When You Are Not Enough

Note to Reader:  This is an interactive post.  I have questions that I want you to answer, so if you can't take some time now, be sure to schedule time in the next week to answer the questions below. Yay!!!

Have you ever felt like you run out and life still needs more?  Have you ever felt inadequate to live the life you lead?  If you do, I have some good news...you are not alone.  Feeling that way may seem like you are the exception not the rule, but reality says its the other way around.

Walk into a nearby Target or scroll through your IG feed and chances are you will find someone who seems to have what you don't have.  Someone who looks like they are killing it in life.  The problem with that idea is that its drawing a conclusion with only a small percentage of the story.  We see all of us and only part of others.

Craig Groeschel says social media is people sharing their best 5%.  That means you are missing 95% of the story.  If you were solving murders with only 5% of the facts, you'd be a horrible detective! 

We need to stop comparing our whole lives with a snapshot of others lives.  But lets take comparison off the table for a minute and lets talk about you.

I have some questions.  So do me a favor, get some paper and a pen and settle in for a moment of reflection.  Don't have time to answer now? Jot these down and answer them later! 

1. What is the standard you are using to measure success (and failure)?  

2. Where did that standard come from?  Is it a healthy source or is it rooted in dysfunction? 

3. Do you need to adjust the standard? 

4. What are you doing out of obligation and not because it flows with the life you want to be living? 

5. What are you over-committing to? Is this a time management issue or a self-worth issue?  

6. What do your best friends see in you that you don't see?  (Don't know - ask them!) 

You guys, I love renovation shows.  I have a handful I watch, and I love when there is a dump of a house, or so you think, but it just seems that way, because us viewers don't see what is actually there. Sometimes we are like these old houses.  We let ourselves just live in a reaction state to life instead of a place of leadership and ownership.  We let hardship and haters define us and wear the junk we pick up along the way because we feel we are supposed to instead of fighting to be who we were made to be. 

Throw some grace on yourself.  You are the only one doing you.  Celebrate that!  Sure, we have areas we need to grow and change, and we want to do us in a way that honors who God created us to be, but can you see what you are doing well?  Is that life glass half empty or half full?  If you are only seeing the mistakes and the inadequacy, then you are missing the beauty of you.  

Let's regroup, shall we?! Here are some steps: 

1. Gather your friends and ask them to fill your love bank.  Ask them to share what they love about you and take notes!!! If you are really struggling write it up pretty and put it on the walls so you are see it every day.

2.  Speak new truth into your life.  I've talked about my I AM Journal, and you need to do your version of that.  Write out in faith what you are or what you are becoming so that you can make a path for a new you.  Lead the way.  

3.  Read up.  Books by women like Dr. Caroline Leaf or Brené Brown will help you to understand the hurdles you have to leap.  Seeing how the brain works and what you need to do to overcome the mental blocks, will help you to go in a new direction.  

4. Write out a realistic day.  What areas of life are priorities and what time do those things take?  I know I can often write out a week's worth of to-do's in one day and that is just silly and setting myself up for failure.  Taking mental note of this and costing out the time helps reveal the things you need to cut.  

5. Take you into account.  Sure women can do it all, but it doesn't mean we should.  What I add to my family is different than what my husband does. I am emotional and I have to build in time for the relational duties that don't often get noticed and take more time, but they are important.  I could be my husband, but what good is that, he has that covered, I need to be me.  Who I am and how I do life affects what I accomplish and how I accomplish it (this is why comparison is pure junk)! 

So there you go.  There is a lot here.  Digest it and process this.  Let me know what you think.  Did I miss a point in all of this?  Tell me.  I love hearing from those of you who read this blog of mine.  You are the reason I write it after all, what you think matters to me! Happy Wednesday! 

I DON'T KNOW YOU

When I was growing up if I liked a famous person, I could always write a letter to their
fan club and hope to receive an autographed photo in the mail.  Those in the Hollywood limelight were unapproachable to the average folk, like myself.  Times have changed since those days. 

