen I am thankful for your insight on this, Bob. Christians definitely need to be better at public discourse.

[Bob Kellemen @BobKellemen]

A Thread: The Bible Is Sufficient to Teach Us How to Publicly Address Public Accusations. This long-form article uses God’s all-sufficient Word to develop a practical biblical theology for publicly cross-examining public accusations made by biblical counselors. Link below. 1/

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@jasonkovacs I went to a lot of concerts back in the day, that's just some that came to mind. Probably still would but it's a pretty high dollar night out these days.

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

Van Halen
Rush
The Police
REM
ZZ Top
Kiss
U2
Beach Boys
Motley Crue
Styx

[Jason Kovacs @jasonkovacs]

Introduce yourself with 10 bands you've seen live:

U2
Arcade Fire
Modest Mouse
Sunny Day Real Estate
Pearl Jam
Built to Spill
The Tragically Hip
Gregory Alan Isakov
MXPX
Pedro the Lion

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@DocPriyamMD Interesting

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@jasonkovacs @mwes10 Learn something everyday. Fortunately my daily driver is a no frills truck and that's what I prefer. Wife's car is the one with all the fancy gadgets.

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@LowerLeavell Oh man, so do I

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@jasonkovacs @mwes10 Have had two vehicles with this button but never bothered to figure out what it does. Just assumed it was a parking brake.

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

Interesting

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@jared_poulton I am definitely interested

[Paul David Tripp @PaulTripp]

Is mental health biblical?
---
Well, here are the two extremes that you want to avoid. The culture, because it doesn't believe in the heart in the way the Scripture defines it. The heart is the center of your emotions, your mind, your will. The heart is the causal core, it's the directional system of a human being. Since the world doesn't believe that, the world tends to biologize everything. Everything is biological or physical. That's an unbiblical view of a human being.

The other extreme is in the church, and it's a tendency for us to spiritualize everything; every dysfunction is somehow a sin issue. And neither one of those two extremes are biblical. The biblical view is I'm a duality. I'm a spiritual and a physical being. The language that is more current is, “I'm an embodied soul.” So, there is dysfunction of soul and dysfunction of body.

For example, I was looking yesterday at an antibiotic, and one of the side effects of this antibiotic, this is very interesting to me, is anxiety. It's not an anxiety that's a failure of hope in God. It's an anxiety that is physiological-induced by a medication that causes you to be unable to deal with the things emotionally that you could normally deal with.

Now, that is a mental health issue. Does it become a heart issue? Sure, it does because everything is a heart issue because the heart is the control center. In the midst of that experience, I could get angry at God; I could doubt His goodness. All kinds of things can happen, but it's not first a spiritual issue.

I had a counseling experience with a guy who had a huge personality change, became a very angry man, and we discovered it was a result of an accident that affected the limbic area of his brain that was swollen. They call that the ‘rage center’ of the brain. He got medication and was fine. By then, his church had already disciplined him for a sin against his wife and family. I heard what was going on; I immediately sent him to a major hospital for a multidiscipline examination, and they found out what was wrong with him.

So, we can't deny the body, and we can't deny the soul. We have to have a category for things, whether you call them mental health or whatever, we have to have a category for body dysfunction that creates behavioral thought-emotion difficulty. And that needs to be part of a Christian worldview; it needs to be part of a system of Christian biblical counseling.

There are body issues. There are mental dysfunctions. We know that there are people who don't process well. Dyslexia is a mental processing issue. ADHD is a distractibility mental processing issue. So, we've got to have a category that remembers that God not only created souls; we're not disembodied souls, but we have bodies. And the fall didn't just affect the heart and the soul. The fall affected the body as well.
#askpaultripp episode 2

[James Hatt @JamesAHatt]

@LowerLeavell Unfortunately this is true