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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.

54. How to Stay Healthy

July 19, 2020 by Lisa Herod Leave a Comment

Episode 54 Show Notes

How to Stay Healthy

People ask me this all the time! “Dr Eddie, what can I do to stay as healthy as possible? How can I help my immune system?” So I am sharing some of my favorites to staying healthy and things we can do to keep ourselves feeling better! Let’s get into it!

Find More about Dr. Edie and what she’s up to here:

This episode of Your Best Beautiful Life is brought to you by one of my favorite things in the world, my Young Living oils and supplements. I lead a group of over 8,000 women and I educate them in a private Facebook group. Head over to www.ediewadsworth.com, grab your starter kit and get started with me today.

Dr Edie’s Website is Life in Grace Blog
Join Dr Edie for Tuesday Livestream https://www.facebook.com/DrEdieWadsworth/

Thanks so much for tuning in. Join us again next week for another episode!

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?

Are you feeling stuck? – 5 questions to get you back on track

June 24, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 2 Comments

Are you feeling stuck in life? Are you feeling confused? Are you feeling frozen with fear? Are you overwhelmed? I have five questions that you can ask yourself and get you moving so you can get unstuck!

I have learned from being stuck, there are things we can do, small tweaks, and questions we can ask to train our minds to think differently, so we can get ourselves unstuck.

Question 1 – Are you holding on to the past?

I was stuck because of my past for about 43 years. For me, it was my childhood.

You might be stuck in some resentment from a year ago, or six months ago, or yesterday, or last month. There is hope! You do not have to feel that way. You do not have to cling to the past.

Who would you be if you weren’t holding on to your painful story?

Here’s what I realized with my own past. There were some things that had been done to me, some resentment I was holding on to, some wounds I was holding on to, what I perceived as people doing me wrong I was holding on to.

That thing that was done to you and me is in the past. What I did was hold on to it, and I kept punishing myself with it over and over and over again. I used it as a story and let it play in my head over, and over, and over, again.

When I first started learning about how to help myself get past the past, one of the beautiful things I learned is that I can choose to hang onto that story, or not. No matter how true it is, no matter how much the story has been embellished in my mind over the years, it’s my choice.

When you hang onto a painful story it’s like holding onto a porcupine. Guess who gets to feel the pinch, and the prod, and the poke of that story?

I loved, in a sick way, playing the story over and over in my head, and it so defined me. I am here to tell you that it doesn’t have to define you. That really super painful story that you’re holding on to, is keeping you stuck.

My story was keeping me stuck in my relationships.

It was keeping me stuck in my work.

It was keeping me stuck in my parenting.

It was keeping me stuck in my spiritual life, because I sort of blamed God.

Your story is like a really heavy backpack. Mine is 292 pages long, it’s heavy! You’re lugging this story through life, and you wonder why you can’t go anywhere. Your body feels heavy because you’re carrying this emotional weight, this emotional backpack, this heavy, painful story.

Your brain thinks it’s really important for you to keep thinking it and believing it, but I’m here to tell you that freedom awaits you on the other side of letting the story go.

I know it feels important to hold on to it. Your brain is telling you, “You have to hold on to this story. It was true.” It seems to justify the pain you went through by holding on to it. Really it doesn’t, because you’re just keeping yourself in pain.

Little by little, I just started to let go of the story. I wrote it down, called it “All the Pretty Things,” and I let it go. You know what happened?

Unbelievable, amazing, life-changing freedom happened when I let go of that story. My life literally opened up and began to just blossom in every imaginable way.

So many amazing things happened when I dared let go of the painful story. The other thing that happened is my heart so opened up to the people in my life and to the people in my story, that I began to have so much more compassion for them, and for me.

Question 2 – Are you letting your brain run wild with all kinds of stories and negativity?

A few months ago, I came off a crazy, busy season, and I was exhausted. For several weeks after that, I just told myself, “I’m just spinning my wheels. I’m not getting stuff done.” I thought I was just stating the facts. “I really am stuck!”

