The Mission Driven Mom Podcast

Part 2 in a two part series, this podcast focuses on the 4 solutions we can utilize in overcoming our challenges. As pain shows up in our lives, we can either ignore it, or look honestly at what it means--usually it means there's a problem we need to solve.

When we engage in the process of recognizing that our pains and problems are there to instruct us, help us grow, and give our lives meaning, we no longer avoid them but optimistically meet the opportunity they provide. 

Ultimately, our pain and problems are the gateway to the greatest joys in life!

Take advantage of our FREE Mini-Training on Overcoming Your Worries and Turning Them Into Forward Momentum here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript:

I am so excited for you to be here today. We are on part two of the four types of Problems and the four Solutions. Last time we talked in depth about what these four types of problems are, and I hope that better understanding them and evaluating them in your own life has helped you see that maybe you have a little bit more power than you thought you did.

And there are, there's something you can do about the problems that you're facing because they're all different and there's different solutions. This is also something that I get into in detail in my upcoming book, How Truth Makes You Free, and there's a whole chapter that. Talks about what it means to be made free and goes over these four types of problems and gives some other solutions and helps and insights.

A big part of which is like we always do at the mission-driven mom, and that is finding those principles and living according to them, which the book is all about how to do that, what those are, and h ow to be more principle centered in your life. But for today, we're going to dive into the four solutions presented by M. Scott Peck in his book, The Road Less Traveled, and how they tie into what we do at the MDM Academy and how you can take some actions right now on those problems that you evaluated since last, since we met last time, and some steps that you can begin to take right now.

Before we do that, I want to just thank you for showing up for downloading these podcasts and listening. It would also really help us if you shared them along and gave us a review. Those reviews help others know that this is a quality podcast where they can expect to gain valuable insights and something that they ought to plug into.

And if you haven't already, head over to the missiondrivenmom.com. We actually have a few free offerings for you. I've got a really great little mini training that will help you stop worrying and start thriving if worrying is something that is a big problem for you. It definitely is for me. I found a tool that has been incredibly helpful.

You can master this tool in 10 minutes and you can turn your worries into forward momentum. We also have the first two chapters of my book, the Mission-Driven Life. How to discover and fulfill your unique contribution to the world. And you can go grab those on the homepage at the missiondrivenmom.com down at the bottom, and get a taste of what that book is like.

And then grab a copy of the book for yourself or maybe for a friend. And we also have a 7 Laws cheat sheet. If you haven't gone back on this podcast, or if you're new here, you might want to go back and begin at the beginning. We actually recently reordered some of these so that it would be an even better listening listener experience for you.

And I go through the 7 Laws of Life Mission in some pretty good depth in a few of those podcasts that will give you some idea of those seven laws that are encompassed in my book, the Mission-Driven Life, and that we mentor you through in the Mission-Driven Mom Academy. That's why it exists. We take you all the way through those seven laws and get you off to the life mission that that God is calling you to, that God has for you.

Missions that you're already engaged in right now where you can do a better job and missions that you can prepare for using your unique gifts. So those are some three things I encourage you to take advantage of all of those.

Let's dive into these four solutions. The four things we're gonna talk about today are the four things that any human being needs to do to stay mentally well. One of what he says in The Road Less Traveled is to a large degree, we participate in creating our own mental illness just as we can contribute in creating physical illness for ourselves.

We can eat poor quality foods, we can remain deprived of certain critical nutrients. We can fail to heal our gut. We can have a weak immune system. We can not get enough sleep. There are a myriad of things that we can do that will contribute to the breakdown of the body so that when we are exposed to certain things, we are more likely to get sick and stay sick.

There are actions, choices that we can make that will keep our body in its optimum health. Now, this is not to negate biology. Obviously biology is real and it's not to negate, you know, the way that we were raised or certain propensities we might have or trauma that we've been through. All of those things are absolutely real, but my goal for all of us is that we heal as much as we possibly can.

We want to be whole. We want to be healthy, and that means mental health as well. And we can be, that's achievable for us. It doesn't mean that we're gonna be happy all the time, and I'm gonna talk about that in just a minute. But it does mean that we can have the optimal physical and mental health that our biology makes possible for us.

Some things we can't change if we're blind, if we're missing a limb, we can't change the past. We mentioned those things last time. There are things we can't change, but we totally can control the future. And what Scott Pick is saying is that these four elements that we're gonna talk about for the next few minutes are vital tools to all of us staying in good mental health. They really do contribute. It's like vitamins for our brain and to the extent that we really understand them and own them we'll be as mentally healthy as we can be. There's also other tools that we can take advantage of. You know, therapy might help for a time, you know, there, there might be people you need to forgive.

There's a myriad of tools that are available to us and a big part of the MDM Academy, especially level one, is to recenter ourselves on. God and to recenter ourselves in our relationship with ourselves, and that means doing activities that generate better mental health. And there's a bunch of tools that I give you there in the academy. We've been around for seven years, this fall. We launched MDM level one the first time, and now we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of testimonials.

We just did a kind of a meetup with some of the leaders that do the teen program. In some schools and, and homeschool co-ops and the teen program is having tremendous impact on the youth and the moms program.

