Personal Responsibility

Phone-Call Procrastination

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Saturday I took my last blood-pressure pill and my last sleeping pill.  It will be about a week before I get the new medications in the mail.  While it’s just as well for me not to have the sleeping pills and therefore have to get through the night without them, going without my b.p. meds even for such a short time is certainly not recommended.  

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The Myth of Control

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The Surrendered Wife:  A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion, and Peace with a Man by Laura Doyle, Simon and Schuster, 2001.

I’m going to have to rein myself in on this post because there is a lot to say about this book’s ideas.  Where to begin?  I guess with a description of my initial reading of it, more than ten years ago.  A woman I greatly admired and respected mentioned it, saying that her husband had suggested she read it.  “How come?” she’d asked him.  “I don’t boss you around!”  And he’d said, “Well . . . ”  She seemed to think that it had indeed had something to say to her.  So I got it, and read it, and was indeed quite struck with it myself.  I wish I’d paid a little more attention to it at the time, but I guess it’s never too late to learn.

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“All men seek happiness . . .

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Blaise pascal.jpg. . . This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”
Blaise Pascal

What do you think?  We’ve all said, “I’ll regret this tomorrow,” or “I’ll be sorry I did this.”  (I’ve said it recently about my giving in to the temptation of watching just one more episode of “The Great British Bake-Off”–of which more later.)  So, if we do something that we know we’ll wish we hadn’t, does that action refute Pascal’s statement above?

“The Lord Doesn’t Change My Feelings

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. . . uNarrow sandstone canyonntil I obey Him” (Rosaria Butterfield’s book, discussed on the previous post).  I discuss this idea of the connection between our feelings and our actions in chapter two, “How Our Emotions Work” of my book.  It’s very true that the main source of our feelings is our thoughts:  “As [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Prov. 22:7 KJV).  But where do the thoughts come from?  They seem to arise spontaneously most of the time, don’t they?

Those who say that we are just products of chance and our entire mental processes are therefore  chemical reactions would then have to go on and say that our thoughts are simply random.

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