A Little Psychology

 Good Saturday morning!!

I am heading a different direction than normal this week, but I promise, we will get back to my normal routine by the end of this. 

I did something this week and I am a little hesitant to share, but I have to tell you about it to get to my point. 

One of my best friends had a picture on fb recently and it was very clear she had lost a good amount of weight since the last time I had seen her. You all know I am struggling beyond belief right now so I asked her what she was doing. Her answer was Noom. I decided why not. I had been seeing it for some time but figured I was already paying for WW, so how could it be that much different. I have been on it a week, and yes, I have lost about 2 lbs. I am heavy enough that a lot of times, when I start a new "diet" I can lose a lot of weight the first week, but at least half comes back the second week and that just blows it for me. This is different. I have truly ate differently this week and I feel my two pounds could turn into 4 next week and so on. I am learning foods aren't off limits anymore, I just need more moderation. 

Anyway, with Noom, you have daily classes. One of the first classes was on T.F.A.R. Yesterday, we had a staff learning day with Teresa McCloy, from the REALIFE Process ( www.therealifeprocess.com ), Teresa also shared T.F.A.R. I am one of those people that think when things show up in my life more than once in a week, maybe I should really be listening. (Did you know most of the things God tells us in the Bible, He tells us more than once?--think about how many times FEAR NOT is there- 365!!)

Anyway, T.F.A,R stands for Thought, Feeling, Action, and Result.

They all work together and that Result is going to be based on the first three. And the whole experience is based on the thought you had and how it made you feel.

I have realized this week that sometimes I do some really stinkin' thinkin' towards myself. My thoughts can very easily have a lot of can't and nevers in them. Such as, I screwed up and had a donut this morning, I have ruined my day, I have ruined my chances of ever losing weight and I am a loser. How does that make me feel? Well, like a loser! and what do I do? Well, that's where things can get interesting. Depending on the day, I will do one of two things, I will see if anyone wants to go out to lunch, because I blew it, I might as well keep going and drowned myself in chips and cheese OR I swing the total opposite and decide not to eat the rest of the day to make up for it. That normally results in me being hungry at supper and overeating again. Either way, it was not the donut that ruined my progress, it was my feelings and actions.

I guess a little commercial for NOOM, They had me set a date of something coming up. HOPEFULLY, we get to start traveling for work again and we have a conference in June. NOOM asked for a date of something important coming up and gave me an amount of weight they BELIEVED I could lose by then. They are making me believe it too. So yesterday morning, when the donuts were sitting there, I decided I wanted to be more comfortable on the plane worse than I wanted the donut and that I didn't want to adjust my eating plan again. When I had ordered our lunches from Jimmy Johns, I had estimated in NOOM and saw that if I ate all my JJ's lunch, I would have very few calories to work with for supper and knowing that my worst time of day is from 5-9 pm, decided to cut my sandwich, chips, and cookie in half (bonus, I have to go into the office today and I have lunch already there!)/
Do you see how my thoughts, feelings and actions gave me the results I wanted?

This doesn't have to be about food. It can be about life in any form. Do you get your feelings hurt because you think you got left out of something? Or because you feel someone did something intentional to hurt you? I do this myself too.  I remember years ago, someone I had always considered a friend confronted me about something that had happened YEARS before. At first, I had no idea what she was talking about and then I started remembering the conversation. She thought  I was criticizing her and I was very truly talking about myself. I still feel bad that she was upset with me for years over something that wasn't true. It was her thoughts and feelings, and it was sadly not reality at all. I would give anything if she would have asked me that night instead of letting it fester. 

So, this week, when you start having negative thoughts, try reframing, one step at a time. It is starting to be a game changer for me.

And of course, the obvious Bible verse to take home this week is Philippians 4:13. I can do ALL things through Christ who strengthens me. Not some, all. I have decided to make Christ more present as I make decisions and as I think, I want him to help me with those thoughts. I figure if I am not looking to Christ for what thoughts are real, Satan may be helping out the negatives. 

I am leaving you with Zack Williams Rescue Story, because the chorus that repeats, You never gave up on me reminds me that God doesn't give up on us, so we shouldn't give up on ourselves!

Have a great week!

Living (no, Loving) Life

 Good Morning Beautiful People!

I hope you have had a good week, and if you haven't had a good week, I hope you can still see good in it. Back years ago, when Robert was in high school and we had the high school kids for AWANA, they would come in full of gloom and how bad their day had been. I knew we needed to shift gears before we even started the night. We would play the "5 good things" game. I would make each of them think of 5 good things that happened that week.