What we don’t realize is that we’re creating the stuck-ness. We’re creating the non-productiveness by continuing to let that thought, and that message, and that story go unsupervised in our heads.

Have you ever considered that when you say, “I’m stuck,” that’s just a thought? It’s just a thing you’re telling yourself and it’s optional.

Your brain loves to tell itself that you’re stuck, and confused and you don’t know what to do, and let me tell you why. Because if you’re stuck, you don’t have to do anything! If you’re confused, you don’t have to move forward. If you’re stuck, then there’s nothing else to do, there’s no creativity to explore, there are no options.

You decide what you want to think about your day, and your week, and your month. What do you want to think about your life? What do you want to think about your marriage? Don’t get caught in a loop of perpetual stuck-ness!

Be on to yourself, but not mad at yourself. Be kind and tell yourself, “It’s okay, darlin’, you’re not stuck. We know what to do. We’ve got this. You know how to create this. You know how to start the book. You know how to lose the weight. You know how to get clarity in your relationship.”

As a man thinks in his heart so is he. ~ Proverbs 23:7

You decide. Your thoughts will become your life. Be on to yourself when you’re in this loop of stuck-ness because you’ll prove yourself right.

Question 3 – Are you willing to feel your feelings?

When you stifle your feelings and you refuse to feel them, you buffer instead. You seek false pleasure. You go scroll on Facebook, you go have some cookies, you eat your feelings, you shop your feelings, or you scroll your feelings.

When you refuse to feel your feelings, the fuel for your life is literally stifled. Your feelings fuel your life.

When you squash them all, you will create zero momentum in your life, because you need to be in charge of those feelings. You need to be willing to feel the bad ones and willing to generate the good ones.

Life is like this: there are a lot of good things and there are some bad things. We signed up for all of it. We say yes to all of it. I say yes when it’s hard, and when I feel grief or I feel loss. I also say yes to the moments when little Tom Tom reaches his hand up around my neck in the mornings, and feels to make sure I’m still there, to that overwhelming gratitude. I’m here for all of it!

We signed up for it all. If you aren’t willing to feel it, your life will feel like there’s no flow. It will feel stuck because you are stuck in your emotions, and you won’t let them flow.

We’re so afraid to feel the bad ones! You know what emotions feel like? They come and go. They come in waves. We have to be willing to say, “Oh, interesting. I feel down today. I feel a lot of loss today.” Feel it, welcome it, let it come on in, sit with it. “Oh, a little anxiety. Interesting. Come on in. Sit with me. Let’s feel it. What does it feel like? Oh, it’s tight in my chest, and in my throat. Okay.”

We welcome it because when you welcome it, it just goes on through. Then the next ones come on through. Then you can pick a few that you want. You know how I want to feel today? I want to feel so motivated about my life! I want to feel so energized to share whatever I have to share with other people.

I can generate emotions when I’m willing to just let them all come, let them all be there. What we do instead is we seek a lot of false pleasure. We just cover it up. We just pretend it’s not there. We just squish it down. That is no recipe for the life you want.

Feeling your feelings is the key to getting clarity and momentum in your life, because you’re here for it all.

Question 4 – Are you being a victim to the people or circumstances of your life?

Your circumstances have absolutely nothing to do with you, and the way you want to show up, and the way you want to create momentum in your life. Absolutely nothing, unless you let them. We make ourselves a victim to people, we make ourselves a victim to our circumstances, and when we do that, we lose all of our power.

I would get going with my life, but my husband holds me back.

I would get going with my life, but these children.

I would get going with my life, but my rascally boss.

I would do that thing, but I don’t have enough money.

I don’t have enough time.

I don’t have enough.

You are not a victim. You get to be in charge of what you think, and how you feel, and how you show up in your life. You don’t have to wait for a specific set of circumstances. As a matter of fact, even when those circumstances come, if you haven’t decided to be in charge of your thoughts and your feelings and your actions, it won’t matter.