You know, if you go to the website, you can see dozens and dozens of testimonials. If you go to YouTube, you can see all sorts of video testimonials as well of women who are much healthier mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. Because these tools are principle centered and vital. So all of that being said, that's all available to you.

Anytime you're ready to plug in, we are here ready to help you and walk you through that. In the meantime, let's get to what Scott Peck has to teach us because it's so helpful.

Now, the first solution. To overcoming our problems is delaying gratification. And when I first was going through this to prepare for this podcast, it reminded me of one of my favorite, I don't know if you would actually call him a philosopher.

He's definitely a political economist. His name's Frederick Bastiat. He's French. He lived in the 1800's. He was brilliant. He has several brilliant articles that I absolutely love, and one of them is called “What Is Seen, what Is Not Seen.”  This really ties into what it means to delay gratification. He says,

“There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one. The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect. The good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be for seen. Yet this difference is tremendous for it almost always happens…"

Listen really carefully to what he says here, because this is not just an economic principle. You think for just a minute. When I read what Bastiat says here to you, I want you to think about every era of your life. I want you to think about your relationships and your finances and your career, and your parenting, and your mental health, your physical health, your relationship with yourself.

All in every area of life, delaying gratification is vital. It's vital to any kind of long-term lasting success. And what he says here, this principle is universal. He says,

“...for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the latter consequences are disastrous and vice versa.”

So think about that for just a minute. It almost always happens that if you can take an action and it feels great and wonderful right this second, there's a good chance that the long-term effects are not gonna be good. But if the reverse is true, if the thing you need to do right now is not your first choice, it's not necessarily gonna be incredibly pleasant, then there's a better chance that the long-term consequences of that will be good.

Whether it's going to bed early or going out for that run that you've been putting off or having a hard conversation with one of your children or telling someone you're sorry or getting a better meal plan together for yourself. It almost doesn't matter what it is. If the immediate thing if, if you can get a fix.

And this is what addiction is all about, and that is why as soon as we tell a lie to engage in a behavior, as soon as we start fixing our problems with these immediate fixes, these immediate consequence that are favorable, we are probably on our way to digging a hole for ourselves. He goes,

“Thence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, that will be followed by a great evil to come while the good economist pursues a great good to come at the risk of a small present evil.

This is really tough in terms of economics, what he's talking about, because you're talking about making choices that affect many, many, many people's lives. If you are any kind of a leader in any kind of a government or you're any economist teaching people how to have more stable finances, you're usually gonna tell them to do something that's not pleasant.

It reminded me a lot of what it took for us to get out of debt. I think I mentioned this maybe in a podcast recently, I can't remember. One of the first steps was just starting to pay off debt. And I remember, we were doing the rolling debt program that's supposed to be so great.

It is really great, but at the time, this is supposed to be so great, and it just meant that I was sending $10 to people. And it just felt, “This is so dumb, by the time I pay for the check or whatever, or the stamp or whatever it is then what's the point?" But it was necessary. And one of the reasons it's necessary is because only in delaying gratification can discipline be built if you are always just doing whatever feels good right now.

You don't have the discipline to withstand any really difficult challenge. It's just like your immune system. If it's healthy, if it's strong, because there were a lot of really good health choices that were made in the past, then as soon as some big illness comes around, you'll have a mild aversion of it, or you won't get sick at all because your immune system is at its peak and it can fight it off.

When we have a crisis, my husband likes to call them character defining moments. When crisis comes, we really see who we really become. When we're comfortable and life is going by and things are good, we don't always know just really how weak we are; how weak emotionally, how weak relationally, how weak in our faith. We just don't even know until we're faced with that moment where now we have to really do something about it and we are really weak or our immune system is weak, or whatever the case might be.

Scott Peck says,

“Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with it is the only decent way to live.”

He really is saying something so profound there. You can schedule the pain and you can schedule the pleasure. You can decide when you'll take a break. You can decide when you'll have downtime. You can decide when you'll take a vacation, and if you'll build that cadence into your life and schedule the pain and the pleasure, life is just going to go so much better. You know, you can.

One of the things I love about this first section of this book so much is that Peck is really getting at the heart of what a lot of life is about. And again, I talk about this extensively in my new book, How Truth Makes Us Free because we all have pain, and pain is so helpful. It is an indicator that something is wrong.

It is a signal that we should change something and if we will listen to it, our lives can be so much better. It's helping us to see that something needs to be done. We are bumping up against life in an unhealthy way.

Peck tells this story of when he was running a therapy group and he says.

“There was a 30-year-old single salesman in the group, and it was in a small town, and he began to date a recently separated wife of another group member who was a banker. The salesman knew the banker to be a chronically angry man who was deeply resentful of his wife's leaving him. He knew that he was not being honest either with the group or with the banker by not confiding his relationship with the banker's wife. He also knew that it was almost inevitable that sooner or later the banker would learn about the continuing relationship. He knew that the only solution to the problem would be to confess the relationship to the group and bear the banker's anger with the group's support.”