I have recently started using a planner to help me find more balance in my life. It has taken me FOREVER to come up with this year's word, but I realized I have had it all along, I just wasn't paying attention. Balance IS my word. Anyway, My planner has a section at the end of each week for "Weekly Review", it asks for this week's wins- where I can actually list how many issues I have solved as well as little big things like I managed to workout at least 20 minutes every morning this week , yep, just finished 3 different workouts a few minutes ago. Another section is what made me happy. Well, I spent Monday evening with a great group of my friends. We get together every couple of months and I so cherish that time. I spent time with my friends Amy and Ella Lee last night at a PTO Bingo, where I got to see several of my other friends, feel that sense of community that I love and even came home with a big basket full of goodies. I spent time texting with my 2 BFFs from high school and making plans with them, and I pretty well finished a major project at work.  Another section is Lessons Learned. Sometimes I can sabotage my whole day by getting into unhealthy foods at 8:30 of a night and then going to bed at 9. It is hard to imagine that 20 minute can spoil progress, but it does and once I have written it down, it becomes real. And then I get a spot that asks for  How I will improve, well, duh, we are going to take care of that 20 minutes. I would prefer not to eat at all at that time, and I will try, but this week, I am going to prepare myself with some healthy yogurt and see if I can stick to that.

So, my 5 good things have come back on me, and I love it. It makes me realize, God has really given me a good life in the midst of a lot of stress, And I will tell you, there is a lot of stress. I have family members dealing with the loss of a loved one, another family member getting ready to head into treatment for cancer. A dear, close friend going through cancer treatments right now and many other things personally that are causing major stresses right now. And I have realized God gave me the ability to be the cup half full person and that I need to be that for these people too. He knows I am a prayer warrior and I take my prayer life very seriously.

As always, God seems to hand me a verse that runs through my head, I didn't even know where it was found, and it took me a while to look it up because, unlike most verses, that I had learned from KJV, this one was apparently from the NIV.

It is Psalm 16:11

You make known the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. 

THAT describes my week, and how I want every week to be. In fact, I decided I not only have a word of the year, I have a verse of the year and this is it. 

My hope for you is for you to find your good life in this week, what was those 5 good things, what did you accomplish that you took for granted, I hope you found your joy.

I picked a song today that I have fallen in love with too and I think it goes right along with this week's post. We try so hard at perfection that we, I anyway, get in the funk of pointing out what went wrong, what I failed at, instead of what I accomplished. There is no place in the Bible that says we have to go through life dwelling on the fact we aren't perfect. God wants us to have JOY!!

Besides that, yes, we should try to be the best we can, but we know we are never going to be perfect here, Jesus was the only perfect one and if there was even one other perfect person, Jesus' work would have all been for nothing. 

Anyway, here is a song from Hawk Nelson, called Live Like You're Loved.

Have an amazing day and an amazing week!

Thorns

 To say this has been a long, trying week would be an understatement. I am thankful to God for getting us all through it. A week ago today, as I was making my plans for this week, I was also in contact with my cousin, Jim, whose mom was failing fast. My Aunt, Nancy, was my last living aunt on my mom's side. Wife to my last living uncle, Kenny, my mom's last living sibling. My mom and Kenny have always been very close, they were the two youngest, and when Kenny and Nancy and my mom and dad were younger, they spent a lot of time together. Over the past several years, I would try to take every opportunity I could to let Mom and Kenny see each other, this was usually in the form of trips to wherever Kenny was doing flea markets. So, I felt like I needed to get Mom to Kenny and Nancy's for a bit. I had told Jim on Saturday evening that I was off Wednesday for another function and that I would take Mom that day, he told me he didn't feel like that was soon enough. So Saturday evening, plans were made to make a quick trip to Decatur on Sunday. One of those things I will never regret, as Nancy past away on Monday evening. That brought to the forefront that I knew Kenny and Mom will follow in those footsteps one of these days, and I did lots of overthinking, and not sleeping. 