You won’t do the thing then, if you won’t take responsibility now. You are not a victim to the people or the circumstances in your life. When you realize that, you will stand in your place of internal power, where you really have the ability to emotionally grow up, and take responsibility for every little thing in your life. It’s such an amazing, powerful place to create your life from.

Question 5 – Are you using your gift to serve other people?

A lot of times when we feel stuck, we are thinking about ourselves over and over. It’s a very selfish place to be because we’re overthinking about ourselves, and that makes us over worried about ourselves.

Stop worrying and just do. Stop worrying and just serve.

Who is God putting right in front of you every single day that you can love, and serve, and offer something to? What little action can you take that breaks you out of yourself, that breaks you out of this weird, negative, stuck loop, and makes you see the people right in front of you who need you?

This whole stuck thing is a way to keep us from serving the people in our lives who need what we have, so let’s just start giving it away.

What I have to give isn’t perfect, but I just show up and offer what I have. Offer a little piece of yourself, a piece of your heart, a little bit of service and love to somebody else. It’s the best way get you out your own way. I feel less stuck when I get out of my own way and serve others.

If you are feeling stuck in life, I hope that you will, number one, let go of the past. Number two, decide what you want to think and feel. Number three, feel your actual feelings and stop eating them, and shopping them, and Facebooking them. Number four, stop being a victim to your circumstances and to the people in your life. Number five, start loving and serving people with your whole heart and you won’t feel stuck anymore!

Life Mentoring School is open for enrollment now. If you need help with these steps, we go in depth. We really focus on how to get your life exactly where you want it, how to get yourself unstuck, how to move past your past, and how to really become a relationship Ninja!

If you want those tools, consider joining Life Mentoring School. You can go to this link to sign up while enrollment is still open. It has been life changing, and I’m so very honored by the people who trust us with their stories. We would love to have you join this program.

Thriving in times of crisis – 4 ways to stay calm & productive

June 17, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

It’s been a rough week and it’s only Wednesday. I spent yesterday morning in a puddle of tears for a variety of reason. Mostly because I’m human and life is half amazing and half terrifying.

This morning I’m committed to meditating on Psalm 107:9, “The Lord satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.”

It’s a good reminder that ALL IS WELL.

And with the current state of crazy chaos we find ourselves in, there’s never been a more important time to TRULY decide what you want to think, how you want to feel, and HOW YOU WANT TO SHOW UP IN THE WORLD.

It’s always a choice. We’re going to dive deep today into what it means to make hard choices NOW for benefit LATER.

You can choose thoughts that bring comfort and peace and calm. Or you can let that crazy brain run wild with whatever it chooses.

But remember that thoughts have consequences. And those consequences become your life.

one- Remember WHOSE YOU ARE.

Stevie and the kids and I went on an overnight tent camping trip. When you’re in the woods at night, it’s kind of an eerie thing. We had three tents. Tom and I were sleeping in one tent. Elea had her own tent and Stevie had his own tent.

Elea’s tent and my tent were right beside each other. There’s literally no light. You hear weird noises. We were whispering back and forth to each other the whole time, “Did you hear that? What was that?”

You know what gave me so much comfort? Stevie’s tent was right there. He’s the dad. He’s the boy scout. He’s got this. He’s got bear spray and a knife and a saw and he’s strong. So much comfort! I would never in a million years do that without him.

Same for our Heavenly Father. He’s here with us. This is not surprising to him. We can trust him with our jobs or our lack of jobs right now. We can trust him with our kids. We can trust him with our lives. It’s not helping anybody for us to live in fear and panic.

Have you noticed when you are spinning in fear and panic, it makes you feel alone?

I am here to remind you that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

This is not God’s first rodeo. This is not a surprise. There’s no panic in heaven. Only comfort and grace and love and mercy and peace.

So how can we incorporate that into our daily lives? Less panic, more peace, less fear, more trust! One thought is not serving us in any way and one thought will keep us calm and productive!

So how can we remember whose we are? I have been keeping my bible open to Psalm 91 to remind me for a while. You might also find my Lenten study helpful and you can find it here.

