faith

Three Choices You Can Make Today That Will Make Your Life Better

November 25, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 3 Comments

Today is your day to make some decisions! If you struggle with decisions, today is the day to get over the struggle. I’m giving you three decisions that you can make today, that will make your life infinitely better, and heal your body, mind, and soul.

1. Stop Lying

Liars don’t heal. ~Carolyn Myss

Stop lying to yourself about your life. Stop lying to yourself about your job. Stop lying to yourself about your marriage. Stop lying to yourself about your kids. Sometimes we so get into the habit of not living in the truth of who we are, that we basically learn how to live sort of mediocre lives. We basically learn how to live a lie.

When I read that quote, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Learning to live with integrity and learning to live with intention, learning to actually walk the talk, learning to actually do the things you say are important, and learning to live as if they’re actually important, is the way we heal. So often we don’t live that way.

When I was practicing medicine, there was a part of that whole lifestyle that I loved very much. I loved the recognition. I loved the income. I loved being with people. I loved working in an office. I loved dressing up every day to go into an office. I loved science so much. I loved figuring out how things worked. It seemed like it should be the perfect fit for me.

It seemed like it, but I was miserable. You know why I was miserable? Because I missed my kids, and because I would miss so much during the day. At that point, both Stevie and I were working a lot, and there were so many things about it that I didn’t like.

I hated to admit it because I’d just spent 13 years of my life getting a degree. I’d spent a lot of money, and hours upon thousands of hours to do this. There were parts of it I loved doing, yet it was a lie to me in my heart. I knew it, but I didn’t know how to fix it, because how do you fix a giant lie like that?

When I started to untangle myself from it I got a lot of flack. People decided that it was a bad decision, and that I shouldn’t have gone through all that training if I was just going to give it up.

Here’s what I know after all these years, God’s the one who made me love these kids like crazy and couldn’t stand to be without them, he gave me that. Not everybody feels that way. I still work, and I’m still separated from my kids, but I do it in a way that’s honest for me.

Going to an office every day just wasn’t how I am wired emotionally, so I’m not casting judgment on anybody else’s choices at all. I’m so glad we have female doctors that are out there, but what I know for myself is, that’s not how I’m wired, and I wasn’t living the truth of who I am and how I made.

It’s so true in so many areas of our lives.

We are dishonest in relationships.

We blame other people for how we feel.

We think we’re entitled to a certain kind of life.

There are so many ways every day that we’re not living in accordance with what we say we believe, or what we say is important, or what we say is the value that we want to live by.

I do it too, so here’s the thing. We can make ONE really important choice, that then makes a hundred choices for us.

When I was actually practicing medicine, I was the most unhealthy maybe that I’ve ever been, which is kind of an oxymoron. Why? Because I was living completely stressed out, I wasn’t cooking any food at home, I didn’t value sleep, I wasn’t getting regular exercise, all the things that I know actually make you healthy.

I was supposed to be a purveyor of health, and I was doing none of them. So my patients would come in, and I would tell them what they should do, but I was not a practitioner of it.

What I’ve discovered about myself in the last few years is, I’m a healer. That’s how God made me. I’m a healer and I love helping myself heal, and helping other people heal. The way I can do that with the most integrity, and with the most intention, and with truth, is to live it.

So today I got up and I made a tiny little decision to go to the gym. And then I made another tiny little decision to eat a chicken breast and some spinach and tomatoes for lunch. Tonight I’ll make a tiny little decision to go to bed early.

I’ll spend some time today reflecting on God’s word and meditating on a Psalm. I meditate on that because I really am interested in living what I actually think is true.

2. Stop waiting on other people.

You’re not entitled to anything.

Nobody’s to blame for your life.

Stop waiting for somebody else to do something.

Stop waiting for somebody else to change.

Stop waiting for somebody’s opinion of you to change.

Stop waiting for somebody to stop rejecting you.

Stop waiting for somebody to give you permission.

Stop waiting for somebody to do anything.

You don’t need any of that. What you need is for YOU to take responsibility for the life that YOU want to live, fully and intentionally, in wholeness. You need to do that. Nobody needs to do anything else.

We have to stop waiting for other people to do what we think they need to do so we can do what we need to do. No, no, and no. As a matter of fact, some of you put your life on hold because your kids are all messed up, and they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do, or because you feel like your marriage is in a weird place, or because you feel like your job is in a weird place.