Meanwhile, one of the things I handle with my marketing hat for TEAM ITS is Chamber functions. We were hosting Coffee and Connections at our office Wednesday morning and I was to do the cooking. In another stage of my life I cooked for a living, running the kitchen at both Richard's Farm and Richard's Refinery, so it is fun to step back into that role for a day or two at a time and cook. This is the second Chamber event I have cooked for and the second time I have been asked if I would please cater. My answer is a solid no. If you have never worked in a restaurant, especially if you have never managed a restaurant, I will tell you, it takes over your life. People think I work a lot of hours now, it is nothing compared to what I worked at the restaurants. I would be at one or the other by 6 in the morning and get home at midnight or later, most of my days off, I would be at one or the other for at least a bit. Catering would get out of hand very quickly so I cook for fun, for the things I want to do and we leave it at that. 
While I was talking to one of the ladies from this event is when she made the statement, the one that changed my week and gave me even more to ponder. 

This tall, thin, beautiful 30-40 something said, "you are one of those people who does everything well". I just laughed and said thank you, as I learned many years ago the best way to appreciate someone's compliment and make them feel appreciated for saying it is to simply say thank you. My head was exploding though. I wanted to blurt out, "are you blind? do you SEE me?" And I seriously began to wonder if not everyone sees my weight problem the way I see my weight problem. 

If you have read my blog long, you know that my weight is a huge problem to me, and I have struggled with it my whole life. Since 2011 when I was diagnosed with UC though, I can't seem to find anything that can bring any lasting results. I work out a lot, and I mean sweat dripping, hair wet, working out, I eat right and here I am. And then stupid things happen like the eye ulcer and there were steroids in the eyedrops, so guess what, I gained 7 lbs over a weekend. So then I spent the next two weeks trying drinking grapefruit juice before every meal, in fact it was my meal for breakfast, eating 3 ounces of meat and vegetables for lunch and 5 ounces of meat and a salad for dinner and I lost 12 lbs. in a week. I do the same thing the next week and gain 4 of it back. Anyway, anytime someone makes a statement about me doing everything well, it is immediately like, "doesn't matter, the one thing I want the most, I can't do well at all, in fact I fail daily".  

So, because this blog is titled "Louder Than the Voices", I need to redirect and find lessons learned in this. I was with my cousins yesterday at my aunt's funeral. One of my cousins has been through cancer and a heart attack, I remember times he looked so bad and I was so afraid he wouldn't make it, but he is the poster child for beating the odds and he reminded himself daily to never give up. Wise words. I had thought to myself, "I wonder what I would look like if I didn't exercise and watch what I eat?" For a few minutes I though I would just try it. I have NOT worked out this week, and I have not watched what I eat as close as normal, but that is as far as I can safely go. Not sleeping and early mornings messed with workouts but I know tomorrow morning I will be back on track. 

And then I have to turn to my Bible and see what God says. Psalms 139:14 reminds us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.  I do not know why God makes it so easy for me to pull off some of the things I do at work, and even things like the event Wednesday morning but makes something so important to me feel so impossible. I remind myself of Proverbs 31:30, "Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised". And that maybe I need to reevaluate just how important it is to me to be smaller ( I started to write thin, but I had a flashback of being about 6, sitting in my doctor's office with my mom and my doctor saying, "she is never going to be a Twiggy," but I would settle happily for "non-plus-sized"). Is this actually getting in the way of my service to God because I am so obsessed with it? After all, there is a huge debate about how I "can't" be healthy at this weight but my blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol, A1C--everything is normal. So is healthy what I should really be paying attention to? 

I want to add, this is a personal battle, I have friends of every size and I truly believe they are beautiful. I have taken the implicit bias test for fat vs. thin, and it definitely shows I am biased against fat, but I know it is because of my feelings about myself, not about any of my friends. My friends who are heavier, wear it better than I do.

I also ponder Paul's "thorn in the flesh" and wonder if my weight is the work of Satan, or moreso, as the "love of money" is the root of all evil and not the money itself, is my obsession the work of Satan? Most of the time when thorns are mentioned in the Bible, the rest of the story is that it is from Satan. When Paul mentions his thorn, he actually say, "there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure". There are several different theory's about what Paul's thorn actually was but we know it was something that caused him pain, and reminded him daily that he was not perfect, and also reminded him daily that he needed God to help him deal with it. 

Lots of lessons learned this week. We aren't promised tomorrow, never give up, and I need to work with God to take care of my attitude about myself, but never stop trying to make things better.

Yesterday my mom made the statement (not about this) that beauty is as beauty does. I need to remember that every time I make someone smile, every time I make someone's life easier, every time I do something that blesses someone,  it is more important to God than what size my dress is. And deep down, maybe I believe that a little more right now than I did a half hour ago.  Maybe someone else needed to hear this too.

And all through this post, MercyMe's Beautiful has ran through my mind. 

