Edie Wadsworth

It’s been a rough week and it’s only Wednesday. I spent yesterday morning in a puddle of tears for a variety of reason. Mostly because I’m human and life is half amazing and half terrifying.

This morning I’m committed to meditating on Psalm 107:9, “The Lord satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.”

It’s a good reminder that ALL IS WELL.

And with the current state of crazy chaos we find ourselves in, there’s never been a more important time to TRULY decide what you want to think, how you want to feel, and HOW YOU WANT TO SHOW UP IN THE WORLD.

It’s always a choice.  We’re going to dive deep today into what it means to make hard choices NOW for benefit LATER.

You can choose thoughts that bring comfort and peace and calm.  Or you can let that crazy brain run wild with whatever it chooses.

But remember that thoughts have consequences. And those consequences become your life.

one- Remember WHOSE YOU ARE.

Stevie and the kids and I went on an overnight tent camping trip. When you’re in the woods at night, it’s kind of an eerie thing. We had three tents. Tom and I were sleeping in one tent. Elea had her own tent and Stevie had his own tent.

Elea’s tent and my tent were right beside each other. There’s literally no light. You hear weird noises. We were whispering back and forth to each other the whole time, “Did you hear that? What was that?”

You know what gave me so much comfort? Stevie’s tent was right there. He’s the dad. He’s the boy scout. He’s got this. He’s got bear spray and a knife and a saw and he’s strong. So much comfort! I would never in a million years do that without him.

Same for our Heavenly Father. He’s here with us. This is not surprising to him. We can trust him with our jobs or our lack of jobs right now. We can trust him with our kids. We can trust him with our lives. It’s not helping anybody for us to live in fear and panic.

Have you noticed when you are spinning in fear and panic, it makes you feel alone?

I am here to remind you that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

This is not God’s first rodeo. This is not a surprise. There’s no panic in heaven. Only comfort and grace and love and mercy and peace.

So how can we incorporate that into our daily lives? Less panic, more peace, less fear, more trust! One thought is not serving us in any way and one thought will keep us calm and productive!

So how can we remember whose we are? I have been keeping my bible open to Psalm 91 to remind me for a while. You might also find my Lenten study helpful and you can find it here.

We are loved by the most high God. He is in charge here. He will take care of us. Whatever your circumstances, they are not surprising to him.

two – Remember WHO YOU ARE.

You are resilient, so much more resilient than you think you are. You’ve been through hard things before. You are so much more resilient than you think. You will come through this.

Remember how God made us. He made us with these amazing, creative minds. He made us to be like children that could trust in Him so we can just go about our business because we’re not worried about all the other stuff. We know He is here, and He’s made this amazing playground called life for us!

We also are living through something that gives us this chance to have a broad range of emotion. I’m not saying, “Oh, you should just be Pollyanna and you should just be happy all the time.” The truth is that both negative and positive feelings are essential for surviving and thriving in times of crisis.

I have had many periods of frustration. I know many of you work from home and now everybody’s home! It’s kind of hard to work from home with a house full of people.

I had this moment where I was thinking, “Does everybody not realize I have a job to do? I have things I have to do.” I’m just one of the humans and I get to be frustrated sometimes and I get to have fear sometimes. I let myself feel that. I let it wash over me and then I come back to the things that ground me, scripture and my family and my purpose for being here, which is to serve and love.

Practice deep and abiding positive emotions such as hope, compassion and heartfelt gratitude that times of crisis bring. Those emotions have broadened and enriched my ways of being.

Many times you cannot change the circumstances, but you have so much control over how you respond to them. You will look back on this time and you’ll remember how you responded.

It’s ALWAYS up to you how you respond to what’s going on around you.

This crisis can be the greatest time of growth in your life or or it could spiral you into bad health and not sleeping and fear and panic. You get to make the choice.

three – Remember to stay open & curious & keep learning and growing.

I love to keep learning. I love to keep growing. There’s really no better way to fight the fear and panic and all the things that come during a crisis than you going on the offensive and being willing to just keep learning and growing, staying open.