You know who’s in a weird place? You are. And you know who can fix it? You can. You can fix it. It’s all just deciding that this is exactly the life you’re supposed to have right now, and living it with all your heart, with integrity, with intention, the way you say you think it should be.

3. Stop looking back

Let me tell you something about your past, there’s nothing there. All it is are thoughts you have in your head. Stop living there. Why? Because you’re using the past as evidence for what you can and can’t do right now.

You’re using the past to blame.

You’re using the past to make excuses.

You’re using the past to live in depression.

You’re using the past to live in anxiety.

You’re using the past to live in fear.

The past does not exist except in your head, except in your thoughts. The only way that you can live in the past is to keep thinking the thoughts of the past. Why would you do that to yourself?

You need to have enough respect for yourself and love for yourself that you say, “No more! I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to keep saying those things over and over. I’m not going to keep reliving that memory over and over. I’m not going to keep blaming that person over and over. I’m not going to keep resenting over and over and over.”

What happens when we do that is, we think that we somehow can punish the people that did this to us. You’re punishing you. You’re keeping yourself from your incredible, amazing present life! You only have one chance to do this day. It’ll never quite be like this again.

I thought about this when I was at the gym this morning, there probably will never be exactly that combination of people there again, in that state of being, in that state of generosity, and love, and community, I don’t get to do this again.

Why am I going to go back and live something that’s not even there and forsake what’s actually here right now? So you just decide.

You don’t need years of therapy. I did years of therapy. It didn’t help. I’m not saying that you might not need some therapy sometime, but I’m saying that in order to get over the past, it’s a thought in your head, and you just DECIDE that you’re going to live from your amazing, beautiful, grateful, generous, abundant, loving, present. You can make right now whatever you want!

A little primmer on decisions...

Decisions aren’t hard, YOU JUST DECIDE. You just stop waiting and you decide. Here’s what I’m doing. How can I make today better?

You don’t need anybody’s permission, you don’t need anybody to change, you don’t need the relationship to iron itself out, you don’t need this job to figure itself out, you don’t need any of that.

You’re capable of creating the reality that you want. You ARE creating the reality that you want right now! The question is, will you take responsibility for it and actually do it? Or will you keep blaming? Will you keep feeling entitled? Will you keep comparing? Will you keep judging? You can do either one you want.

I promise you, if you will stop waiting and start living, you can have the life you want today.

I want you to do some soul searching this week. I want you to think about what decisions you are making, right now, and every day, that are keeping you stuck. You’re making some.

You’re eating the same food that’s keeping you sick and is keeping you stuck. You’re still not getting exercise that you know would make a difference. You’re deciding to still live in resentment. You’re deciding to hold your husband hostage. You’re deciding to have expectations of everybody else so that you can feel better. You’re deciding that you don’t like your job, so you’re miserable, and you make everybody else miserable. You’re deciding to hold a grudge against your best friend because she didn’t invite you somewhere. You’re deciding that you’re angry with one of your kids because they didn’t behave how you thought they knew to.

You’re hindering your present joy on a million things that are outside of your control, when you could just lay hold of it, and have it right now.

That’s the power of the choices that you make every day. You make one amazing, beautiful choice, and it makes a hundred more for you.

I remember when I became a Christian. One, what seemed like little tiny choice, has now made a thousand choices for me. The power of choosing what you want in your life, and doing it on purpose, and letting that choice reverberate and reverberate and reverberate is incredible.

So what little decisions, that turn out to be actually big decisions, can you make today, that will make a thousand choices for you in the future, and will give you the life of service, and love, and generosity that you actually want?

If you’re still feeling stuck, watch this!

How to get your mojo back

October 29, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 3 Comments

Do you feel like you’ve lost your mojo? Are you thinking any, or all, of these things?

What has happened to my life?

My house is a mess.

I haven’t been to the gym in months.

My eating is off plan.

I’m not sleeping well.

I’m scrolling social media too much and getting ragy!

What do you do when you’ve lost your Mojo?

Start with the end in mind.

I find it’s helpful to look ahead and decide what result I want. Let’s don’t drag up 75 reasons why we haven’t done it so far. Let’s just decide the result we want and start living into that space. Start living as if…

What would I do if I was a person who took really good care of her health and was fit?

What would I do if I was a person who had a really organized and peaceful house?

You start figuring out what it is to live in the result. You might even brainstorm it out into your bullet journal. What does it look like? How do you feel?

Let’s say your house is driving you crazy. You’ve got kids doing school from home or now you’re working from home, and you feel like your house is always just a dumpster fire. It’s always a mess. It’s disorganized. You hate being there.