But he did nothing. And he goes on to talk about how it blew up later and created far more problems than it needed to because he, he told himself, in fact, when he was faced with it and it finally blew up and everybody asked him, why didn't you do something about this?

He said, “I knew that talking about it would be hard. And I thought if I just waited long enough, it would go away.” Then Peck says,

“Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”

That's really what we're about. We want to grow, we want to develop and ignoring problems just prolongs the pain. He also has this really beautiful section where he talks about the role that parents play in modeling by delaying gratification for their children and how we really can't give our children something that we don't have. They can go try to acquire it for themselves.

We're not going to be perfect. We're going to be deficient in some areas, but to the degree that we can actually have the skills that we're trying to pass on our children are going to in benefit incredibly. And he talks about how important it is to model it and for us to be the kind of people that are disciplined ourselves. Discipline is also something we give our children when we discipline them, and it requires a lot of time and it requires a lot of love. He even goes on to talk about how ultimately love is everything, that even when we're deficient in certain areas, if we'll love properly, then that will make up for so many deficiencies that we carry ourselves.

It's the time and the patience that we need that's going to help us solve our problems. So if you really want to solve some of these problems that are causing you a lot of pain, you're going to have to slow down. You're going to have to take the time.

He tells this other story, which I didn't pull up, but he tells a story of there was something wrong in his car and he'd always thought of himself as not a good mechanic and that. He didn't know how to solve these kinds of problems. And finally, one time there was something wrong and he really, really slowed down and he took the time to look at everything and push buttons and go slow, and the solution emerged and he realized, there are many things that he could figure out in life if he just decided to figure them out.

So the second solution is taking responsibility. He explains that there are two types of people that would come to see him in his practice. Two major groups of people there are neurotics and there are character disorder people. The neurotics take on too much responsibility and the character disordered people take on too little. I lean in the direction of the neurotic. In other words, I could really double down because I have a tendency to be a rescuer, and the more I do that, the more I kind of push that button and allow that tendency in myself to go, the more I take on responsibilities of other people that they should be completing and I handicap them, but I also do a lot of internal damage. It causes me to do a lot of beating myself up. But it is also sometimes the case that we don't take responsibility. I mean, I guess I do this too because I want how my finances look or how my marriage is going to be my husband's fault and I want, my pain with who I am to be somebody else's fault. That doesn't work. We have got to find the balance of what is really ours. And that's why some of these books and like being mentored in the academy can be so helpful because sometimes it's hard for us to navigate that personally. Sometimes we're just so in it, you can't see the forest for the trees.

Or you’re like a fish in water. You just don't even see the water around you. because you have such deeply entrenched patterns, it's hard to see. So getting the perspective of lots of other people being mentored, reading and gaining tools and practicing them is so vital.

So this isn't necessarily something you can have figured out, but recognize that you can only solve a problem that you take responsibility for. One of Covey's favorite ways of talking about this is that. Until we're ready to radically say, I made this problem. I am where I am because of the choices that I've made, then we can't assume the power for fixing them if they're not our fault. We're powerless.

If the academy, all of the sections where we talk about better governing our heart and mind, which is one of the principles of loving ourselves every section,  the beginning of that section title is “Increasing my personal power by…” So every time we gain a skill or a tool for taking responsibility appropriately, we increase our personal power.

I could tell you story after story after story. One woman that comes to mind had blamed her husband for years and years and years about their marriage, and then the Academy helped her realize there are so many things that she needed to own. She realized, "I’m the only one that can make me happy.” That was like a huge takeaway for her. “I'm the only one that can make me happy. I've got to take care of myself.” There are many things that she was expecting her husband to do for her and be for her that he couldn't do and be. I do think this is also a big reason for our high levels of divorce. I think that faith plays a role because there are things only God can do for us that we expect our spouse to do or we expect ourselves to do. And I think that there are many things that only we can do for ourselves. Definitely meeting our needs, discovering our talents, disciplining our heart and mind, striving for self-mastery. Those principles of self-love that I talk about in the book and that we mentor a woman through in the academy are vital. Nobody else can do those things for us, but there are things that we do need a spouse to do, and there are things we do need God to do. Finding that balance is not always easy, but the number one tool, the most important tool is self-examination. And Peck actually talks about this quite a bit, as does Covey.

I'm going to read you some really cool quotes here from Peck about this. He's talking about the neurotics and the character disordered people, and he says. That it's so difficult to sometimes distinguish. He says, “The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence.”

So we know we have a problem, we have a pain point, so there's a problem there. Is it my problem or somebody else's problem? Is it something I need to let go of or is it something I need to repair? Is it something I can do something about, or something I can't do something about? He goes on to perform either process adequately to know, to distinguish what we're responsible or not responsible. We must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination. It's terrible to some degree to put the word suffering with it, but it is painful sometimes, maybe most or all the time.We've had women say that they didn't do the academy because they didn't want to read self-help books. Because either they didn't help or they just made them feel worse about themselves, because it was just a laundry list of things that they were doing wrong. That's why in the academy, all of the readings are so tightly vetted and you only read like one chapter that applies specifically to one specific principle that you're learning and we're giving you the tools for overcoming it. So it's a totally different experience. But you do need the tools. We shouldn't just ignore the information or the tools that are out there. We just need to acquire them in the right way. He goes on to say,

“It is only through a vast amount of experience and a lengthy and successful maturation that we gain the capacity to see the world and our place in it.”