Now, if I like an actress or singer, all I have to do is follow their Instagram and I instantly know all about their life - where they eat, their kids and fur babies, their latest red carpet event and the trip they just took.  This change goes beyond fame; when I meet someone at an event I speak at, or in a meeting at the kid's school, I can then go add them on Facebook or accept their request to friend me.  Craig Groeschel makes note of the use of the word "friend" on Facebook in his book, "#Struggles: Following Jesus in a Selfie-Centered World."  Its true, we get fed a subconscious lie that we are adding to our friends whenever we add someone to that list of connections. 

The internet has tricked me.  Its tricked me into thinking I have a lot of friends.  Truth - I do have a lot of friends, but as I've aged, I have way more acquaintances than friends.  Friend - you know the person that is there when life has got you down or pops the champagne when you conquer that mountain you climbed.  A friend isn't just someone who is connected with you on Facebook or follows you on Instagram.

Because here is the thing - knowing something about someone doesn't mean we know them! Its awkward sometimes to stand next to a mom at pick up that I have never sat and just talked with, but I know all about her family and that hard time she went through last year, because Facebook told me. 

The same can be true for people like Candace Cameron Bure.  I feel connected because I watch her on Hallmark Channel and I follow her feed, but I have NEVER met the woman.  She has no clue who I am.  We are not friends. Its time for a reality-check.  Can you distinguish between your true friends and just people you know about?  I have to remind myself of this truth as I scroll the feeds - I DON'T KNOW YOU!!! This doesn't mean, there aren't acquaintances that I'm pursuing friendship with or friends who have grown and gone their own ways that I stay connected with, because this is why I love social media!

The danger comes when we live online and forget to maintain relationships in real time.  Doing so will lead to loneliness and depression and often worse.  The hole in people is what often fuels the horrible stories we read in the news.

This is also true in our spiritual life.  Knowing about Jesus, doesn't equate to knowing him.  Knowing him is accomplished in the same way we know people around us - spending time together.  I sit and talk to God about my life, about the Bible and while he doesn't speak in words to me, he speaks back.  He connects with me through moments in life where I see my heart fulfilled or when I got that thing that didn't mean anything except that he heard me.  He speaks to me through the Bible, a book that has been around forever, and yet can speak to my specific day. 

 The light at the end of this tunnel is that its easy to fix.  Life offline as much if not more than you do online.  Meet someone for coffee, get to know a new friend and put the work in, to make that Facebook "friend" a real-life friend!!!  Same with God - he makes it easy to come to him and its never too late to start. 

Do you have the proper balance between your online and offline self?  Do you need to adjust or maybe you got this down and its your turn to share it with someone else?  Checking in with ourselves is a must for a healthy life!  There is always a take-away.  So go and get it!

5 Tips to Regain Control of Your Life

Life can get going at a rapid pace and we can sometimes feel overwhelmed with the constant demands that nip at our heels each day.  It happens to me more often than I'd like to admit, just read Monday's blog post.  What are we to do to gain control again?  Truthfully, I can't speak to you specifically unless you reach out and give me details on your life, but there are some simple steps that can help you regain control. 

1. Unplug

Think for a minute about all the messages and mediums vying for our attention.  We have text messages, email, television, YouTube, social media private messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Linked In, Instagram, Tumbler, Pinterest etc.  So many ways to get information and that didn't even include the newsfeed built-in to your phone home page or computer web-browser.  Its no wonder we feel stressed out and tired, we are getting too many messages.  If you begin to feel like you are on this treadmill that keeps getting the speed increased, its time to get off the media train and take some time to shut down the many methods of input.  Maybe you can't go without it all for your job, but if you are being honest, you could easily find hours reaching or even exceeding the double digits of unnecessary media time.  That movie or latest episode of your favorite show can wait.  You can take the social media apps off your phone or turn off certain notifications so you aren't clicking to see each like or comment. 