What I want you to do is envision what it would be like if it was organized, uncluttered, peaceful, and nourishing. What would it actually look like and be like? How would you feel when you woke up in the morning if you knew that it was organized? You put yourself into the position of having achieved the result and you learn to live there.

What we tend to do instead is we look to the past and think, “Well I haven’t been doing that so far. My house is pretty much a dumpster fire. Everything is cluttered. Everything is everywhere. I can never find what I want. I hate being here. It’s always a mess.”

That’s living in the past. That’s the way your house used to be. What I want you to do is go to the future. What does that result look like? How can you start living there already? What does it look like to be a person who can easily keep a decluttered house that feels nourishing and peaceful?

Many of you look at the thing that’s bothering you the most in your life right now, and you feel like it’s impossible. I promise you, it’s possible when you learn to take action from a place of feeling like it’s already there.

Then the action feels easy and doesn’t exhaust you. The reason you’re exhausted by the result you’re NOT getting is because the thoughts you think about it are exhausting.

You think to yourself all the time, “I hate how I’ve been eating lately. It’s driving me crazy. I hate my house lately. I can’t keep up.” Those thoughts are exhausting to me even just imagining thinking them! How can you change that and live into the results? Start with the end in mind.

Expect failure.

You’re not going to do it perfectly. Don’t wait until Monday to start, or the first of the month, or after the holidays. The reason you’re going to try to wait until Monday is because you’re afraid of failure, and you think if you just had a little bit more time to get yourself organized then it would be fine. That’s not true.

You need to expect failure. You’re going to start, you’re going to do it fine for two days, and then you’re not going to do it great. This is where the key moment is. You’re going to keep your house organized or you’re going to eat on your plan, or whatever your thing is, and you’re going to do it really really good for two days, and then you’re going to blow it! Am I right or am I right? I’m right!

The question is not whether you’re going to fail. You are going to fail. The question is, what are you going to do about the failure?

What are you going to make it mean? Are you going to make it mean you are incapable of making a change? Are you going to make it mean it’s just not “you” to have a clean organized house or that you’re just not a one of those healthy people?

Or are you going to say, “Oh yeah! There’s going to be failure along the way, so let’s just jump back right in.”

You don’t ask yourself, “What am I going to do IF I fail?” You know you’re going to fail. You decide ahead of time what you’re going to do with the failure, and what you’re going to make it mean.

You’re going to make it mean you’re human and you’re going to jump right back into the thing that you were doing!

Expect failure instead of running from failure.

The reason you don’t want to start until next Monday is because in your mind, that puts off the failure a little longer. No, we embrace the failure. We know what’s going to happen, and when it comes, we know what to do with it because we’re expecting it to come.

Stop making excuses and blaming other people, things, and circumstances.

The reason we lost our mojo is on you and on me. Yes 2020 has been crazy. Yes working from home is different. Yes there are a whole host of things we can blame. Let me tell you why you don’t want to do that.

If you blame the fact that we’re dealing with a crazy virus, or you blame the fact that now you’re having to work from home, if you blame a circumstance or someone else, you make yourself a victim to whatever you’re blaming. Then the only way your situation can change is if your circumstance changes, or if those people change.

NEWSFLASH: those people aren’t changing and your circumstances may not be changing either!

How can you learn to take responsibility and manage you? You take care of the only thing you can take care of, which is how you respond to the crisis, and how you respond to the situation, and how you show up to crazy 2020, or how you show up to the working from home life.

You can only control you.

Here’s the beauty of taking 100% responsibility. You CAN change you. You might not be able to change your circumstances. You might not be able to change the people in your life, but you CAN change you. That’s a powerful place to be!

Don’t put yourself in a place of weakness by thinking you need something or someone to change, and THEN you’ll get your mojo back. Stop making yourself a victim to the circumstances, or to the other people. You take responsibility for you, and decide what result you want in your life and how you can start living into that now.

Get some accountability.

It really helps when you want to achieve a certain result to tell someone, or do it with someone, so you have some accountability. That’s why we’re doing a challenge together in November!

A lot of times the holidays are when it all falls apart. You’re doing your exercise plan just great, or you’re keeping your house nice and tidy and decluttered, and then the holidays come and it all goes to pot!

“Well, I guess now I’m just waiting until January.” No! We don’t want to do that. We want to really get back control of the things we want to have happen in our lives, so that as we go through the holiday season we keep these practices in place.

Instead of just letting everything go, we just keep it in place.