Realistically, that's what we have to do. A realistic optimism. We talk about this in the academy too, that. We need to be very realistic, but we can be optimistic about it because we can take back our power because the future is blank and we can make it whatever want it or whatever we want it to be. We have way more power than we think we do to make other thing, to make our lives better than they are.

Like this woman that realized that she was the only one that could make herself happy, she started taking. Better care of herself and her relationship improved and her husband didn't do anything. He didn't lift a finger, but suddenly her marriage was better because she had this way better perspective. She saw it more realistically. She had an optimism about things that she could do. As she took responsibility for herself, she felt better. She showed up in her marriage differently. There are so many residual effects of doing this and doing it right.

Peck goes on about casting away their responsibility.

“They may feel comfortable with themselves, but they have ceased to solve the problems of living have ceased to grow spiritually and have become dead weight for society. They have cast their pain onto society. The saying of the sixties attributed to Eldridge Cleaver speaks to all of us for all time.

‘If you're not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.’”

And I hadn't thought about that before. One of the goals of the academy is servant leadership, right? So when we don't actively work to solve our own problems, they go unsolved, and then either we don't show up in society as we could show up helping other people solve their own problems because we refuse to solve, to solve our own or that problem really does become a problem for society, whether it's children who don't have a good home life, whether it's you claiming or I claiming bankruptcy, whatever those things are, it's a burden to others if we don't solve them. If we want a better society, we also have an obligation outside of ourselves to the society at large.

The third solution is really so plugged in to the book that I'm writing and it is dedication to truth. I just cannot say enough about how vital this is. I want to read to you what he says about this because he's absolutely spot on. I get into this in a lot more detail in the book, and I do talk about, taking responsibility in those other things, but when you're dedicated to truth, so many of the other things will show up as well.

He says. “The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem solving, which must continually be employed. If our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth superficially, this should be obvious. For truth is reality."

And this goes ties back into the natural law and the arguments I make, I make for the law of human nature and how it is enforced. And we do know it and it's part of tied up into our conscience and our sense of right and wrong and where that comes from. And I build all those arguments. I have all that information in the book so that you can better even have a, a larger frame of reference around this. But that is the nature of reality and cannot be changed and we bump up against it.

We've been talking to some people lately about, about people that we know who are struggling in their lives. More than they need to struggle, to be honest. And I think one of the problems that they're facing is that they don't have enough societal feedback in their lives. They don't go out enough in in environments where they're forced to show up for people and be accountable all the time, because that is really important feedback for us. That is the reality around us that we don't get to change. He goes on

“That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world, the more our minds are befuddled by falsehoods, misperceptions, and illusions. The less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions.”

This is why lying is so destructive to our mental health and any behavior we engage in that we feel like we need to fudge with people that we need, that we can't be transparent about, that we need to hide. This doesn't mean you should just air all your dirty laundry all the time to people, but it does mean that if we are lying to the people close to us about who we are and what we're doing in order to get away with certain behaviors, we are actually leading ourselves. Like I said earlier, into addiction and into worse mental health.

Carl Jung said, “Lying is an attempt to circumvent legitimate suffering and hence is productive of mental illness.”

So when we lie, we're trying to get out of suffering, that we need to suffer because we have behaved in a way that has that consequence attached and we're trying to get out of it. We don't want someone's wrath. We don't want Whatever the consequence is, that would be part of the legitimate suffering for our decisions. So we lie. And another way that we lie is that we withhold truth. And sometimes this is the worst form of lying because people don't have information they desperately need in order to make better decisions about their lives.

Because we won't just be honest with them about how we're really living, what's really going on, what's really happening. So there's three things that we need to do in order to, according to Peck. There's actually more. I have more information on this particular solution, especially in my upcoming book, which I hope, fingers crossed, I can, we can release by the end of the year. But we've got to engage in self-examination again. Peck says that's what we've got to do for all of these things. The next one is something he calls openness to challenge, and I love what he says about this as well.

He says,

“It is indeed a never ending burden of self-discipline, which is why people. Opt out for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closeness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. But by their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.

That's one of the major arguments that I make in my book about How Truth Makes Us Free. What is freedom? Freedom from blindness doesn't mean that magically our we can see anymore, but it means that that that problem, quote unquote problem of being blind doesn't stop our personal growth on any front.

In fact, it is a catalyst for greater personal growth. Whatever it is we think is holding us back, whatever it is we think that we have to. You know, not have in our lives anymore in order to be liberated. This is why we, we cast off spouses, because we think that they're a barrier, but we don't know that until we've really fixed ourselves.

There's this really a awesome quote by James Allen I just thought of, so I didn't look it up. But basically the idea is that until we have completely cleaned ourselves up until our thoughts and our actions are exactly what they should be all the time, we actually can't know if other people are the whole problem.

