Soul Keeping: Taking Care of Your Body
Our souls are made up of body, mind, and emotions. Right in the middle of it all is our spirit.
So far in our Soul Strength series, we’ve covered a lot of territory. Today I am thrilled to share one of my very special bloggy friends as we focus on the physical part of our lives. This blog is focused on where the spiritual meets the practical, and taking care of our bodies is practical–and oh so important.
I want to introduce you to Katie Oldham. Katie is a whole life blogger who is a word crafter, real food recipe creator, and fitness motivator. She writes about body, soul, and taste buds! I am in total awe of someone who can create delicious and healthy recipes, and I love reading her heart spread over the page.
Katie as lived whole and healthy through some hard days. You can read her story here. You’ll be inspired! You are going to want to try her gluten free pumpkin spice muffins. Katie can help you feed your precious body with good, healthy food. You’ve seen my kitchen, and there’s a really good reason I don’t do recipes!
Last week I read Katie’s post on the importance of resistance training for women, and I really wanted to share it with you.
Here’s Katie:
Why We Need Resistance: 7 GOOD Reasons…Ladies, Listen up!
I enjoy working hard and rocking a good sweaty exercise routine! But, you won’t find me raising my voice or sending my clients to the mat for pushups when they really feel more like a push over.
What I want is to encourage you! To empower you to use that beautiful body God gave you!
I know what movement does for me and it’s so much more than what you can see. I’m not in it for the aesthetics anymore. Exercise is a sanity saver, a part of a peace-routine for my soul before the day saturates it with stress and a way to invigorate my mind and body when keeping up with the kids seems impossible…
Why resistance? Because, in addition to the numerous health benefits to your body, weight training works wonders for women. Here are seven reasons I hope inspire you to strength train:
1. Confidence. Are you surprised this is first on my list? It’s not all about the aesthetics! When your body feels strong and you’ve taken the time to flex your muscles, your mind will respond and you’ll stand up straighter (literally and figuratively). It feels good to feel capable!
2. Boost your Metabolism. If you add muscle to your body (even just a little bit), your body becomes a better calorie burner. That means even at rest you’ll use more calories. So, whether your health requires you to lose a little weight (the unhealthy kind) or you want to maintain your weight as you age (and we all are!), strength training really is a must.
3. Gain Independence. I’ve been a single mom for almost four years and before that I was a caregiver for two small girls and my late husband. Physical labor is part of my position here at home. While I need to call for help from time to time, I love the feeling of being able to accomplish certain jobs without too much trouble or injury. Maybe you’re not alone at home, but you’ll still feel strength in your physical independence.
Click here to read four more great reasons to take care of our bodies with resistance training. Let’s get lifting, friends! When you stop by Katie’s website Happily Whole, leave a comment and say hi to our friend.
You can catch the entire Soul Strength series right here.
Soul Feelings: Unlocking the Messages
I’m a really good worrier.
Feelings can get the best of us sometimes, can’t they? Today’s post continues our look at feelings as messengers.
When I am under pressure, it is easy to go to the familiar ways of living that make up my flesh. Problems prompt a natural default to anxiousness. I’ve been practicing for a life time and my worry muscles are strong. In fact, I can probably out-worry a lot of folks, but I’m not bragging about that. It isn’t something I’m proud of.
Feelings carry all kinds of messages.
Years ago my husband applied for a ministry position with an organization. He found out about the job a week after our daughter left for college, and I struggled with the idea of moving far away. The thought of moving again sent me into a spin.
We went for an interview, and it seemed that God was opening the position for us. It was a dream job that would have been a blessing for both of us, yet anxiety raged in my soul–heart, mind, and body.
The inner battle went back and forth, taking my feelings on a ride wilder than any roller coaster. After a career of military moves, my emotions simply refused to cooperate. The day of our interview, we stopped by a church to pray. I surrendered my feelings, the weight of insecurity and anxiety to God, and committed to go where He would send us, even if it meant another transition for our family.
As it turned out, we weren’t offered the position. I felt like it was my fault. I felt that God had tested my faith and I had failed. I accused myself of robbing my husband of his dream job.
Feelings became thoughts. Over and over they replayed in my mind and I began to believe what appeared to be true. I believed the lies my feelings insisted were true.
It’s all your fault.
You don’t have enough faith to follow God.
You are a failure.
This was a deep soul struggle.
God used this experience to show me my need for some soul work. In all of the military moves, I did what military wives do so well, pull it together and carry on.
Over time, God is teaching me to look for the messages in my feelings. Feelings reveal what I am believing in the moment, and many of those beliefs relate to getting my needs met. I am learning to ask myself, what am I believing right now. What needs are attached to these beliefs?