We’re starting the challenge on November 2nd and it’s called The Honor Challenge: 12 Ordinary Days, 10 Life-changing habits. It’s based on this scripture out of Romans 12:10.

Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. ~Romans 12:10

Go here to sign up and get the Honor Challenge Guide. I will be doing live videos every day here on my Lifeingrace Facebook page, and TOGETHER, we’re going to get our mojo back!!!

I can’t wait to get started!

You always find what you’re looking for

September 16, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 1 Comment

As you know, we have been through kind of a strange time as a nation and as a culture, and it has given us a lot to process and work on and think about.

There are the people who process change and hardship and suffering by over performing and people who process by under performing. Both ways end up at the same place.

I’m am an over performer, so I come out of the gates like, “I’m going to learn everything. It’s going to be great. I’m not going to let quarantine get me down.” Then about four weeks later, I’m crying on the floor. And then there are those who underperform. They start their crying on the floor and then they slowly get up and start to function.

One thing that I’ve noticed about myself over the last couple of weeks is I’ve been letting the division get to me. We say to ourselves in our mind that there are these camps of people. The truth of the matter is most of us are somewhere in the middle, but what can appear to happen is this divide, and you can tell who’s on one side and who’s on the other.

You’re supposed to hate all the people on the other side of whatever your camp is, right?

We tend to villainize the people who aren’t in our camp.

I started to see this huge divide and think,”Oh my gosh, we’re so divided. People can’t see the nuance. We’re just so divided. We are pitting people against one or the other.”Then I realized, wait, this is how I see it because this is how I choose to see it.

When I made that revelation for myself, it helped me kind of step back and think,”People are probably not just one way or the other. They’re probably nuanced like I am.”

I don’t feel like I know everything about everything. And they probably don’t either.

It kind of drove the point home that I’ve been learning for the last 10 years, which is

You always find what you’re looking for.

What I mean is if you look at your spouse, and your story in your head about your spouse is that they don’t contribute and they’re not supportive, you will look for evidence for your story and you will find it. You will find LOTS of evidence for your story, which will confirm your story.

Your brain likes to confirm its story and that’s okay, except ask yourself, “Do I like what I’m finding?” Because if I don’t like what I’m finding, I probably need to look a little closer, see a little more nuance, see both sides of the story.

Those of you who have that story about your spouse, you could probably tell another story about them. My spouse is supportive. My spouse goes to work every day and he takes care of our family and he loves us, right? You could tell both stories.

Which story helps you like the way you show up?

If your story is he’s not supportive, he doesn’t help, he doesn’t love me, and he doesn’t support me, then you’re going to show up pretty needy and pretty defensive. But there’s always another side to the story.

If you live from the other side of the story, you’re going to probably give him the benefit of the doubt, and show up with more curiosity and compassion and love. That’s probably where you want to be living your life, I would guess.

The same thing is true when you see somebody on the internet that you don’t agree with.

Can we hold the same space for people?

Can we see that there are two stories?

Can we see that telling ourselves everybody who thinks THAT way is awful and I don’t like THOSE humans, pretty much Xs out about 50% of the humans!?

I found myself going down into this place where I would do that. I would think, “Well, they’re one of THOSE people and I don’t agree with that,” and I would kind of discount them and lump them into this group of people that I don’t really respect or agree with.

Can we hold space for each other?

Can we at least acknowledge that there’s another part to the story, and that person who’s really worried about going out might have a sick child, and it feels so personal, and it feels like everybody that’s recommending that we do something different is against her child.

Can we just be curious about the people who are on the other side?

This is what I have ask of myself, because you will always find what you’re looking for, and if your brain is looking for division and looking for people to be wrong and looking for the negative side of things, you will always find it.

Then you have to ask yourself, do I like living from the place where I think half the world is wrong and awful. I really don’t. I really like holding a bit more curiosity and love and respect for people who don’t see it the way I do. So it’s been a good exercise for me, honestly, because I found myself saying, “Oh, everybody’s crazy. The world’s going crazy.”

It does feel like the world’s going crazy, but can we hold space for people and can we just be a little bit curious? Can we step back just a little bit and say, “I can kind of see why that person with that upbringing from that part of the country could see it that way?”

Where in your life are you doing this? Are you doing it in your marriage? Are you doing it with one of your kids? You may have a story in your mind about one of your kids and everything they do just confirms the story that you already have. I would beg you to ask yourself, “What’s the other side of that story?” What if more of the time you lived from the other side of that story?

