Some of you may have seen movies based on a series of books by a certain Christian novelist, called The Lord of the Rings. In the tale, the hero is equipped with a secret weapon - a tiny bottle of pure light to pull out whenever he gets into a desperately dark place. If there really were a magical amulet to locate security and contentment in the midnight moments of our lives, I expect just about everybody would want it.

But if there is no secret weapon like Tolkien’s Bottle of Light, there is a secret to contentment in the midst of trying times - and it has to do with to something odd about us human beings. Recently a young Cub Scout I know placed Third in the Pinewood Derby - so in a rather preacherly way I reminded him about something called the Bronze Effect. You see, according to a Cornell University study of Olympic medalists (When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction Among Olympic Medalists, 1995), Bronze medalists are considerably happier than those who win Silver. Does that seem strange to you? Logic says that since Silver medalists finish ahead of those with Bronze, they ought to be happier. They did better, subjectively speaking. But I bet you can figure out the real reason Bronze winners are all smiles: almost without exception, Silver medalists focus on how close they came to winning gold. Bronze medalists, however, are just plain happy to be there, since what they came close to was not winning a medal at all!

The Bronze Effect is an example of what psychologists call counterfactual thinking: that what I think and how I feel have less to do external circumstances and more to do with internal realities. We knew this already: our attitudes, beliefs and expectations regarding others and ourselves – these are the things that shape our experience of life. The great English author John Milton may have said it best: “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heaven out of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” This is why some people can find something good to cling to in their darkest hours, while others can find something negative to obsess about - even when the sun is shining.

We’re not quite at the secret to inner peace yet - but we have laid the groundwork. Last week, we heard how Paul and his companions found joy in getting a bronze medal: believing that God had called them to plant churches on an entirely new continent, they might have been disillusioned to find only a group of women, praying by a river. But as we heard, they preached, and Lydia and her family became the first to hear and receive the Gospel in Macedonia - the world’s first European Christians.

Today we rejoin their story as they run into trouble on the way to the river. Paul impulsively frees a servant girl from some kind of affliction that has caused people to see her as a fortune teller. Her owners, concerned only with how her lost talent will impact their pocketbook, accuse Paul and Silas of being troublemakers, and with a dash of anti-Semitism thrown in by an angry mob, things go from bad to worse. After being publicly beaten with wooden rods, Paul and Silas are pitched into a fetid, windowless prison to await their fate.

At this point I would break in to observe that while I’ve had some fairly crummy days, the heroes of our story are having a truly “horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad day.” This is NOT why they made their dangerous sea voyage. Their friends and freedom gone, their futures very much in doubt, it would be no surprise if the next verse read: “Around midnight, Paul and Silas began loudly complaining about their rotten luck!”

But as we know, instead there was some counterfactual thinking going on. In the pitch-darkness of that cold, foul prison, the other inmates began to listen with increasing wonder at a sound – the sound of singing. It made no sense! These men have just been assaulted by a mob and publicly beaten. They are chained to the stones, their ankles locked in stocks - and they are lifting their voices in praise and worship of God. Somehow, something gave them a reason to sing.

Just as complainers can always find something to complain about, we see here that those who worship can find something to praise God about, even in the worst of circumstances. This is what Paul and Silas were doing. I wish we knew what praise songs or hymns they were singing; we actually know very little about music in the apostolic church. But we do know this: Christians who’ve come through hours just as dark as Paul’s have also found something to sing about.

Eighty years ago, a hard-working dry goods salesman named James Penney was on the verge of ruin. These were the days of that other great economic depression, and like millions of others with their livelihood invested in the wind, James was overwhelmed with insomnia and despair. The stress led to a painful case of shingles and a dependence on painkillers, until, as James would later recall of his days in a hospital bed, “I was broken nervously and physically, filled with despair, unable to see even a ray of hope. I had nothing to live for. I felt I hadn’t a friend left in the world, that even my family turned against me” (Then Sings my Soul, Robert Morgan, p. 259).

Then the morning came when James Penney heard singing coming from the hospital chapel. He would never forget the words that he heard: “be not dismayed whate’er betide / God will take care of you.” Descended from a long line of Baptist preachers, James felt a light go on deep within him - something unlike anything he’d known before. He went into that little chapel and worshipped with the few souls there, and according to him, “suddenly, something happened…I felt as if I had been instantly lifted out of the darkness of a dungeon into warm, brilliant sunlight.” After that day, J.C. Penney would never again know what bottomless despair felt like - so deeply did he remember that a much greater J.C. loved him. (Oh, and his business eventually recovered too. You may even have shopped there!)

Unbounded joy in a hospital ward - counterfactual thinking, you could call that. It really depends upon what you consider to be the relevant facts. Because whatever leads a person to come to worship - a fondness for choral music, the desire to be in community, a love of spell-binding preaching (or of twenty minutes of undisturbed sleep) – in time we are invited to understand that we are here to offer something. We come to experience a God worthy of our worship. To discover that we are created to worship, to glorify the Giver of Life. This is why terminally-ill people have told me that they are living for God and dying to meet Jesus: that by our living and our dying, we can glorify the One Who is Life. The night was dark and the stone was cold in that Philippian dungeon. But from where they were sitting, Paul and Silas could somehow still see God’s light, and believed in what they had been told, what they had seen God do.

I don’t mean to say that this deliberate, worshipful attitude is easy to maintain. We know that pain and anxiety can weaken our will to worship our Creator. But no matter how dark the night, no matter how cold the stone, we can choose to remember that Jesus endured more than this to buy our freedom from prison. We can pray with the awareness that the present pain is temporary, and that life in the Kingdom of Heaven is our true and lasting reality. When we learn as Paul and Silas did, as J.C. Penney did, that God is good, then we will begin to see that God is good all the time.

One last thing: someone might be thinking that this sounds an awful lot like the “power of positive thinking.” I don’t dispute that thinking positively offers some benefit to those who try it, but this is way beyond that. Thinking positively is solely subjective; it gets its “power” from a feeling. Keeping a worshipful heart alive, a God-centered perspective in mind, means getting in touch with an objective reality: that is, even when our days are dark, God is good. Probably the purest form of worship of all is to praise God even when we don’t really feel like it. To do this is to escape from the shackles of our circumstances, and focus on the character of God. Worship like this can bring heavenly sunlight to a darkened place.

For all that, I’d be surprised if Paul imagined his closing hymn would end in an earthquake and the baptism of the jailer and his entire family. But Paul did know that when you start with a worshipful heart, literally anything is possible, simply because anything is possible for God. Shackles can be broken. The tectonic plates of your world can shift. Whole continents can move. An earthquake may not always occur - but even when your immediate circumstances do not change, prayer, praise, and worship still hold life-changing power.

As it turns out, that’s no secret at all. Thanks be to God.