In other words, we can always get busy cleaning ourselves up. We can always get busy working on ourselves. And as we do that, only then, only through that process will we know, oh, this is actually something I can do something about, or this is something I can't do something about. And so when he says that by being open and living in truth, we're free from fear, it's because no one's going to, no one has anything on us. No one's going to find anything out that's going to break anything. We can be challenged.

It also means that we're meek. I love that. That's a major trait of Jesus in the Bible, that he's meek. It just means he's super teachable. He was always open to challenge people called him out all the time. If you go back and write the New Testament and you find this of great men and women, people call them out all the time.They tell them things that they're doing wrong, and those people listen. They don't just shut it down. They ask themselves. They engage in the self-evaluation, they're open to the challenge and they say, is there something I need to change? Even if this person is my enemy, are they saying something legitimate? Is there something to their case? And only then can you know what reality really is, and only then can you know, wow, I really did have the power to change that. And now things are different because I changed me. You just need the tools to change yourself, and that once you've made the commitment, then making the changes are not difficult. Once you've made the commitment, you will be led to the solutions. It's like when the student is ready, the teacher appears. That's kind of how it is. When you're really ready to engage in your own personal growth and stop blaming everyone else and being a victim, and you become truly dedicated to truth and reality, the mentors and the tools will appear that you need to engage in.

Okay. The fourth solution to your problems is balancing. We mentioned this, I mentioned this a little bit before, balancing and knowing what is mine, what is yours, and in the nature of reality, but there's also more to it than that. It's also balancing all of our resources, all of our tools. He says.

"To be free people…”

There's that word freedom again. So great. Exactly what my book is all about. Being free. What does it mean to be made free?

“To be free people, we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so, must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours, to be organized and efficient. To live wisely. We must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future yet to live joyously. We must also possess the capacity when it is not destructive to live in the present and act spontaneously.” So there's this balance in life that we have to get, we have to mature into. We have to gain capacity in our ability to balance ourselves.

So a lot of balancing has to do with some of those problems that I talked about, that sometimes we have to let go and sometimes we have to accept what we can't control and change and let go of it. Sometimes we need to accept more responsibility for what we can change, and I think sometimes because we've tried a lot of things, we think that we can't control that, but we actually can.

We just didn't have the right tools.

So I'll tell you this little story. One time I was teaching a class and there was this older woman, I don't know, she might've been in her sixties, that was in the class and it was on, it was a government and economics primer. And we were talking about lots of different things. And so you can imagine sometimes the discussion got a little heated as people shared their opinions, governmentally.

Now one time in class, it happened more than once, but this one time in particular, she got pretty rude. She just voiced her opinion. She just walked all over people. She just didn't care who she was hurting. She was pretty destructive and the way that she was engaging in a class. Well, later that week, I got an email from her and she recognized that. What she did was wrong, that she shouldn't have let it all hang out like that and recklessly hurt people. She wanted to apologize, but she didn't want to apologize. It was so fascinating. So she sends me this email and she basically says, “Hey, I know that I was saying things that were rude and you know, maybe I shouldn't have, but I'm older now and I figure I've earned the right to be able to say whatever I want, whenever I wanna say it.”

So now she was using her age. What did she use as an excuse for this destructive behavior 20 years earlier? I'm sure she had an excuse for it because it was a pattern, it was a habit. It was her way of being in the world. And now that she'd gotten older, she'd come up with a new excuse for not being considered of the people around her and just recklessly running over them by not taking responsibility for this thing that she really did need to change.

And so she didn't have balance in her life because she wasn't owning up to what she needed to change. This is when, this is what scripture means. When it talks about the refiner's fire. There's this dross that has to be melted away from the goal that sloughs off. That's all the crap about you and I that we need to get rid of, and I think sometimes we think that this is gonna be this grueling, uphill battle and it just doesn't have to look like that. It can be actually a pretty joyous journey because we see problems fall away. We see ourselves living at a higher level. We see people respecting us and honoring us more. We're more proud of ourselves. We like ourselves better. All of these wonderful, beautiful things that can happen for us, but part of this process.

It is taking responsibility for our time, for our talents, for our resources, the money that we might have, the relationships that we have, and finding ways to have better balance in our lives. Sometimes that's the fundamental problem with a problem we're trying to overcome, is that we don't have good balance, and that would solve the problem.

One of the things that Peck mentions is the experience of depression and. It was so helpful to me the first time I read it because he explained that depression is healthy. It's part of the human experience. We all experience depression. It's not all clinical, and it doesn't all need to be medicated because what depression is, it's an emotional response to giving something up to a loss. It's just the way that we respond to loss. Whether it's the loss of an expectation, we thought this thing was gonna happen and now we're here and it's not happening, or to someone else, not meeting our expectations of them, or them walking out of our lives or someone dying.