We’re all doing this in different parts of our lives, in different settings, in our marriage and our families, and in the culture. It just makes us better humans to be willing to HONOR other people and the way they think, even if it’s not the same as us, and to try to find some understanding.

It makes us better humans to listen a little bit more to their side. Ask, “I wonder why they think that,” or “I wonder why they so quickly go to that.”

I’ve really been working on this. This year has been difficult for us in a lot of ways, and we have the choice of how we want to see it.

Even if I looked at last year and all the different things that have happened, I could think,”Oh my gosh, God hates us. This has been hard. Why do bad things happen to us? Why has it been like this?”I could look at it that way, but when I look at it that way, I feel like a victim.

I’m not a victim. I don’t want to feel like a victim.

The other choice I have is,”Wow, look at what has happened FOR me. Look at the chance that I have gotten to see things differently, to really grow, to accept the suffering and challenge, and let it be my teacher and let it change me in the ways that it can.”

What if we looked at it like that?

We have a pandemic in front of us. You can tell yourself a story about that. And you live a certain way, according to that story. Remember though, there’s another side to the story.

I do believe that the pandemic of fear is real, and when we live in fear, do we like the way we show up? It’s okay to do it either way, but I’m just asking us, asking myself, to step back from all of our dogma and say, “Is believing this story helping me show up the way I want to?”

It’s a question that’s worth asking, because if it didn’t matter how you looked at it then we would all see it the same way, and obviously we don’t all see it the same way.

We don’t see the pandemic the same way. We don’t see marriage the same way. We don’t see suffering the same way, right? What that tells me is that the way you see something really becomes your story about it, and you can choose how you see it.

Sometimes we look at a circumstance like a pandemic and go,”Well, there’s no other way to see it, except that this is terrible and we’re all going to die. We should stay in our houses forever.” That’s one way to see it.

We have to ask ourselves,”When I look at it that way, do I like the way I show up? Do I like the person that story makes me into?” It’s really worth asking, “How do I want to see this? How do I want to look at life? How do I want to look at my relationships?”

You might be saying to yourself,”Well, you’re just looking at it with rose colored glasses.”Possibly, but what I always ask myself is,”When I tell myself this story and live from this story, is that the best, highest version of myself? Am I living from love? Am I giving people grace and the benefit of the doubt and all the things that I would want people to give me?”A lot of times I’m not.

It’s been a really good time of learning and growth. That’s what I think is so cool about collective hardship, collective suffering. We talk about this a lot at my gym, voluntary hardship.

Sometimes we sign up for things that are hard and we, in our minds, tell ourselves, “No, this is good for me. It’s good for me to challenge myself. It’s good for me to deny myself. This is going to teach me so much.”

Then we have the involuntary hardship, involuntary suffering. Sometimes we don’t change our mindset about it and decide how we want to think about it, and then we get into this weird victim mode where everything’s happening to me and i’ts all wrong. Woe is me!

I just find that I like the way I show up when I truly believe that God is doing this for me. This is for me, not because I need to be punished or did something wrong. We’re all sinners. We all need to repent. We all need God’s grace, but coming from the aspect of this is for us. He’s doing this for us. This is for our good.

He will turn every situation into good.

Is there any harm in believing that? How does it help us show up when we believe that?

Especially in the divide that I see in my own life, the divide that I see in my own family sometimes, the divide that I see in my own town, in my own Facebook feed, it’s worth considering giving people a little bit of space and being curious about what makes them tick. It’s worth being curious about how we are interpreting things, and how we are seeing things.

Do we like ourselves when we interpret things that way, and when we show up the way we are showing up? Because we always find what we are looking for.

How to make any relationship better

July 22, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 1 Comment

We all have been having a lot of together time, and it can push people different ways, especially if we’re talking about marriage. You can both be on the same page with how you think about what’s going on and how you’re processing everything, or you can think and process totally differently, or it can be a mixture of both.

Stevie and I think the same way but we process differently. It can either make you come closer together or it shows how much difference there is. This is not just true with your spouse, but with your children, and just with the world at large.

I’ve learned most things through a lot of heartache, and I’m still making a ton of mistakes, but this one thing makes a huge difference in relationships.

More curiosity, less judgment.

I’m an enneagram three, so when life gets crazy I process it by getting productive. We’re having a quarantine? Ok, I’m going to learn how to make sourdough bread, and I’m going to organize my whole house, and I’m going to start raising ducks and chickens.