A mind is like a parachute — it works best when it’s open.

When you get in a fight or flight kind of crisis mode, everything shuts down. Your heart rate goes up. It’s hard to breathe. Your brain shuts down. Everything gets small. Your mind gets small. You get very narrow, and you can’t see any answers.

I also find we become so narrow in the way we see things, that anybody who does it any differently, you’re instantly judgmental of them. “Those people should be doing whatever!” Our brain just gets negative and judgmental and we don’t even like ourself when we get like that.

If you open up, stay curious, get into more a parasympathetic state of being with your nervous system where you’re open, you’re breathing and your heart rate comes down. Your brain gets fluffy, it expands. It can think of a thousand things to do during a pandemic, or a quarantine. It can think of all kinds of creative things that you could be doing right now with your time other than scrolling through Facebook and watching news and getting depressed.

Open your heart up, open your mind up. Be willing to keep learning, to stay curious. How can you be part of the solution? Let’s teach our brains how to open up and see solutions and stay curious and get creative and productive? It’s such a better way to spend your time than spiraling in judgment and all the other negative things that it’s so easy to spiral into in times of crisis.

What can you create right now that didn’t exist in the world before? How can you contribute to the world in a way that maybe you haven’t before? There’s so many things that you can do!

Actions speak louder than words, so we must seek out mentors who exemplify what we aspire to become, because the most important lessons in life are not taught but caught. Passion, commitment and curiosity are highly contagious. Stop spinning in worry and negativity and judgement and START DOING things that are calming and productive and creative.

four – Remember to nurture habits that nourish your body and soul.

Which also means avoiding things that bring more panic and worry, like watching too much news and scrolling social media. Let’s do things instead that expand our minds, that open us up, that help us keep growing, that help us keep learning, and that help us take care of our body and soul.

Here’s a list of things we’ve been doing—baking, art projects, planting an herb garden, hot baths, writing, cleaning, organizing, hiking, exercising, journaling, praying, staying in the scripture, puzzling, playing games, napping, and so much more.

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After we lost our house to a house fire in 2010, the nine months that followed, was some of the hardest, and yet most precious times of my whole life. I can remember staying in a borrowed house. We didn’t have any of our own stuff.

People can tell you it’s going to be okay, but we didn’t know that.

It didn’t feel like anything was going to be okay, and our little family just huddled together. We would have little dance parties, and I remember one night, Stevie and the girls got to singing some crazy song, and I laughed so hard I cried. We just all huddled together and loved on each other and let it be hard together.

We were also willing to rise up together and realize that this kind of thing is what we’re made for.

It’s hard to believe how much has changed so quickly.

Let’s look for peace in uncertain times.

People are scared. People are scared for their health, they’re scared for their finances, they’re scared for their parents, they’re scared for lots of good reasons. We have a lot of fear right now and if we focus on it, it magnifies. Let’s shift our focus just ever so slightly to something better.

When we focus on the external, we lose sight of the eternal.

Fear is paralyzing and keeps us from acting in a way we want. Fear is when we focus on what’s external instead of on what’s ETERNAL.

You can’t change what is happening, but you can recognize who is here.

I’m here to give us a gentle reminder, a gentle shift back to the center of things. You can’t change what is happening, but you can recognize who is here.

God is with us. He is here. This is not a surprise to him. This is not his first rodeo.

We can’t change the circumstances, but we can open our eyes and recognize that this is not the first hard thing that people have gone through, and we are going to be okay. Here’s what happens in times of heartache and stress and national crisis, people come back to themselves.

They come back to their sanity, they give, they help, they pitch in. 

Let’s borrow a little bit of the wisdom from people who have lived through way worse things. Even surviving used to be a lot harder than it is now. Let’s focus back onto the eternal.

No matter what is happening around us, God is with us.

He is here.

We are His.

He will take care of us.

We don’t have to be afraid. We don’t have to live in fear. We can still be a blessing to our neighbor. We can still spread light and joy and love.

