Burn and wear out for Thee. Don’t let me rust, or my life be a failure, dear Lord, for Thee.” Bessie F. Hatcher, 1957.
This song is part of my spiritual DNA. I grew up hearing it at my church and later on at the Christian university I attended. I always found it to be affecting . . . and daunting. However sincere the author may have been–and I’m sure that she was– her words induced more guilt than inspiration, for me at least.
. . . what would you change?
Had an interesting conversation yesterday after the church service with a woman who was visiting from out of town. Isn’t it great when you meet someone for the first time and make a real connection? That’s what happened here.
I wrote last week about John Piper’s book Desiring God and said that I had just started reading it and was excited about its ideas. I’ve been chewing over it–a better description than “reading it”–and realizing more and more how much it would have helped me back when I was a college student and struggling with the question of what God wanted me to do with my life. But hey–I’m still struggling with that question. So it’s still helpful.
When People are Big and God Is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man by Edward T. Welch, P & R Publishing, 1997. Published in cooperation with The Christian Counseling and Education Foundation.
This past Sunday, during an excellent sermon drawn from the book of Romans, my pastor cited a term that was new to me: “imposter syndrome.” According to an article in Forbes magazine and other sources, this condition occurs when seemingly confident and capable people are plagued by the fear of being exposed as frauds. “Everyone thinks I’m so great. If they only knew!”
Sounds pretty normal to me! And very biblical, to boot. The Christian view of man says that we’re all incapable of saving ourselves and in desperate need of someone else to do it for us. and that someone is Christ. Our sinful nature explains why we’re so messed up when it comes to our reactions to both the accolades and the taunts of other people. We fear them more than we fear God. As I listened to the sermon I was reminded of this book and decided to use it for this week’s post.
Scribbled on one of the many scraps of paper I accumulate is something from a recent church care group meeting in our home. We get together a couple of times a month to discuss ideas sparked by recent sermons. One of our members mentioned that we humans have the tendency in our thinking to be vague about the problem but specific about the solution, and he gave as an example the above phrase, something he’d gotten from a friend at work.
. . . that will help keep you from being BORING. You know both of these, but they’re so good that they deserve space here.
So the two acronyms are:
MEGO: “My eyes glaze over.” It always amazes me that people can’t tell when they’re boring me to tears. It’s probably just as amazing that I can’t always tell when I’m the one who’s boring. Not everyone reacts quite as obviously as the woman in the photo.
TMI: “Too much information.” Do you really need to go into all that detail? Probably not. Edit yourself.
Why am I writing this post? Because I realized recently that I was talking and talking about my blood-sugar issues. Do I really need to go into the whole thing yet again every time I’m offered a sweet and feel that I should turn it down? No, no, no. Just say, “No thank you” and let it go. (Just as I don’t need to go into why I don’t eat low-fat ice cream, or indeed low-fat anything if I can possibly help it.)
Just say, “No thank you” and be done with it!
Delancey : A Man, A Woman, A Restaurant, A Marriage by Molly Wizenberg, Simons & Schuster, 2014.
A time, a place, and a plan.
This principle is courtesy, once again, of Josh Waltz, the pastor of my church. The study of habits is really big right now, with the trend bookended by, of course, two books. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit was a great hit three years ago; I quote from it fairly extensively in the chapter on habits in my own book. And tomorrow Gretchen Rubin’s new book Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives comes out. I can hardly wait to read it!
One of Duhigg’s best insights is the idea of so-called “keystone habits.” In my book I said that for me a keystone is getting up in the morning when I wake up instead of just lying there. This morning I did indeed get up at 5:00, and, while I wouldn’t say that the day has gone perfectly, I’ve certainly been more productive than usual.
No habit exists in isolation. My habit of a weekday 45-minute walk can’t take place unless there’s time for me to take it, which feeds right back into my getting-up-when-I-wake-up habit. And since I’ve strengthened the habit of cutting out most of the added sugar from my diet I’ve felt much more alert and willing to get up in the mornings. That difference makes me wonder if I’ve been going around with blood-sugar levels that have been just a bit high most of the time, which can’t have been good. Since my higher-than-expected A1C levels at the end of 2014 I’ve been very, very motivated to keep things under control. It wasn’t enough for me to just say, “Sugar isn’t good for anyone, so I need to just cut most of it out.” No, I needed a scare.
Just because it’s mid-March instead of New Year’s Day doesn’t mean you can’t start a new good habit. (It helps most of us to think in terms of doing something good rather than not doing something bad.) What can you do today to build a positive structure into your life?
Telling Yourself the Truth by William Backus and Marie Chapian, Bethany House Publishers, 1980, most recent reprint 2000.
I read this book about 30 years ago when I was an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. One of my assignments to my freshman comp class was to write a book review, and one of my students wrote about this book. It’s funny how vividly I remember discussing its ideas with her and how little I tried to put them into practice!
The premise of this book is so simple as to seem simplistic: change your beliefs, your thoughts, so that you are telling yourself the truth, and your life will change.