It would be really easy for me to judge everyone else who doesn’t deal with it the same way. There are a lot of people, even in my own house, who don’t deal with stress that way. They don’t want to make 10 loaves of sourdough bread in five days and watch endless videos about how to organize their pantry!

We have to be really careful about how we judge ourselves.

I was doing just fine on the surface, and praying for people who I knew were being greatly affected, but I didn’t think I was being affected that much. Then I took some friends of mine some sourdough and as soon as I saw them, my eyes welled with tears, and I was emotional for days afterwards.

It opened something up in me that I was covering up with productivity. Seeing people from my real life made me realize I was grieving. I missed my friends, and my gym, and having the house to myself.

I started spiraling, wondering if anything is ever going to be the same. But then instead of judging myself for being emotional, because I can be pretty hard on myself, I got curious.

I could have judged myself for having three naps and not getting anything done for a few days. Instead I treated myself like a kind aunt. I told myself it was alright to grieve, to be angry, all of it.

I started to let myself feel the hard things. Maybe you have been frozen with fear. The best way to get out of that is really lean in and feel it, and let yourself be where you are, and have more curiosity and less judgement towards yourself.

Then we can work on having less judgement and more curiosity about the people in our house. Right now they may be driving you crazy, but this is what I’m learning.

However quickly you can get to curiosity and leave the judgment behind, is how soon you get to peace and laughter.

We had a situation where someone let our dog Bandit out. I was judging the whole situation and everyone involved! I was thinking, “I should be in house, having my bath and enjoying my life, not out in the mud chasing a dog.”

I was judging Tom for having his best day ever during this adventure. I was judging the teenagers because they didn’t run out and help. I was judging Stevie because he was irritated.

When we start judging a situation, it becomes a domino of judgement.

I had to be on to myself and start by not judging myself harshly for being judgmental. Then I had to get curious and I thought, “Of course Tom is loving this! It’s the most excitement he’s had in weeks. Of course the teenagers don’t want to be out in the mud. Of course Stevie is irritated. Who am I to say it shouldn’t bother him?”

Once I switched off the judgement and let everyone off the hook, it became a funny comedy of errors.

More curiosity and less judgement of the people we live with really helps our relationships.

What if we had more curiosity and less judgement of the wold? We all think we have the answers. No one thinks anyone else is doing it right. I find it so interesting that everything going on has brought this out in us with such force.

What if we just let people do things the way they do things?

Let’s all give each other

more grace,

more peace,

more compassion,

more curiosity,

less judgment.

Maybe we’ll start to see a little more joy and even some lightheartedness.

Suffer Now or Suffer Later

July 15, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 2 Comments

What is your false pleasure? We all have at least one. I have a lot of them! Usually the reason we’re choosing the false pleasure to begin with is because we’re trying to avoid the suffering that comes with being human.

Suffering is part of life. Suffering is iconic in the life of a believer because we have a suffering savior who suffered for us. The good news is God sent the Holy Spirit to be our comforter.

Comforter- one who walks alongside us.

I spent 30 minutes crying the other morning because life is hard, and we have a lot on our plate right now, and I came to kind of a breaking point in my heart. Instead of trying to buffer the bad moment away, I just sat and cried, right in front of my precious 18 year old daughter.

She stood beside me and comforted her mama, patting me on the back. It was so sweet! As she stood there by my side, I wanted to sob even harder because I thought, “Lord, this is so beautiful. This is a visible demonstration of what your Holy Spirit does for us.”

When we stop running from pain and suffering, it unlocks so much power in our lives.

When we run from our pain now , and we choose to suffer later, we usually seek some kind of false pleasure so we don’t have to be where we are, or feel what we feel. Now, not only do we have the problem we had in the first place, but we have a weight problem, or a money problem, or a Facebook problem, or a procrastination problem.

We create more problems later by using false pleasures, trying to get out of the initial suffering.

We’ve failed to acknowledge that this is what it means to be human! It doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t mean we’re being punished. It doesn’t mean all the things we try to make it mean when we’re going through a hard time.

I was sitting in church one Sunday and Thomas started acting out, and talking loud, and just causing a ruckus right away. Stevie and I both turned to him and gave him a correction, to which he responded, “You’re not even my real mom and he’s not my real dad anyway!”

I know that it’s just part of the process, but sometimes it just cuts like a knife. This is what it means to bear someone else’s burdens. The burden and grief that he carries from all of the loss he’s had, he needs us to come alongside him and help bear that burden. Sometimes that burden feels like it’s directed right towards us.