He gives a simple story of playing a chess game with his daughter. She needed to get to bed because she had class early the next morning and he kept pushing her and kind of guilt tripping her into staying with this chess game. And by the time it was over, I don't even think the game ended. She finally so was so frustrated. It was so late. He had just cajoled her over and over and over again that she just got up and left and went to bed and he finally realized. He was being competitive. It was his competitiveness, his determination to win this game at any cost that was damaging his relationship with his daughter. He felt depressed about it, that he was like a loser dad. But he had to let go of his competitiveness in order to have a better relationship with his daughter. The process of letting that go is the process of being depressed. I'm not going to get into all of this. We do touch on it in the academy a little bit, but it's something to think about that. You have an inner desire. You have a soul that wants to grow.

Think about that. You have a soul that wants to grow. Peck says depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon. You know what that means. That means that a lot of the time when you and I are feeling depressed. It is actually a good sign because what it means is something inside of you wants to grow or change, but in order for that to happen, you're gonna have to let go of something and you're hanging onto it. You're depressed because you know something's gotta give and you don't want to give that up. Sometimes you may not even be aware of what it is that you need to give up, and sometimes the balancing means having a willingness to make decisions and follow through with them. Sometimes it's just that we're sitting in limbo land and we're unhappy and we have a problem we can't solve because we won't just cross the finish line with any decision. We get to the point where basically any decision is better than no decision.

These four types of solutions can be dovetailed with those four types of problems, and any or all of them can be used to solve any or all of the problems that you might be facing. Maybe you need to delay your gratification. Maybe you need to take more responsibility or less. Maybe you need to be more dedicated to truth and reality and find better principles that you can live and apply in your life, or maybe you need better balance in your life.

Now I know that this has been a lot of information in these last two podcasts. We've gone over a lot of things and I hope it hasn't felt overwhelming. The next step that you need to take is just whatever the next step is that you need to take. You can only do this one bite at a time, one step at a time.

Evaluate your life for the greatest pain point that you're facing right now. Think about the fact that you may be depressed about this pain point because you've tried things in the past that haven't worked, or because you need to let something go, or because you just don't have any idea what to do, and so you need to find a new principle. You need to be more dedicated to the truth, or maybe you haven't taken proper responsibility for yourself.

And the way that you can do that is finding that principle and applying it to your life. Principles can help us in any of these. They can show us where to take responsibility and where to let go. They can show us how to delay our gratification because we can delay gratification in service of the true principle. They can show us how to better balance our lives. They can come to our rescue in so many ways.

This is the path of the servant leader, the person who's learning to love God and love herself, and love truth and love humanity better. And you can do this. There's a framework, there's a path we can follow. The greats have paved it for us. We just take one step at a time.

Father ten Boom was young. Their health was terrible. He was super judgmental, struggled in some of his relationships, and he had a whole lot of debt. Just begin where the ten booms began. That's why I wrote all those stories in The Mission Driven Life book for you, so that you could have hope, like I have hope that we can each change and be a little bit better. This path is possible for all of us. You can identify the problems that you're facing and find solutions to those problems, and we're here to help you do that.

I want to end with one of my very favorite quotes from The Road Less Traveled. It is such a beautiful way of talking about the problems that we face and the kind of people that we wanna become.

He says this.

“Spiritually evolved people by virtue of their discipline. Mastery and love are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence, they are called on to serve the world and in their love, they answer the call. They are inevitably, therefore, people of great power. Although the world may generally behold them as quite ordinary people sense more often than not, they will exercise their power in quiet or even hidden ways. Nonetheless, exercise power, they do. And in this exercise they suffer greatly, even dreadfully. For to exercise power is to make decisions, and the process of making decisions with total awareness is often infinitely more painful than making decisions with limited or blunted awareness. The best decision makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions, but still retain their ability to be decisive.

One measure and perhaps the best measure of a person's greatness is their capacity for suffering. Yet the great also are very joyful. You cannot achieve. Great levels of spiritual evolution without suffering, and in so far as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways that are painful to you and demanding of you, more so than you can now imagine.

The spiritually evolved person is most of all an extraordinary loving individual, and with his or her extraordinary love comes extraordinary joy.”

That’s who you are. You are an amazing. Child of God with immense potential and power, you have not even begun to tap, and the problems that you face are simply your school. They're simply the trigger to help you know what is the next step in your growth. This thing is a problem for you because of who you are. You are bumping up life up. You are bumping up against life in a unique way, unique to you. And it's because there's a problem. You need to work through your growth, your potential is on the other side of that problem, and the truth will make you free as you seek out the principles that will help you navigate this problem.

If you need balancing, if you need delayed gratification, whatever it might be. You will become more through being the decision maker. The path forward is through those depressive feelings or through the self-evaluation, or through the searching for the principle and the practice and applying it. You can be so much more than you are, even though you're wonderful as you are, and the pain is the tool to help you get there.

So I hope that this is a very joyful message for you—that you do have problems. I have problems. And as soon as I solve this problem, I'll have another problem. And those problems are gifts. They are what brings meaning to life. Like we quoted Peck last time, that's where we really draw meaning. If we didn't have any problems, we were just always at the beach on our towel. Life wouldn't mean anything. It is through solving these problems and our growth lies through the solving of those problems. So learn more. You could pick up the book, The Road Less Traveled. You can pick up my book, The Mission Driven Life, and you can learn more about our academy, where we will walk you through all of those steps, but ultimately recognize that problems are the gateway to your joy.