Hope you all have a good week and take some time to focus on what is important to God in your life. :-)

Head Vs. Heart

 Good morning!

     Once again, it has been a long absence and I got a gentle prod from a friend. Don't ever discount who God is using to remind you that our life is supposed to be for His glory. So, it's Saturday morning, a little later than it used to be because I am learning the art of sleeping in, all the way to 6 am on Saturdays! lol. 

So many things has happened in the last 2 weeks, it isn't even funny. Many know I had an ulcer on my eye and chipped a tooth. That was kinda minor compared to what happened next, the thing that shook our world for a few days. 

We had someone wanting to buy our house. If you know me well at all you know two things about me and this house. 1. I have been totally in love with this house since I was a teenager and stood at the trashcan outside Huck's, that used to be across the street, eating my lunch. 2. Ever since we moved here (our 8th move since we had been married), we both said they would carry us out in pine boxes, this was supposed to be our forever home. There are two houses side by side, a two story Victorian and a 1 1/2 story California Bungalow, with all the bells and whistles of that architectural style, which I loved. I loved the little things about my house that made it interesting but not flamboyant. So, of course, my first thought when hearing someone wanted to buy it, "for way over market price" was to just cry. 

Ironically, I do social media work for a realtor and I texted him telling him I might need some help. He texted me back that he had just listed a house in Greenup. Little did he know at the time that house was a favorite of mine too and had been owned by a woman I considered one of my heroes. I thought maybe this was God saying, "this is what I want you to do". So I accepted it. Told myself that if they were going to tear my house down, at least I got to live here first and we figured out what it would take to get us moved. If you live around here, you know we have made a bunch of improvements to the house, new siding, roof, windows, all while keeping the architectural features, which caused more than one contractor to run when we told them what had to be. Dale Milliman was a blessing when he did all this, he took such good care of her and basically restored her to her former glory with a great facelift. Anyway....

We talked to the realtor, made our offer, and waited, and waited. I had made some peace with moving, and honestly, was at least starting to feel a little okay with it. I finally called 5 days later and found out it was a hard no. They apparently had no idea how much our house was worth and the amount they were willing to pay was honestly a slap in the face. 

And I was relieved. and yes, I cried tears of joy. 

I had been talking to one of my closest friends about it and I had quoted her the first part of Proverbs 14:12 "there was a way that seemed right to a man", I did not feel like our request was greedy, or pie-eyed, it was realistic, and it would have made life a little easier but it was still not replacing the fact I was leaving the house, and ultimately, we would have left Newton, which also was making me sad. I realized, while my head was asking God to make this all happen, my heart was begging him to make it stop. So yeah, we still have a mortgage, and a crack in the ceiling in the family room, and the floor slopes a few places its not supposed to. But it is still ours, and we are still living our dream of getting everything exactly how we want it by the time we are 67, so we can retire and enjoy it. (and I know a handyman that can fix all those things when he gets time, lol)

I was listening to a podcast the other day that said to remember when trying to listen to both your head and your heart, your heart doesn't really have a vote. I get that in so many things, but I am glad that while I was telling myself that, God was watching out for my heart. 

I already knew this was my topic before I came downstairs this morning (many times my inspiration comes as I am typing, lol) but a friend on facebook had changed her profile and it was a picture of Jesus carrying someone in his arms and the overprint was "I will never leave you, nor forsake you, I love you forever -God". This was my Godwink that what I was planning on writing about was what He was wanting me to write about because I have had Hebrews 13:5 running through my mind to connect all of this since Wednesday when I decided the blog was happening today.

Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.

So my friends, today's takeaway is this. When your head says you should do something because that is where the money is, let your heart have a vote, even bigger, asked God to just take care of it, I am sitting in my half finished office, that at one point last week, I was so upset because I would never see it finished. It isn't finished because Andrew has been so busy, his business has been more successful than I think we could have imagined and he has the best customers in the world. When he gets time, he works on my office, it is going to be a big deal when I get my French doors are up, and they are on sawhorses in the "doorway" right now, so we are getting close. Our first project of the year was putting a second set of shelves in the high cabinets in my kitchen so I would have more storage, I have flooring ready to put down in the laundry "area" of the basement, that will also one day have walls and a door, these things make my heart happy, I thank God for protecting that these last few weeks. 

As always, I leave you with a song. Much like Hebrews 13:5, this song has ran through my head a lot.

Have a great week and remember He will NEVER leave you.

Kari Jobe's I Am Not Alone.