All of those things are possible, and maybe now more than ever because people are really waking up. We get in this cycle of our crazy busy lives and we forget the things that are important, and now we can be reminded all the time, every day.

Take comfort that God is in charge and this is all going to be okay and he’s going to take care of us no matter what happens. He didn’t say hard things wouldn’t happen. He said, “I will be with you.”

No matter what is happening, don’t forget who’s here. 

You can’t change the circumstances, but you can RENAME them.

You can say, “Oh my gosh, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. This is terrible. The financial world is going to be in ruins and this is going to be terrible.”

You could look at it that way, but you could also RENAME it and you could also say, “Wow, this is a chance for us to really pull together. This is a chance for us to take care of people who are less fortunate. This is a chance for us to really look out for the people in our lives who aren’t as prepared. This is a chance for us to speak life. This is a chance for us to love our neighbor. This is a chance for us to really step up our game.”

We were made for difficult things. We are so much more resilient than we think we are, and we can become voices of that in our families.

Our kids are listening. Our kids are afraid. They’re watching, they’re seeing how we’re going to respond. What a beautiful time to reassure them that nations come and go, principalities come and go, economies come and go, but God NEVER changes and He loves us and He cares for us, and all of this will be for our good in the end.

We just rename it. You can look at it any way you choose to. My advice would be really consider how you’re looking at it. Really consider the things that you’re letting occupy your mind. What you think about magnifies and what you think about becomes how you feel.

If you’re feeling anxious and overwhelmed, full of anxiety, you’ve got to ask yourself, “What am I letting run rampant up here that’s not serving me, that’s not helpful?” You have a chance to interrupt that and get in the scriptures and read all the comfort that’s there.

As humanity, this is not our first really trying thing. And like He gets us through everything else, He will get us through this.

You can’t go back THERE, but you can learn to truly be HERE.

You can’t go back there, three months ago when our lives were normal. Some of you have had personal tragedies in the last few months and you wish you could go back there.

You wish things could be like they were. You wish you still had that job. You wish you were still married to that person. You wish your child hadn’t done whatever. You wish you could go back there. But here’s the challenge, can we learn to love and be present HERE? 

We are a culture who doesn’t want to be here.

We have a million ways to escape being here. People are checking out left and right. We just numb ourselves and distract ourselves. It’s so easy to not be here. But this is where we are, and right here today, right now, is where we’re supposed to be.

How can we be more present here? How can we stop wanting what we used to have, the way it used to be, back there? How can we really learn to live in the present here? God is here. How can we learn to stay here and be here, even in the heartache, even in the trying times, even when all the kids are home and we have no idea what to do with them, even when we just lost our job and we’re not sure how we’re going to pay our mortgage?

Escaping here, in all the ways that we have to escape here, doesn’t make the problem go away. It just gives you another set of problems. What if we learn to stay here and present, and those feelings we have, we just let them wash over us for a little while. Then we can decide how we want to show up.

How do you want to show up right now? Do you want to look back on this time and think, “You know what? Those were some of the sweetest times most precious times.”

If we allow right here to shape us and if we allow it to really do its work in us, this kind of thing is our teacher. Are we going to allow it to teach us something? Are we open to the lessons? Do we have enough humility that we’re willing to learn something new about ourselves, about our family?

Let’s be willing to have this curriculum in our lives and let God teach us and make us see things in ourselves that aren’t what they could be.

I pray He would give us a better understanding, and more awareness of my neighbor, more awareness of how we’ve been living our lives, maybe in ways that we don’t want to keep continuing on.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from CS Lewis. We’re not living under this same threat, but it applies so much.

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things. Praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting with our friends over a pint and a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

Cs Lewis

I hope that you can find some peace in these uncertain times. It’s always there for the taking. 

If this mindset shift resonates with you, I’d love to go deeper with you in my monthly mentorship program called Life Mentoring School! We are studying money and abundance this month (June 2020) and next month is food and weight loss, & in August we’ll be tackling how to get things done!