So walk through that gate because your joy awaits.

In writing my new book How Truth Makes Us Free, as I worked to make clear what it means to truly be made free, I realized that there are 4 types of problems we face in life. Understanding these bring clarity to what is needed in order for us to overcome our challenges. 

In this part 1 of a two part series, I go over the 4 types of problems, sharing personal stories from my own life. I also explain how Jacques Lusseyran faced each of these types of problems as well. In fact, if you go back through the Mission Driven Stories on this podcast, you'll discover that every one of them also faced these 4 types of problems. 

The most important aspect of these 4 types of problems, though, is why they are problems for us, and how they actually bless our lives! 

Next week, in part 2 of the series, I'll go through 4 solutions to these 4 problems taught by M. Scott Peck and explain how my new book, The Mission Driven Life book, and the MDM Academy all play a vital role in understanding, facing, and overcoming the significant problems we face. 

If you're ready to face your own worries and anxieties, make sure to grab your FREE mini-training on Overcoming Your Worries and Turning Them Into Forward Momentum! https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Resources and links from this episode:

Mission Driven Stories: Jacques Lusseyran: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/podcasts/the-mission-driven-mom-podcast/episodes/2148868524

What is Truth?: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/podcasts/the-mission-driven-mom-podcast/episodes/2149020280

Books referenced: How Truth Makes You Free by Audrey Rindlisbacher, releasing late 2025; The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Transcript:

 Today we get to do something really wonderful. I've got a two-part series for you called The Four Types of Problems and the Four Solutions. Today we get to talk about the four types of problems, and some of what I'm gonna share with you is from my upcoming book, How Truth Makes You Free.

In there I talk about the nature of truth as natural law, and in this section of the book, I'm talking about how truth makes us free. And in order to better understand that we need to understand the types of problems that we face and can be liberated from through truth. Before we get to that though, I want to ask you to please share this podcast along and leave a review if it's been beneficial for you and for others that you know, so that we can grow our audience and expose more people to the truth and how it can make them free.

Today when I share some of the book with you. It might be worth your while. You don't need to stop this podcast at all and go listen to it, but I do have a mission-driven story on Jacques Lusseyran and I talk about his story a little bit in the book, and I'll reference him in some of the things that I talk about.

You don't have to have read his book or even listened to that. Podcast to understand the kinds of things that I'm talking about. We're gonna reference the types of problems that he faced in his life and I'll give you some frame of reference for that as I go through them. And then I'll tell you some personal stories about ways that I have run into these four types of problems myself.

To start out though, I wanna read to you a little bit from the Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. He has this to say.

“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we really see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand and accepted, then life is no longer difficult because once it is accepted, the fact that it is difficult, no longer matters.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead, they moan more or less incessantly, noisily, or subtly about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties, as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief loudly or subtly that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be, and that was somehow been especially visited upon them or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race, or even their species and not upon others.”

I know this moaning because I have done my share and I am right there with M. Scott Peck and with all of you that. Life is difficult. Much more difficult than we want it to be many times. And we moan about it. We don't want life to be difficult. And yet he goes on to talk about the nature of problems and how they're tied into all of the things that we're gonna talk about today and that we talk about a lot in the MDM Academy.

He goes on,

“Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them? Okay. Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. And without discipline we can do nothing. But with some discipline we can solve some problems, and with total discipline, we can solve all of our problems.

What makes life so difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one. And yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning. So we all face problems. They present pain. We don't want that pain. We want that pain to go away. And the truth can liberate us.”

That is the promise. But how does that come about? And that's why I want to talk to you today. About the different types of problems that we face, the pain that they bring. And then next week we'll talk about the solutions. Many ways that we can work on solving those problems that we face.

So let's get into these four types of problems that will allow us to better evaluate ourselves and to begin to make some headway. I'm gonna give you a little assignment to do this week between the Part one and part two of this podcast so that you can begin to insert yourself in this process. So I'm going to go through some sections of the upcoming book now on these four types of problems.

Christ's promise is that there is objective truth and that it can make us free. By now we have a good sense of what truth is, and Jacques's story can help us understand what it means to be made free. He is a perfect example of the four kinds of problems we all struggle with, although usually not to the extremes that he experienced them.

What's so amazing about Jacques is that in every instance where he was presented with a new type of challenge, he chose truth and was made free. Throughout his book, he actually uses this phrase many times that he was free. Free in his blindness, free from his debilitating emotions and thoughts free under the crushing weight of running a resistance movement, free in the midst of the deepest sorrow and suffering of a concentration camp.

So that in a nutshell is what most of that other podcast is about. It's his mission-driven story and how he lived the 7 Laws of Life mission. But for the purposes of today, and talking about the four types of problems, we're gonna talk about these types of things that he went through, his blindness, his debilitating motions and thoughts, running a resistance movement in France during World War ii, and then being placed and suffering in a concentration camp.

Although you and I will probably never have a severe handicap or be placed in a concentration camp, we do experience pain, suffering, and sorrows that we don't know how to overcome. Jogs experiences can show us the way out of the troubles that keep us emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and sometimes physically stuck.

