I was struck with this thought while working on the material I presented a couple of weekends ago at a Christian women’s retreat. My actual topic was about the different choices we make about the food we eat, which I placed in the following hierarchy:
| Level 1: Choices controlled by actual health conditions: true food allergies, celiac disease, diabetes, etc. |
| Level 2: Choices controlled by conscience or conviction: vegetarianism because of discomfort with the suffering of the animals killed for meat, keeping kosher either because of personal religious beliefs or because of a desire to maintain connections with family members who hold those beliefs, etc. |
| Level 3: Choices controlled by preference or by belief in the efficacy of a certain diet or lifestyle, often based on faulty information and often harking back to an idealized vision of the past. |
The title comes from a recent 
I just had a wonderful weekend at Camp Elim, a Christian camp near Colorado Springs, where I was privileged to speak in a couple of workshops. My two topics were “What’s Your Tendency?”, an examination of Gretchen Rubin’s theory about the four ways that people respond to expectations, and “How Food Fads and Myths Can Harm You,” in which I took on some of the current ideas floating around in the eating theories world, with a few side trips into my views on alternative medicine. I may get myself into trouble with that second one! My actual group for that session was small as I was competing with a very popular one on marriage, and they all seemed very receptive to my ideas. I gave everyone who attended the sessions the opportunity to sign up for a resources page, so I decided to just turn that material into a post for all my readers to access. Here ’tis:
I’m poaching from a podcast again today, this time from “
I’ve written before about the JFK assassination in reference to 
A number of years ago I was acting as a group discussion leader in a Bible study group, and we were given a document titled “Are you a servant or a volunteer?” This happened near the end of the year when I was feeling a bit weary in well doing about being a leader. I loved my group and interacting with them, but I felt burdened and somewhat resentful about all of the time I had to spend in leadership meetings in order to spend 45 minutes or so guiding a discussion based on prepared questions that everyone was supposed to have answered in advance.So reading the article cemented my decision not to serve the next year. (I’m sure that was not the intention!) I had realized that my attitude fit the “volunteer” mold much more than the “servant” one.
Yes, you should go see “Black Panther.” I felt during it the way I’ve felt during the best of the Tolkien films—that I never wanted it to end, that I was completely sucked in. That praise doesn’t mean that wasn’t totally confused a few times, but in the end pretty much everything was explained. Jim and I were on one side of a dispute about a certain plot element, with my brother-in-law and son on the other. You wouldn’t want to agree on everything, would you? It feels as if so much of our society is in flux these days, so the zeitgeist (a word that means pretty much whatever you want it to mean) favors a film such as this which breaks so many cultural barriers, but really—the movie stands on its own.
The source for today’s post is the sermon my pastor, Josh Waltz, preached yesterday. As I think I’ve mentioned, we’re going through the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, and what a fascinating and encouraging journey it’s turning out to be. Yesterday we were in chapter 7, and Josh started out by telling a story about Teddy Roosevelt’s childhood from his autobiography (named, aptly enough, 
). 
You’ll be amazed to find out that I’m referencing a podcast today that’s not from Gretchen Rubin. My husband and I are huge fans of the 
As I often say, this isn’t a political blog. If you want to see my opinions in that arena you can visit