Shortly before a tornado took her three-story home in Maryville, Indiana, Stephanie Decker said to her children, “You’re not going to die. We’re going to make it.”John makes a great spiritual application to this touching story of a mom who saves her children. Be sure to read it.
People are more comfortable being uncomfortable than being comfortable, if they have been uncomfortable for an extended period of time. It's simply an ingrained pattern, and familiarity is more comfortable than novelty. Most people have for so long experienced the gnawing sense of anxiety about all the un-captured and un-clarified "work" of their life, that's what they're used to. Then no matter how clean and in control they get at some point, they will soon let themselves slide, let things mount up again, unprocessed, sufficiently to get them back to the level of stress they are accustomed to.This point seems to offer a spiritual application as well. People are often more uncomfortable with their old sinful life than with the life of Christ, than with the "feeling of freedom," as Allen mentioned. We love our burdens and weights too much to lay them down. We want to keep our old familiar prejudices and hates and habits. Along with the context of Galatians, might not this truth give extra meaning to chap. 5, verse 1, "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be subject again to the yoke of slavery." Christ has given us freedom. That freedom was meant to be exercised and enjoyed, not stifled by the inner or religious need to prove one's own worth to God. This hopeless effort produces only frustration, but some, who already know only this, prefer it to the freedom of having sins totally forgiven and living in the free obedience to the will of God.
"Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it." —William Zinsser, On Writing Well, quoted in "Lessons I Learned Reading Over 200 Books". h/t Grat Tucker
... reversible, keep-your-options-open decisions reliably lead to lower levels of satisfaction than irreversible ones. In other words, we are significantly less happy with our choices when we can back out of them.
Why does keeping our options open make us less happy? Because once we make a final, no-turning-back decision, the psychological immune system kicks in. This is how psychologists like Gilbert refer to the mind's uncanny ability to make us feel good about our decisions. Once we've committed to a course of action, we stop thinking about alternatives. Or, if we do bother to think about them, we think about how lousy they are compared to our clearly superior and awesome choice.
This business article has a direct application, in my mind, to marriage. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence when the life-time commitment is lacking. When we make our choice of mate with the thought that there is no going back, the PIS kicks in and we see all the reasons why we made the right choice. What do you think about this one?
One of several I made for a friend.
Pepsi ... has been contracting with a research firm that uses fetal cells from babies victimized by abortions to test and produce artificial flavor enhancers.And they're not the only ones. It's difficult to describe how horrendous this is. One evil leads to another, even greater. #pepsico #abortion
... the Obama administration is set to face more criticism because an agency has declared that Pepsi's use of the company and its controversial flavor testing process constitutes "ordinary business."
Songwriter Robert B. Sherman, who wrote the tongue-twisting “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and other enduring songs for Disney classics, has died.