2. Be Silent, Be Still

If you are as old or older than me, you may remember a movie in 1999 called, "She's All That."  There is a scene where during a piece of live art, the actors chants, "Be Silent, be still," repeatedly.  It brings home the point that we need to bring all the noise to a stop.  If the mess of noises listed above weren't bad enough, we have a few more bouncing around our brain.  They can be summed up with one word - expectations.  We allow the voices of others in our lives and even our own self-talk, to bring craziness to our thoughts with an endless supply of limitations and criticisms.  It's time to shut it out and just silently be still.  That may be meditation for you or it may look more like what Craig Groeschel describes in his 5 minutes of quiet each day.  Just take time, even if its 5 minutes to sit quietly.  It may seem awkward at first, but you will grow to appreciate what it offers you. 

3. Put on your Mask

I don't know who you are or what you do, but I bet involves taking care of others.  That my friends is an amazing part of life, but sometimes we give and give without any balance of caring for ourselves.  Its become cliché, but truly the airlines know what they are speaking to when they tell you to put on your oxygen mask before assisting smaller travelers.  If you put the mask on our child first, you could pass out in the process due to your bodies need for oxygen.  You need to sleep, eat, exercise at minimum.  If you are like me you also need relational time to fill that love tank.  My mom suffers from Thoracic Outlet Syndrome and needs to go to certain yoga and water aerobics classes each day to manage the pain levels.  It is a need.  If she ignores it she becomes debilitated by pain.  If I ignore my need for relationships I can become debilitating depressed.  I don't know what that looks like for you but its time to figure it out and schedule it so that you have what it takes to do your life. 

4.  Choose Gratitude

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and honestly its a holiday we have all but forgotten.  Its just become a day off work to stuff our faces (and now start Christmas shopping) instead of a season of gratitude.  Gratitude prepares our hearts and minds to center our souls between reality and desires.  Gratitude allows us the ability to recognize what we have.   Let's face it, if you spent $2.50 today, you are doing better than 50% of the population (I know I've quoted this before) but isn't it something to celebrate?!  Each situation has a positive and negative spin and its your choice to pick a path.  Gratitude quiets the unsettlings inside ourselves. It keeps us rooted in the here and now and keeps us from either living in the past or too focused on what's next.  What are you grateful for in this one moment?  I once sat in the woods for 5 hours and during time made a list of everything I could think of that I was grateful for from birth until that very moment.  It was a humbling and truly rewarding experience.  Its time I do it again.  Focus on what is beautiful in your life.  Sometimes it does take some digging but it can be that one thing in the midst of the storm we face that can bring us comfort.

5. Re-evaluate

Greg McKeown's book "Essentialism: The Discipled Pursuit of Less" or Marie Kondo's books on tidying up both bring to our attention the need for re-evaluation of what we are aiming at in life.  When we hold onto things and develop a hoarding mentality or we overwork ourselves in an effort to do it all, we are creating dysfunctional habits and aren't aiming at anything.  The result isn't satisfaction and success, but instead stress and anxiety within an unsettling reality.  We must pause long enough to look at see what we want from life and if our current daily actions support or fight against our goals.  If this is an area of struggle for you, I suggest you check out one of the resources I listed at the beginning of this paragraph.  Get some tools to working smarter, not harder.

Why Your Posts Are Part of the Problem

Yesterday, we elected a new President.   It wasn’t the Presidential Candidate I thought would win.  I really thought Clinton had it.  I was not a fan of either so I have no idea exactly how I feel, but I was more saddened (not surprised) when I opened up Facebook this morning.  Why was I saddened?  Because while we all have a right to share our opinion, most of us just shouldn’t!  

Over the past year I have read in a variety of books and articles how our lives online have hurt us.  I have been especially impacted by Craig Groeschel’s book, “#Struggles: Following Jesus in A Selfie-Centered World.” I don’t think social media is bad, I actually love it!  I have lived in 6 states and 2 foreign countries, travelled a lot in my earlier years and I love people, so it is an amazing way for me to be in the lives of so many far and wide.  

But we were never intended to live our lives online.  We were made for relationships.  Real relationships.  That means connecting our soul with others and that rarely happens online.  Online breeds superficial, unfiltered, edited responses to life.  It gives us a false sense of celebrity as we share our every move, thinking the world wants to know.  That may work with a small group of followers or friends but you would NEVER have a good coffee shop conversation with 1,000 people.  It just wouldn’t be productive or beneficial.  