Beliefs and Needs
The Feeling: It’s all your fault
The Belief: Making right decisions and performing well makes me OK
The Need: Adequacy, worth, and acceptance
The Truth: God accepts and loves me even though I struggle and make mistakes. There were many more factors at work in the decision. In reality, surrendering despite my feelings was a victory, not a defeat–regardless of the outcome.
Do you see how this works? So often, our feelings can show us what we’re really believing under the surface. We can rely on our flesh or we can depend on Christ. We can choose our feelings and false beliefs or we can choose God’s truth.
What’s behind your feelings today?
You can find the entire Soul Strength series here.
Emotions can be a difficult area of our soul. In my book, Holy in the Moment, I devoted a chapter to practical truths and ideas for processing our feelings in healthy and holy ways. Learn more here or click the image below.
Soul Blessings for your Weekend
Day 18: A little God glory for your soul this weekend. Enjoy beauty in the simple, ampoule daily slices of life. Ordinary moments lived well become extraordinary. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Print...
Soul Truth: Feelings or Truth?
Truth for your soul today.
When we allow feelings to be bearers of truth, feelings become beliefs.
Feelings are not true or false. They are responders and messengers. They just are. We have a choice in what we believe. We can accept feelings as facts or we can hold fast to truth.
Truth to remember when our feelings are sending negative messages to our souls:
I have abundant life.
I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.–John 10:10
I am loved by God.
The Lord appeared to him from afar, saying, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.–Jeremiah 31: 3
I am accepted.
Therefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. –Romans 15:7
I am not alone.
…For He Himself has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,”–Hebrews 13: 5
I am forgiven.
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.–1 John 1:9
I have peace.
For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall–Ephesians 2:14
I am God’s masterpiece.
For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.–Ephesians 2:10
What will I believe today, feelings or truth?
What will you?
Want to learn more about dealing with your emotions? Learning to recognize the truth about what we feel is so important that I wrote a chapter on feelings in my book. Click the link below to learn more about Holy in the Moment or check out the book page on this website.
*This post contains an affiliate link at no cost to you.
Soul Messages: What are Your Feelings Telling You?
I have updated this post. You can read the updated version here or check out the related podcast episode on processing your feelings with faith.
“It never works out.”
These are words from a sweet soul that I love–words that ring with frustration and discouragement. Emotions run rampant when times are tough. One bad moment can give birth to another and another, and our emotions go into overdrive.
All of a sudden hope fades and defeat marches in with a vengeance.
Don’t we all know this hard place?
We respond to our world through the amazing gift of our emotions.
In the moment, truth can be no further away than the nearest feeling barging into our thoughts.
Feelings are powerful.
Convincing.
Enticing.
But they are not truth.
Feelings sometimes shout and sometimes whisper, but they can bully and badger, making us think they carry truth. It all feels so real.
Feelings are responses.
Feelings are responders and messengers. They hold no power to dictate truth unless we allow them to speak false belief to our souls.
We are so tempted to respond to our merry-go-round of feelings as truth. If I feel it, it must be true.
Feelings feel true.
My kids would fall on the floor laughing at this Mom-ism that sounds so stupid…but is so true.
But feelings feel true.
And we fall for it, way too often.
I am in a season of soul work. One issue that keeps popping up is my tendency to respond to my feelings as though they are truth. Feelings bring out all kinds of conclusions, many of them false beliefs.
One feeling believed can open the door to a nasty downward spiral to defeat. It can be one short step from feeling discouraged to believing: “I can’t,” “God won’t,” “I’m not,” “I’m alone, ______.” Fill in the blank with your need of the moment.
When we allow feelings to be bearers of truth, feelings become beliefs.
I feel rejected–I think I am rejected–I begin to believe I am rejected.
I feel discouraged–I am discouraged.
I feel loved–I am loved.
The convincing power of our feelings sway our thoughts and we begin to believe the messages our feelings shout loud and long.
In reality, feelings just are. I feel good, I feel mad, happy, sad, hopeful, disappointed….and on and on they go.
Here’s the thing that matters.
Feelings are not true or false. They are responders and messengers. They just are. How much time have I wasted, shaming myself for feeling this or that. As if some feelings are allowed and others are not.
We feel is what we feel. Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to feel what we feel without judging it. Without lecturing it. Without discounting or stuffing it.
We have a choice in what we believe. We can accept feelings as facts or we can hold fast to truth.
What is the message of your feelings? What is hidden beneath the emotion?
Feelings simply respond to what we believe is true in this moment. I feel like a failure. Then I begin to think I am a failure. Then I begin to believe I am a failure.
What are your feelings telling you?
