self-knowledge

You know what you know . . .

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Bible, Open, Book, Religion, Holy. . . because you believe what you believe.

Sounds as if I got my terms mixed up, doesn’t it?  But I didn’t.  I first heard this statement many, many years ago from the evangelist Bill Rice III, son of the founder of the Bill Rice Ranch in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  (The BRR is a Christian camp that began primarily as a ministry for deaf children, brought about because the Rices’ daughter Betty was deaf.  As far as I can tell from the website, it’s still going strong today.)  It wasn’t original with him at all, but it stuck with me from that sermon.

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Shaming never works . . .

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. . . It’s only inspiring that works.” (Amit Sood, Professor of Medicine, Mayo Clinic)

I caught this statement on a radio segment about keeping New Year’s resolutions.  It aired sometime in January, I think, and now I can’t find it, but I was so impressed at the time that I looked it up to be sure the quotation was correct and to get the name of the speaker.

What do you think?  Do you find that you try to shame yourself or others into doing the right thing?  What kind of results do you get?

Dear me, let us be elegant or die!

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You can’t accuse me of a boring consistency in the books I write about on this blog.  Last week’s book had a gun on the cover and talked about the logistics of killing someone; this week’s tells you why you should dress, eat and indeed live like an elegant Frenchwoman.  (Note to guys reading this:  the rest of February’s books are also going to be pretty female-centric.  Fine with me if you want to read the blogs or the books themselves.  I’m just a-sayin’.)

I can’t quite remember why or how I ran across this book, although I do know that I actually bought it, a rarity for me.  It was enjoyable and, I thought at the time, pretty lightweight, one of many memoirs about Americans going to France and finding out what they’ve been missing.  

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Eliminate . . .

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Image result for Anne Ortlund
image accessed from The Gospel Coalition website.

. . . and concentrate.

Great advice from Christian writer and speaker Anne Ortlund, who died in November 2013.  I’ll be doing a book club post on Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, her 1977 classic, later on this month.

For now, though, I’ll just concentrate on these three words.  You may think, well, easy enough for her to say.  What on earth can I eliminate?  I’d love to concentrate just on what I love the most, what I feel most called to do, but hey!  What am I supposed to do with all this other stuff that’s been thrust upon me?

No easy answers here.  I do think, though, that sometimes we take on responsibilities that don’t belong to us.  Many years ago I read a statement in a Bible Study Fellowship commentary that would have saved me from some unwise commitments of my own had I followed it.  I can’t quote it exactly and can’t remember what we were studying at the time.  The general idea, though, was that if you take on something that really should be done by someone else, not only are you overextending yourself and probably therefore shirking your real obligations, but you are crowding out someone else who could and should do that job.  Isn’t that an interesting idea?  Your overcommitment is someone else’s deprivation.

 

Further small thoughts . . .

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. . . on the importance of small things!

I quote here an example given many years ago by Sparky Pritchard, then an associate pastor at my church.  He was talking specifically about Bible study, but this analogy could apply in many areas:

Sometimes people ask what they should do when they don’t feel like reading the Bible, or don’t feel as if they’re getting anything out of it.  I tell them that you don’t always enjoy it.  Sometimes your Bible study time is like taking your vitamins:  totally unexciting, but you know it’s good for you.  Other times your experience may be more like eating a bowl of cold cereal:  It’s nourishing and somewhat tasty, but not all that great.  But then you experience the Bible as if it’s peaches and cream.  Here’s the thing, though:  you never get to that dessert stage without being willing to go through the vitamins stage.  In other words, you have to be consistent:  do the (seemingly) small thing of being in the Word daily.

Just as I said a couple of days ago:  the small series of faithful actions adds up.

Clear the Decks!

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Now folks, this is a somewhat weird book.  I highly recommend it or I wouldn’t include it here, but there’s no question that Ms. Kondo has her own idiosyncratic view of how you should treat your possessions.  Being one of her clients must be quite an experience, as she insists that things be done her way or else.  (She has a three-month waiting list for her personal consultations, so people don’t seem to mind.) She has two central ideas.  The first is the one that’s the most problematic for me:  that you must do the tidying up of your surroundings all at once.  If you do it gradually, she says, you’ll never finish.  In an ideal world she’d probably be right, but most of us can’t really take a whole weekend to throw out stuff.  If we have to do it that way, we’ll never do it at all.

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The only person I can change . . .

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. . . is myself.