I Corinthians 10:23 says "Everything is permissible," but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible," but not everything is edifying.

We are not famous.  Our platform is faulty if we are assuming it gives us celebrity.  We need to make our voice heard but unfortunately that voice gets lost in over saturated newsfeed.  People cannot take the overwhelming responses good, bad and ugly to the election process and the results we saw unfold into the wee-hours of this morning.  We were not made to effectively process all of that.  The non-stop barrage of in your face responses to the world enforces depressive tendencies and studies are now reflecting this connection with a rise in depression and suicide, I just read a great article in TIME magazine (November 7, 2016) about this very thing.  

When I was living in London for a semester during college, I got to experience the term stimulus overload.  Living by the hospital meant I heard sirens non-stop.  It was hard to sleep or focus as first, but by the time I came back to the States, I didn’t even notice the sound.  My brain couldn’t take it so it made the proper adjustments and filtered out the sound so I could function.  I see this same phenomenon happening online.  The very tool that once gave us a voice is now silencing it because its just too much! 

Face to face communication involves non-verbal communication that get lost in our social media posts, not to mention unscripted conversations include more than 140 characters.  You may drop a controversial bomb in the midst of a two-hour lunch with your bestie, but the take away is tons of other topics and perspectives.  It adds to the dimensions of the conversation and the relationship even if its disagreement, but social media is relational-free opinions and its only creating a divide between us and anyone who disagrees.  

Get offline, get out with friends, or upgrade an acquaintance to a friend by hanging out and having shared experiences.  Share those opinions over coffee and allow the opinion to do more than scroll across someone’s face in between classes, meetings or lines during errands.  Get used to not using the delete button when giving your two cents.  Take the chance to say it wrong and hear how you could have rephrased it.  You maybe be surprised how much better life is offline! 

4 Things To Do Before You Speak

Recently, while driving I heard a radio DJ speak some truth that resonated with me.  I am not sure the topic they were discussing as I had just gotten back in the car, but Zach, said something to the effect that many people think that if something is true that is enough for them to speak it to others, but context and timing have a huge impact on when and how we should speak it.  I couldn’t agree more!  Speaking truth in the wrong time or with the wrong motives is in fact, wrong.  

Sometimes the best thing we can do is be quiet.  This week in my Bible reading, I was working through one of my favorite books, James.   In James, we are told to be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger (James 1: 19-21).  I know more than anyone that my mouth can be my greatest asset and quickest downfall.  

We think we always have the best thing to say and we are usually dying to get it out.  We are often so quick to speak that we fail to hear the person to which we are talking and in life words aren’t the only solution resource we have to offer.  So what else can we do besides run our mouth?  Well, its pretty simple!

1. Pray - 

We aren’t God and prayer often reminds us of that.  We are called to walk by the Spirit of God but how can we do that when we are walking by the spirit of self.  Its not a part of the Holy Trinity its just a human perspective and not the only one.   Prayer connects us with people through God who knows the other person greater than we do. 

 2. Be -

In an online world, we have lost some offline tools.  The best relationships are found in human, face-to-face, contact.  Quiet is awkward but often necessary.  I recall a story by pastor and author Craig Groeschel where he went to be with a family who had lost a child.  He felt he floundered in his condolences but later found his quiet presence with them in their home was exactly what they needed.  We need to not only be still in our time with God, but also in our relationships with each other.  Just being in the presence of our family and friends without outside distractions can be a powerful force that forges the relationship and holds our souls together.

3. Touch -

I recently ran into a woman I know in public.  She happens to be someone I hold a  great affection for and unfortunately don’t see often.  As our paths crossed, she shared some new bad news she received from her doctor.  In that very public place I grabbed her and hugged her.  That hug did more for both of us than any words I could utter in that moment.  During my years in college, I heard the statistic that as humans we need 20 hugs a day to feel secure.  I don’t know if the number is accurate, but I do know the concept is true.  We need physical touch.  Touch is very powerful with friends and family.  When my friend, who is not a touchy-feely kind of person, lost his wife, he was welcoming of a hug.  It was comforting in a very tenderly hearted moment.

