Tag: progress

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Focus Friday: Let’s Focus on Freedom

I write about my struggles and failures quite often for Focus Friday. I don’t mind doing that because I figure it just may help someone else who is going through a similar situation.

But the other day, I was reminded that people don’t constantly want to see that in other people’s lives. They want to see victory, too.

Here’s the quote I heard in episode five (“Anger Must Fall”) of Goliath Must Fall by Louie Giglio (it’s available on RightNow Media if you want to watch it yourself):

“God doesn’t get glory from our lives when there’s a giant with its foot on our neck….When we’re always talking about the downside of life, the weakness of life, the thing we wish we could change about life. We’re not giving God glory as an ultimate savior, a defender, and a fighter and a champion in our lives.”

So I thought I’d brag on God a little bit this week and tell you a few good things happening in my life.

My emotional health keeps improving. Sure, there are ups and downs, but the general trajectory is upward. When I have a bad day I don’t turn it into a bad week. God has been teaching me all kinds of things about myself and about life. I give him all the glory when I am able to catch negative thoughts and emotions. He gives me the ability to find the distortions in some of my thoughts and turn them around. He helps me really feel the negative emotions that bubble up at times, spending an appropriate amount of time with them and then choosing thoughts that will lead to more positive emotions.

My physical health is better. I’ve been experimenting with what I’m eating and how I’m moving in recent months, and I’m seeing changes in the right direction. Slow, steady growth in this area is important as I make little changes that will last. I don’t want to get bogged down in what the scale says, so I’m focusing on how much God loves me just the way I am right now. That said, I feel like he’s helping me choose better things to do with my urges to overeat. That feels good, even if the scale doesn’t reflect huge changes.

I’m making progress on my book. Most of you know that I’ve been working on a book about my experience with depression and how we can all stay healthy emotionally. I’ve been putting in a little more time on it lately and I’m seeing the word count go up (funny how that works!). The giant of fear has been standing with its foot on my neck in this area for a long time, but I am finally allowing God to be my champion. He has the power to keep that giant at bay.

I’m not saying that life is perfect all the time. I’m finally realizing that life is a mixture of good and bad, positive and negative. That’s okay. God is with us through all of it. We can lean on him during the hard times and praise him in the good times. (We can also praise him during the hard times and lean on him in the good times.)

I’ll keep sharing inspiration and ideas for getting through the difficult parts of life, but never forget that we are all free because of what Jesus Christ did for us. Isn’t that awesome?

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” (Galatians 5:1 NIV)

Are you bogged down by life’s problems? How can focusing on God help you to live in freedom, even in the midst of hard times?

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Focus Friday: Let’s Focus on Revisiting Themes

After I uploaded last week’s blog post, I had a funny feeling I had already written about it before. I went to my blog and typed “doing it anyway” in the search box. To my amazement, two posts came up: The one I had just uploaded, and one from January 10, 2020. It had the exact same title and I had written it almost exactly one year before.

I was a little embarrassed at first, and then I got a bit concerned. I’ve written hundreds of blog posts. What if I have nothing new to say and I just start repeating myself from week to week? People will get bored, or confused, or annoyed!

But as I read the two posts, I realized that I had nothing to worry about. The content had the same title, but I was a year older and I was writing from a different place. Yes, I was still struggling with the temptation to quit when things got hard or when I didn’t feel like doing something, but I had moved ahead and done something anyway—two years in a row.

Even though I haven’t accomplished everything I’ve planned to do, I have finished many things in recent years. I have to keep training my mind to celebrate those successes instead of dwelling on the times when I failed and didn’t push forward.

It’s not bad to write about the same things over and over. If I continue to deal with procrastination, doubt, fear, anxiety, and depression from time to time, I can assume some of you need a reminder as you deal with those things as well.

The themes you revisit may be different than mine, but it’s perfectly okay for us to keep going back to the same words, ideas, and struggles. Hopefully, every time we revisit them we’ll be a bit further along in our journey and we’ll have learned some new insights that will help us get unstuck a little more quickly and we’ll be able to see progress.

You’ll probably see me writing about many of the same themes here on this blog, but I’ll try to at least make the titles different from now on.

“For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.” (Colossians 1:9–10 NIV)

Are there certain themes you keep returning to over and over? How can focusing on God help you to grow so you move forward each time you revisit a theme?

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Focus Friday: Let’s Focus on Three Steps Forward

Back in 1997, Chuck Swindoll published a book called Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back. I don’t know if it’s an actual saying that people use now. When I tried to look it up, the closest I got was “One step forward, two steps back.” Now that’s a discouraging thought, trying to move ahead and ending up even further behind than when you began.

What got me thinking about all of this was my scale. I had a couple of really good weeks a while back, watching what I was eating and exercising a little bit more. The scale went down two weeks in a row and I was feeling great. I was sure that I was on my way to going down a pants size and losing the rest of the pounds I had allowed to creep on over the last few years.

Then we moved Blake to Chicago.

I skipped exercising for several days.

We ate out while we were on the road.

Klondike bars were on sale at the grocery store by Blake’s apartment, so we just had to get some and eat three in one day because there was no way to take them with us on the bus and the L when we headed back to our hotel.

When we got home and I weighed myself, I found that all of the pounds I had lost were back. Bummer.

So what I want us to focus on this week is “Three steps forward.”

For a couple of weeks I made good choices and dropped some pounds. That’s good progress.

If I focus on the “Two steps back” that happened because we traveled and I made lots of poor choices, I might decide to just give up and not worry about my weight at all. But that wouldn’t be good for my physical or emotional health.

Instead, I’m going to focus on the “Three steps forward” and remind myself that better choices and hard work produce good results. It’s inevitable. I can’t give up just because I slid back a couple of steps.

We can apply that to any area of our lives.

We learn to control our temper and don’t yell at our children for two weeks straight, then we have a bad morning and totally blow it, scaring our kids with a giant temper tantrum.

Focus on the “Three steps forward.” Apologize to your children and move ahead with the resolve to do your best and be as calm as you can be. Not perfect, but better.

We decide to get our overspending under control and refuse to shop online for a whole month, then our favorite store sends out an email with an amazing sale and a super coupon, and we order enough to get free shipping.

Focus on the “Three steps forward.” Unsubscribe from the store’s email list and either enjoy your purchases or maybe return some of it next time you go to the store. Not rich, but less poor.

We go to work, clean the house, and keep on top of the bills and laundry for six months straight, then we call in sick, binge-watch Netflix all day, and let everything fall to pieces around us.

Focus on the “Three steps forward.” Go back to work, do the dishes, and save Netflix for a treat on the weekend. Not a workaholic, but a hard worker who enjoys life.

Whenever we have a setback – physically, emotionally, or spiritually – we have to focus on the “Three steps forward” we’ve made, not the “Two steps back” (or more!). Only that focus will help us to press on and not give up.

“I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:14 ESV)

Have you fallen “two steps back”? How can focusing on God help you to focus instead on the “three steps forward” you’ve made?