Just one more day of the old year.  I think my only resolution should be to remember that I can only make resolutions for myself.   I want to set the very highest standards for myself but refuse to apply those standards to others, to remind myself that people are (or at least may be) doing the best that they can, to carry out the description of love in I Corinthians 13:5:  “It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”  As I’ve said many, many times, I am the Queen of Grudge-Holders.  If I concentrated on just that italicized phrase all year I’d be much easier to live with.  (“If thou, O Lord, shouldest mark iniquity, who should stand?”)

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It is more blessed to give . . .

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. . . so be willing to do some receiving!

[The original picture for this post was of yet another cross-stitch kit in my possession.] I’ve said that I have enough cross-stitching to last me till the nursing home, but my sister-in-law and I went to a needlework shop yesterday and I just fell in love with this one.  “Oh, I don’t need to get this,” I said, and left it on the rack.  But when I looked again, it was gone–and in my s-in-l’s hands.  “Let me get this for you,” she said.  “You spoil us rotten when we visit.  I’d love to give it to you.”  I hesitated.  The tendency is always to demur when someone wants to do something for you.  But then I remembered how pleased people are to give a gift.  “Okay.”  Her face lit up.  Am I pleased with this item?  Indeed I am.  But you know who was even more pleased?  She was.

Later I was asking Carol if it was okay for me to tell this story on my blog, and not only did she say that it was, she also told a similar story about herself.  She was 14 and possessed of very little self-esteem, as she puts it.  Her aunt wanted to buy her a Minnesota t-shirt with a funny slogan.  Carol kept refusing, until her aunt said, “A gift can please the giver as much as it does the receiver.”  How true!  Carol accepted the gift (and still has the t-shirt).  So I hope that yesterday as you opened your presents that you  didn’t utter the fatal words, “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” and instead just said “thank you.”  If you did say those words or have that attitude, resolve that you will STOP IT RIGHT NOW.  As the author of The Surrendered Wife says, your motto should be, “Receive, receive, receive.”

There’s no great pleasure . . .

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. . . without some small pain!

Below you’ll see a slideshow of some of the wonderful pictures Jim took this past week on our traditional visit to the Denver Botanic Gardens “Blossoms of Light” tour which they have during December.  (This post was originally written in December 2014. Please note that because this site was moved to a new platform some images were lost, among them, sadly, the pictures for this post.) 

Last year we missed it, for some reason.  This year they had absolutely outdone themselves.  There’s one small drawback to this outing:  It’s usually pretty COLD.  I’ve gone before wearing a totally inadequate jacket and shivered my way through it.  More of an endurance test than a pleasurable outing.  This year I made sure to wear my heavy-duty parka and did much better, but 23 degrees is still 23 degrees.  I found myself alternately being distracted from the cold by the lovely displays and distracted from the lovely displays by the cold.  I’m so glad we made the effort, though.  What a great memory, and how little the discomfort really mattered.  Don’t we often switch those priorities, though, and concentrate on the small inconveniences and difficulties?   I think back to my father’s funeral, for example, which was on the whole a wonderful service.  What stands out in my mind the most?  The fact that their sound system picks up police scanner transmissions in the area, so periodically the testimonies and the Gospel-filled sermon were interrupted.  Later my brother said to me, “Why were you sitting there making faces at me while I was giving my testimony?”  I was so irritated and distracted by the sound system’s defects that I irritated and distracted him.  I do try any more not to let myself dwell on the imperfections inherent in any human event, but it’s a struggle for me.  I’m sure there will be more posts on this topic.

It’s Okay to Be an Introvert

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Bookcover of "Quiet"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.

My mother used to say to me, “Don’t be self-conscious.” Other times she’d tell me not to be shy. This book tells me that she might as well have said, “Don’t have blue eyes” or “Don’t be good at spelling.” Introversion is an inherited trait.I got so tickled at Mimi Wilson, a Christian writer and speaker who was featured at a recent retreat I attended. She said she was such an extrovert that she’d have a hard time in Heaven if the mansions were all separated from each other; she was hoping they’d be more like apartments. But while I’ve become much more people-friendly since marrying Jim, I have to say that my idea and Mimi’s idea of Heaven don’t exactly coincide. While I do enjoy talking to people much more than I used to, at some point I have to have some alone time. My dear friend Cecelia said once that she drew energy from other people; for me, it’s the other way around in that people draw energy from me. I can take only so much togetherness!

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