4. Listen - 

We learn the most by listening not by talking.  When I say listen, I mean actively receiving and processing what the other person has to say without any thought to a rebuttal.  Sometimes the best way to make headway with someone in a debate or growing a relationship is by lending a listening ear.  Whether or not you understand or agree, can you become empathic or hear the heart behind the words?  

Not only do we not need to have all the answers in every situation, we likely do not have them anyway.  Too many debates are happening on social media and they are tearing up relationships because there is no relational foundation for the weight of the words we are using.  We think we know the words to say to change someone’s mind on a hot topic or to salve the soul of someone walking a hard road, and even if we do, I suggest you first pause before you speak.  Ask yourself, “Even if this is true, is this the best time and medium in which I can say it?”   Maybe its your turn to speak truth, but taking a second to evaluate can save a lot of heartache if its not.  Remember, you have other tools at your discretion, use them!  

That One Thing That Could Help Your Day Go Way Better

If you don't know, I am a youth pastor.  I have been at the same church for almost 14 years and have worked with teenagers over 15 years.  (By the way, teenagers ROCK)!  Right now we are working through a book by Craig Groeschel called "#Struggles: Following Jesus In A Selfie-Centered World."  This book is truly insightful and relevant to some of our greatest needs in our current culture. 

This week we looked at a topic that I think all of us could use more of!  That is the topic of...

ENCOURAGEMENT!!!

I don't need to regurgitate back to you what Craig had to share, because if that is what you wanted, you could read the book.  As an activity to do in connection with this chapter, I took the 5x7 index cards and wrote each person's name in the group at the top.  Then we passed the cards around.  We were to write something encouraging to the person whose name was listed at the top, and by the end everyone would have a card with encouragements from each other. 

The funny thing was, it was like Christmas morning.  Everyone was eager to get their cards and then the gushing started as everyone ohh'ed and ahh'ed over the comments they had received.  I was actually surprised at my own reaction to my card.  It was amazing!  In that exercise, I realized, we all need more of that.   Instead of just using Facebook to take a million selfies and post your breakfast, take some time to write encouraging posts on your friends' walls. 

Let's be honest, this world beats us down!!! If we aren't hearing personal criticisms, we are seeing the depressing news feed filled with a constant stream of political slams, criminal happenings and overall human cruelty.  While the occasional animal video is fun and happy, its really not enough to overcome the constant crap that clutters up my feed! (Can I get an AMEN?!)  I need more!  So how can we be encouraged? Here are

3 Ways to Infuse Your Life With Encouragement:

1. Read the Bible - Spending time in God's word encourages me.  I am reminded of a God who created me and loves me.  The Psalms can be especially wonderful in this department, but it is not the only book.  If you aren't used to reading the Bible, I suggest you download the YouVersion Bible App, its free!  You can discover plans that fit you and each day there is a reading for you to follow.  Its easy and it works! 

2.  Look in the Mirror - This isn't to do your make-up, shave your beard or fix your hair, but to see yourself and while you are taking a gander, say 3 things that you love about who you are.  I don't just mean your best body parts either.  What do you like about your character or personality?  If you don't know yourself well enough to do so, then take a personality test and find out more about who you are. 

3. Be An Encourager - There is this amazing boomerang effect to our words.  What we put out there, comes back to us!  And let's face it, life is not all about us, but others.  When we put our focus on the gems of friends and family we have, we can begin to realize the beauty in our lives that we never knew was there.  We also make an impact in other's lives, which is amazing!!!  When we practice encouragement, we will be happier people and will probably hear encouragement back.  I did the card exercise for my teens, but I was also greatly impacted. 

Let me just close this by saying, I don't necessarily know you, but I'm sure if you are reading this, you are trying in life.  There is something to be said for effort.  You, no doubt, have many amazing qualities whether you see them or not. 

Go out today and BE ENCOURAGED!!!!