We are loved by the most high God. He is in charge here. He will take care of us. Whatever your circumstances, they are not surprising to him.

two – Remember WHO YOU ARE.

You are resilient, so much more resilient than you think you are. You’ve been through hard things before. You are so much more resilient than you think. You will come through this.

Remember how God made us. He made us with these amazing, creative minds. He made us to be like children that could trust in Him so we can just go about our business because we’re not worried about all the other stuff. We know He is here, and He’s made this amazing playground called life for us!

We also are living through something that gives us this chance to have a broad range of emotion. I’m not saying, “Oh, you should just be Pollyanna and you should just be happy all the time.” The truth is that both negative and positive feelings are essential for surviving and thriving in times of crisis.

I have had many periods of frustration. I know many of you work from home and now everybody’s home! It’s kind of hard to work from home with a house full of people.

I had this moment where I was thinking, “Does everybody not realize I have a job to do? I have things I have to do.” I’m just one of the humans and I get to be frustrated sometimes and I get to have fear sometimes. I let myself feel that. I let it wash over me and then I come back to the things that ground me, scripture and my family and my purpose for being here, which is to serve and love.

Practice deep and abiding positive emotions such as hope, compassion and heartfelt gratitude that times of crisis bring. Those emotions have broadened and enriched my ways of being.

Many times you cannot change the circumstances, but you have so much control over how you respond to them. You will look back on this time and you’ll remember how you responded.

It’s ALWAYS up to you how you respond to what’s going on around you.

This crisis can be the greatest time of growth in your life or or it could spiral you into bad health and not sleeping and fear and panic. You get to make the choice.

three – Remember to stay open & curious & keep learning and growing.

I love to keep learning. I love to keep growing. There’s really no better way to fight the fear and panic and all the things that come during a crisis than you going on the offensive and being willing to just keep learning and growing, staying open.

A mind is like a parachute — it works best when it’s open.

When you get in a fight or flight kind of crisis mode, everything shuts down. Your heart rate goes up. It’s hard to breathe. Your brain shuts down. Everything gets small. Your mind gets small. You get very narrow, and you can’t see any answers.

I also find we become so narrow in the way we see things, that anybody who does it any differently, you’re instantly judgmental of them. “Those people should be doing whatever!” Our brain just gets negative and judgmental and we don’t even like ourself when we get like that.

If you open up, stay curious, get into more a parasympathetic state of being with your nervous system where you’re open, you’re breathing and your heart rate comes down. Your brain gets fluffy, it expands. It can think of a thousand things to do during a pandemic, or a quarantine. It can think of all kinds of creative things that you could be doing right now with your time other than scrolling through Facebook and watching news and getting depressed.

Open your heart up, open your mind up. Be willing to keep learning, to stay curious. How can you be part of the solution? Let’s teach our brains how to open up and see solutions and stay curious and get creative and productive? It’s such a better way to spend your time than spiraling in judgment and all the other negative things that it’s so easy to spiral into in times of crisis.

What can you create right now that didn’t exist in the world before? How can you contribute to the world in a way that maybe you haven’t before? There’s so many things that you can do!

Actions speak louder than words, so we must seek out mentors who exemplify what we aspire to become, because the most important lessons in life are not taught but caught. Passion, commitment and curiosity are highly contagious. Stop spinning in worry and negativity and judgement and START DOING things that are calming and productive and creative.

four – Remember to nurture habits that nourish your body and soul.

Which also means avoiding things that bring more panic and worry, like watching too much news and scrolling social media. Let’s do things instead that expand our minds, that open us up, that help us keep growing, that help us keep learning, and that help us take care of our body and soul.

Here’s a list of things we’ve been doing—baking, art projects, planting an herb garden, hot baths, writing, cleaning, organizing, hiking, exercising, journaling, praying, staying in the scripture, puzzling, playing games, napping, and so much more.

Life Mentoring School is the perfect place to JUMP into the deep end and figure out what is possible for you. Click here and start your own killer summer school accelerated learning program! Enrollment is open now and will close July 3rd. I would love to have you join us!!