In that moment, the disappointment and hurt and pain of it brought instant tears to my eyes. I had to be willing to sit with the pain and understand that this is what it means to be human. It doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong as an adoptive mama. It doesn’t mean I love him any less, or that he loves me any less. This is our humanness and this is where we are.

We have this idea somehow, if we are doing it all right, then we wouldn’t experience this world’s brokenness, so when we do, we try to push it away.

We aren’t taught how to be uncomfortable. We are taught to make ourselves feel better. Only it isn’t better because when we buffer the discomfort away, we create more problems in the future. In those moments if we can just remember, this is what it’s like to have a relationship with someone you love.

This is how I am to God. I disregard Him in so many ways. I pitch my temper tantrum and tell Him, “If you were my father, things would be better. I wouldn’t have to go through this. This would be easier!”

The beautiful thing that happens is we get a chance to really work on our relationship with God and our relationship with ourselves.

When we allow pain to be our teacher, when we can sit with it, instead of trying to push it away, suffering transforms us. The pain that we have can be transformed into the gift that we give to the world.

I think of the gift Mary gave us in Christ. She wraps this baby in swaddling clothes and 33 years later, he’s in grave clothes. The pain that she went through as a mama to walk with him through all of the suffering, to help him bear that, to see him ridiculed, to see him beaten, and then those grave clothes…It’s so interesting how that suffering was transformed into the greatest gift the world has ever known.

In those moments of sitting in fresh pain, I try to remind myself He’s going to use this for good. This is all going to be for our benefit. It may not look like it now, it looks hard now, but it’s all going to be fine.

It’s hard to remember, but I started by getting to the point where I can sit with discomfort and pain and just be with it, instead of having to escape. I can suffer now or I can suffer more later.

What it means to love your neighbor

July 8, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

Love your neighbor as yourself. ~Mark 12:31

It’s been a really heavy couple of weeks for my family and for the world, and I am just feeling every bit of it.

I’ve been meditating on what it really means to love your neighbor.

C. S. Lewis said,“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”I was listening to some teaching this weekend and the pastor talked about how Jesus is waiting. He is inside your neighbor waiting to be loved by you.

Mostly Jesus is loving us, but I love the thought that Christ is in the other person, and what you do other people is what you do to Him. That image would probably save me from a lot of heartache and tears. Honestly that’s probably all we need to say about it.

I want you to think about the person that you’ve been fighting with this week on social media, or who you’ve been thinking to yourself, that person is doing it wrong, that person is not showing up right. You might even give them a name, that person is this or that, but I want you to really imagine that person is where Jesus resides.

How I treat them, and think about them, and love them, or don’t love them is how I treat Him.

I want to tell you a little story from my own childhood, because I feel like stories are where we connect. Stories are where we have so much in common. There’s obviously so much that divides us as people, but people can argue with your politics, and they can argue with your theology, and they can argue with your dogma, but people can’t really argue with your story.

My mama had been in beauty school, and when she finally got her license, I started going to nursery school. My life at that point, honestly, was crazy.

The first day that I ever got dropped off to nursery school, the first person I met on the playground was Leticia. And she and I became fast friends. We went to school together, all through elementary school, all through middle school, and all through high school. We became best friends.

We cheered together in high school. We were on all the same committees together. She was so smart. She was so good at cheerleading, she could do a toe touch like nobody’s business! All through those years she was one of my dearest friends. I never thought of her as my black friend, I just thought of her as my dear friend who was amazing.

I had so much of my own turmoil in my own life that I was just thankful she wasn’t judging me because I was poor, or because my daddy wasn’t around, or because he was an alcoholic, or because he showed up at the ballpark drunk. I was SO thankful.

She just seemed to love me for me. I loved her for her.

After we both went to college, we went our separate ways. She’s a very successful attorney in Knoxville now. When I think about her, I still have so much love, so I messaged her last week and just said I was sorry for everything that was going on,“I love you so much. I’m so grateful for you in my life.” I thanked her for loving me all those years, for just being such a dear, dear friend to me. And she wrote back and she said, “Thank you for leading me to Christ, and for being a good friend to me.”

She told me about what she experienced after high school, and what she experienced even sometimes that I didn’t know about during that time. It made me just love her even more. The way she responded, with so much compassion, was just like I remembered her. Full of love, even though in a lot of ways, she had been mistreated by people who were ignorant or didn’t appreciate how amazing she is.

That whole exchange sent me into a tailspin as I think about what I’ve been taught in the scriptures about loving our neighbor. Literally that person bears the image of God, whoever it is we come across.

Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. ~Frederick Buechner

First of all we need to repent. In our church every Sunday we confess,“Lord, I have not loved you with my whole heart, and I have not loved my neighbor as myself.”I think the first step to being a good neighbor is admitting that we’re not good neighbors. Just being honest with God, and honest with ourselves and vulnerable, and saying,“I have not been a good neighbor.”

To confess that we have not been the neighbor that we could be to the people in our lives, who are hurting and who need us, is so freeing because we don’t have to pretend like we’re always doing it right. We can just confess and choose to have a tender heart that is teachable. I want to have a spirit of humility so I can continue to learn.

We also need to receive the love and forgiveness of God. We can’t give out something we don’t have. We have to fully receive the love of Christ, and know we are adored, and we are taken care of, and know that everything we’ve ever needed, he’s already done and finished.

When we live from that place we get to live with reckless abandon, because we know we’re being held. We can say, “There’s the example and I will never do it perfectly,” and then we can rest, receive his perfect love, and acknowledge and honor the image of God in every person we meet.

We need to commit to love as a practice.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things ~1 Corinthians 13:7

BEAR ALL THINGS

Since Tom came to live with us this year we’ve been in play therapy helping him to heal. When we first started going, he was always playing with emergency vehicles. He was pretending like the the house was on fire and somebody got hurt. He was pretending like we were taking the ambulance to the hospital, things like that.

At one point he started bringing me all of these big scary stuffed snakes and crocodiles, and then he brings me a dragon. After he loaded me up and I’m sitting there with my arms full, he goes back to play with normal kid stuff, like Legos.

It was a major breakthrough. Our precious counselor said, “He just needs you to hold the scary things so he can play.” Those words have reverberated in my heart. That’s what it means to bear each other’s burdens.

Can we hold the scary things of other people?

Can we be part of the solution?

Can we bear the burdens of people who are having a hard time bearing their own burdens?

BELIEVES ALL THINGS

Believing all things means we give people the benefit of the doubt. It means believing the best of our neighbor.

Stevie said something at dinner the other night that really hurt and offended me. But I love this man. I know his heart. I know he loves me. To really be a good neighbor to him means to show him loving kindness and not be so easily offended. Being offended is how so much division starts, so believing the best of people brings us back together.

HOPES ALL THINGS

With what has been going on in our world the past three months, I think we’ve all lost hope a time or two. But can we really trust that God is going to take care of us and that His purposes are going to be fulfilled, that He’s going to use this for good? Can we be a source of hope for our neighbor?

ENDURES ALL THINGS

Endure is a military term that means stay strong until the death. This is where I have just had to dig deep the last few days. After I let myself just be broken by it, it does raise up in me this warrior mama spirit.

This is not going to take us out. All this division is not going to win. And letting that warrior rise up in us, so that we can be strong to the end, so that we can endure for the sake of our neighbor, is part of what it means to really love our neighbor.

These ways that we can physically and tangibly love our neighbor will cost us something.

Love always has sacrifice attached to it. So when we think about Christ’s love for us, it always has a sacrificial component. Love is ready to sacrifice its time, its resources, its name, whatever it is, love is always ready to sacrifice. And I just think about that so much when I think about what is happening in my own family and in the world right now.

Another pastor I was listening to talked about the fact that there’s going to be a gap between you and your neighbor. You don’t understand him. He’s not like you. His family is not like yours. He doesn’t believe like you.

You get to choose what goes in the gap.

You get to choose how you think and feel about this person. This is a lot of what I teach in Life Mentoring School. Your ability to love your neighbor has nothing to do with your neighbor. Your ability to love your spouse has nothing to do with your spouse. Your ability to love your children has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with you.

This is a practice that we have to keep practicing. What do I want to think and feel about my neighbor, and how can I practice that on a daily basis? How can I be mindful of them? How can I think on them?

God give us grace to choose love, compassion, and understanding, even for people who aren’t reacting the way we think they should, or showing up the way we think they should. And when we don’t want to show up at all, which is the way I’ve been feeling, let us remember this scripture.

Do not growing weary in doing good. ~Galations 6:9

Christ is in your neighbor. Your neighbor is the image-bearer of God, and how you treat your neighbor is how you treat Christ. It’s the most tangible example that I can give for myself of how I want to show up to the people in my life. That person that is the image-bearer of God, that person that he loves so deeply, that he sacrificed everything for, how will I show up to that neighbor?