Godly Insights for the 21st Century Life

It has now been over a month since my life was normal. For some of you, it may be longer, and for some, it may not be as long. Unfortunately, this global pandemic has left few unscathed throughout the world, even if no one they know was affected by the virus itself. This past month has brought some good things, and some not so good. I was reminded a couple of weeks ago of a youth group tradition at my church of sharing pows and wows (bad things and good things), and so here in no particular order are the pows and wows of this last month, starting with a few things that were a bit of both. Pow/Wow- The news:  While it's been good to get information about what's going on, the constant updates get to be a bit much. A few of my friends have decided to not watch the news at all, but I think that's a bit extreme. I have decided to still watch and read some news but limit how much I watch and read. That often means reading only part of long articles and occasionally muting the T...

This past summer, I read the book Me, Myself, and Lies  by Jennifer Rothschild, and it really made me think. If you read my post " What are You Really Saying? " you know that I realized that at least for me, saying "I can't believe I said/did/forgot/lost that!" was really a way to put myself down, and I was determined to stop saying it. However, this book helped me to realize that though I wasn't saying things like that out loud, I was still putting myself down. I was challenged to continue to assess how I talk to myself. In the book, Jennifer compares our thoughts to items in a closet. We have the comfy ones that we wear so often that they start to wear out, but we refuse to stop because we love them so much. We have the ones that aren't our favorites, but we will wear them at certain times and they fit us well enough. Then there are the ones that we never wear because they don't fit and we don't like them. However, she likens our negative tho...