I wrote a chapter on dealing with feelings in the care and keeping of God in Holy in the Moment. Learn more about the book here.
*This post contains an affiliate link at no cost to you.
A Free Workbook to Process Your Feelings
Enjoy a free work book with exercises to help you process your feelings in a healthy way.
Soul Confidence: You are Enough
Day 15: My Soul, be confident.
When confidence fritters away, seeping through our fingers like a handful of sand, we question our worth. Facing failure, we wonder…will we ever get it together? We ache, feeling the stretch and pull of our need for adequacy, to know that we are enough.
There’s a country song that laments “looking for love in all the wrong places.” We look for a lot of our treasures in the wrong places. Spiritual confusion of our true worth and value trips our hearts over the obstacle of our flesh. We try with all we’ve got to draw confidence from our own strengths, abilities, and success.
Choosing real
There is a confidence, a knowing of adequacy that is written into our lives by God’s living Spirit. When we stop trying to commend ourselves with our self-confidence, we find that the Spirit is writing Himself into the fabric of our being–who we are, how we think, what we choose.
“You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being manifested that you are a letter of Christ…written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” 2 Corinthians 3:2-3
How freeing to discover that God is writing His Living Spirit on our lives. I want to write with the ink of human accomplishment, declaring my value…all the while struggling because I’m still trying to find confidence in my self. This is the fading ink of proving worth through my own abilities, personality, and strength.
God has something better for you, my Soul.
With the breath of the Spirit, God writes Himself into our lives with living ink. This living Spirit (zao) means to enjoy real life that is worthy of the name of Christ. True worth, value, and adequacy comes with the vital power of Christ, full of vigor, fresh, strong, and efficient.
Soul, why would you settle for less?
Why do you hold on to the raggedy tatters of what your flesh can accomplish when you can have the zao of Christ as your confidence?
Why do you keep finding fault with your self, trying to gather what you cannot keep? Stop collecting confidence with a success or a compliment, only to drop it when the weight of inadequacy gets to heavy to carry.
Hmm…but how we try to find our confidence in ourselves. Confidence in the flesh or real life in the Spirit? What am I really longing for?
…who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant–2 Corinthians 3:6
Soul, you are enough.
Your adequacy and worth is from God, His gift of true life. You are everything God created you to be. You are more than enough.
You can stop trying to draw life from the approval of others. You can stop chasing confidence proved with your own efforts. There is no life here.
Soul, don’t hold back.
You don’t have to hide or hold back any longer, open the gift you’ve already got. In Christ you have the gift of enough, today and everyday.
…The spirit of God alone can give life to the soul.
(v. 6 JB Phillips).
You can find all the posts in this #write31days series here.
Today I am sharing with Holley Gerth at Coffee for Your Heart.
Soul Reach: Inspiration to Reach for More of God
Soul Reach
My soul keeps seeking, holding, submitting…
Reaching to know more.
My soul reaches for the real, the substance that fills.
Saturate me in Your Spirit, Lord.
At first I am afraid to let go,
Holding on to bits and pieces, afraid to give up my rights and desires.
Back and forth, my soul struggles between faith and flesh,
Between His peace and my striving.
As I grow, the transforming work of God takes root,
I open more and more of myself…
And I give it again, and again, and again–
until He has all of my heart.
All.
Truly knowing God is everything.
He is every answer that I seek,
The provision for every need that I have,
The source of every blessing I receive,
And the Giver of every good gift that graces my life.
Learning to live full in all that He is,
To live loud this life of faith in Christ…
This is the work of the believer
And the growth of a lifetime.
Truth strengthens my soul,
I come to realize that confidence to draw near to God,
Confidence to love vibrant and free is based on His faithfulness,
Not on my ability, purity, or goodness…
How long it takes to get this lesson learned…all the way, soul deep and life strong.
As I learn to lay my treasures at God’s feet
I begin to stop defining myself with the stark lines of
What I can do, how I look, how well…how much…
When I see myself by these self-expectations the reflection is never accurate
and it is never…ever…enough.
The blessings and gifts of God are not standards to measure and evaluate.
They are meant to be used by a spirit set free
From the chains of performance, approval, and perfection..
There is nothing more beautiful
than a heart fully submitted to God.
You can find all the posts of this series here. If this post has encouraged you today, I’d love to have you share it with someone.
[tweetthis]Confidence to love vibrant is based on God’s faithfulness, not on my ability, purity, or goodness[/tweetthis].
[tweetthis]The blessings and gifts of God are not standards to measure and evaluate.[/tweetthis]
Sharing today with Inspire Me Mondays.
Soul Sabbath: Discovering the Rest of God
Soul Sabbath
There is a gap the size of eternity can that exist between knowing what is true and believing what is true. The distance between hearing and entering is the doorway of faith. Just as God rested from His works on the seventh day, He invites us to rest from our work of trying to get ourselves together.
One of the secrets to Soul Strength is discovering the power of Sabbath Rest. Rest reaches deeper and spills wider that merely taking time off from work or going to church on Sundays. It’s not bound to following the rules, and it has little to do with being religious. Neither is rest concerned with sleeping better or taking more time off.
Sabbath rest is a unique concept altogether. God rested from His work of creation; He rested because the work was finished. Sabbath rest is a spiritual rest, a cessation from our works to earn righteousness.
Thanks to Christ, we no longer have to do the righteous work of keeping the law. Christ has finished this work. Entering God’s rest, the grace offered in salvation, means that we no longer need to work to attain salvation and acceptance from God.
What a relief to know that we no longer have to work at keeping the law with the blood and sweat of our own goodness.
Mark Buchanan explains the rest of God:
Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness. It is both time on a calendar and a disposition of the heart. It’s a day we enter, but just as much a way we see. Sabbath imparts the rest of God—actual physical, mental, spiritual rest, but also the rest of God—the things of God’s nature and presence we miss in our busyness” (Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God p.3.
He continues, showing that Sabbath rest is not just a space on the calendar or a day of the week.
“But when I say Sabbath, I also mean an attitude. It is a perspective, and orientation. I mean a Sabbath heart, not just a Sabbath day. A Sabbath heart is restful even in the midst of unrest and upheaval.” —The Rest of God, p. 4.
Soul, how can you discover the rest of God today?
Soul Doing: What are You up to?
Trust in the Lord and do good. Psalm 37:3a
Life at the sixth grade lunch table can be a hard place to be. To be labeled a Goody-two-shoes was a kiss of death to anyone who longed to be popular.
Maybe we still carry these negative connotations of do-gooders. But we’ve grown up now and doing good is part of our lives.
Good work began at creation as God spoke this world into existence. The creative work of God took shape in the lives of men, and God called it all good.
Trust and Do
Can I tell you how easy it is to get caught in the say-yes-to-everything cycle? I don’t need tell you because you already know. It is way too easy to get stuck in the crossfires of a need and a good cause.
It happened to me just last week. I had more on my to-do list that is possible for the most gifted of super-women to accomplish.
Incoming…
A desperate plea for more nursery workers.
Sometimes No is a really uncomfortable word.
Life is filled with many opportunities to help out and do good–we just can’t do all of them.
Beyond busyness
There aren’t enough hours in the day, or days in the year to accomplish all the good that needs doing. We live in a world desperate for good, and that can be overwhelming at times.
Doing and being are paired together in this simple instruction. Simple isn’t always easy, yet when we live life from a foundation of trusting God, it is the answer that is always right.
Not good:
- Sometimes we trust God, but do nothing.
- Other times, we are busy doing, but faith is left behind.
- Often we rush ahead doing good in our own strength.
There is a fine balance between trusting and doing that creates faithfulness. It is a balance in the art of living by faith, this doing what is good with a heart firm in the trustworthy hands of God, responding to the direction of the Holy Spirit.
The word trust means to lean on, rely on, and be confident in. To be bold, secure, without care we feel safe when we trust in God.
This is the kind of trust that allows the trapeze artist to let go, flying through the air with abandon, confident that the catcher will not let them fall.
It is trust that quiets a crying baby simply because mother’s arms hold them tenderly.
Hannah Whitall Smith reminds us,“Faith is simply to believe and assert the thing that God says. If He says there is peace, faith asserts that there is, and enters into the enjoyment of it.”
Trusting God allows us to believe and possess, to live in and then live out God’s promises. Trusting God enables us to do what is good–the right thing and the right time.
Trusting God…not trusting self.
When self-effort kicks in, we can easily to slip into a works mentality. So subtly we can begin working, doing good, to please God more in an attempt to control the outcome we want rather than doing good our to the pure expression of Christ in our hearts.
One way we can put our finger on the pulse of our heart motivations is whether or not we are trusting God in our work/doing good.
When we aren’t trusting God, it’s SO easy to find ourselves…
- frustrated that our plan isn’t working
- upset others aren’t responding the way we want
- afraid to risk failure
- trying to prove something with our work
- attempting to control situations and outcomes…
Any of this sound familiar?
Steven McVey says that we often ask God to bless our efforts of doing good. Yet the New Testament model of a Christian is “not one who dedicates his own work to God. Rather it is the story of God Himself doing the work through a person totally yielded (trust) to Him.”–Grace Walk, p. 31.
My soul, what are you up to?