And how to choose the reason that can be ours through the power of the natural law and its principles and with the help of heaven. The first kind of problem we face in life are accidents of fate over which we have no control. Just like Jacques was blind. These include countless circumstances, which we neither choose, nor we can change like the family, race, religion, or culture.

We were born into. The level of political and economic freedom and prosperity that we experienced as children or that we live in today, injuries to our bodies, how we were raised, and many more. These are things entirely out of control that we can't change no matter how much we try. In fact, it includes the past as well.

The past is over and done. It's out of our control. They are therefore things we must accept. As Jacques accepted his blindness. Like Jacques, we must often resist. Like Jacques, we often resist these problems that. Have been handed to us by life and that we can't change. We complain about them or we try to pretend that they aren't reality, but complete acceptance is the only way forward.

For Jacques, one day he could see and the next he would never see again. This caused immense emotional pain and longing to enjoy the pleasures of sight, which he would never have again, rather than falling completely into despair and rejecting life. He chose to continue to engage in the world and through prayer and effort to try to find a new way to live, he was given a glimpse of light.

For Jacques, this glimpse of light was enough to help him start looking for the way to accept and work with his blindness rather than resisting and working against it. And even though he was a child, this was still completely his choice. He could have chosen to spend his time and emotional energy becoming a victim of his blindness, choosing dependence and negativity rather than independence of hope.

Of course, hope. Was the courageous choice, and in choosing hope, he opened himself up to learning and growing from this accident rather than shrinking because of it. Notice he did not get his sight back. This is not about being made.

Notice he did not get his sight back. That is not what being made free means. Instead, he used his blindness to make him a better man. He did not let himself get stuck. He did not resist reality. He did not pretend that the problem would not go away on its own. He accepted it and let it teach him. He literally became more than he would've been if he would have retained his sight because he let his blindness teach him.

Jacques could have been blind without accepting his blindness. Just as we have circumstances in our lives that we don't like, that we can't change, which we can live with, or that we can accept and learn from. Although I like you, went through many difficult experiences in my life that were out of my control, like moving every two years when I was growing up, like my father's sudden death when I was 16, like falling in the hospital after giving birth and permanently damaging my hip.

I learned this lesson most poignantly when I was struggling with my husband's pornography addiction. As I've mentioned previously in this podcast and we talk about in the academy, I knew about his problems almost from the beginning of our relationship, and we naively thought that marriage would fix it. Actually, it became much worse the first several years we were married, year after year. I either ignored it or told myself that he was going to overcome it, yet he didn't, and the pain persisted.

After over a decade of this, I was again blindsided with another betrayal. I yelled and wept and basically went through the course of emotions I always felt when he acted out. But then when I gained better control over myself, I began to really think. This time I didn't rush to find new solutions or make amends with Blaine.

This time, I sat with myself for several days and pondered the situation I was in. I finally realized that I should stop lying to myself about my reality. I saw that this problem had been around for most of Blaine's life, and I was kidding myself if I continued to believe that things were going to suddenly get better.

In fact, I finally, for the first time, face the truth that he might remain an addict his whole life. We might never find a solution. Amazingly, I did not say these things to myself out of discouragement or despair. I hadn't given up. I wouldn't stop trying to find answers. What I was finally doing was looking at my life more honestly and looking at my options more clearly.

I knew I could divorce my husband, but I also knew that divorce wouldn't change the fact that he was the father of my children, that we would still need to interact constantly, that they would still have an addict for a dad, and that many of the problems I would face was facing would not change because of divorce.

I also knew that Blaine loved me, that he was trying, and that I had made a marriage commitment to him for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. I also knew that despite his many struggles, he had many admirable qualities that I could respect and focus on. After all the pondering and introspection, I finally came to a moment where I fully accepted my reality and the things I couldn't change.

I chose to keep loving my husband. I chose to stay with him, and I chose to be married to an addict for the rest of my life. Then something happened that I didn't expect. I thought this acceptance might bring discouragement. But just the opposite happened. When I completely accepted my circumstances for the first time, I felt completely free for the first time.

Of course, there was still that hope inside of me that we could find the solution to his addiction and he could gain sobriety. But my staying with him did not hinge on his behavior. I was no longer a victim of my marriage. My newfound freedom empowered me to stop complaining and start looking for what was what in this solution could teach me.

I focused on the one thing over which I have control. Me and when I was honest, I knew that I had a lot of work to do in cleaning up my own character and learning to be a better mother and wife. I knew in order to manage this situation properly, I would have to get better at a lot of things like boundaries and forgiveness and communication.

Happily, I could finally see that the possibilities for my own growth in this trial were endless. Now, years later, like shock, I have become more than I would've been without this challenge in my life. The second type of struggle we experience is with problems we make for ourselves through our ignorance, poor choices, and lack of character.

For Jacques, this meant overcoming his propensity to anger, selfishness, impatience, and unkindness. And honestly, many of us would've been tempted to just put up with his bad behavior because he was blind. We would've given him a pass based on his handicap. But this would've done him no favors.

Luckily, he didn't take the easy path, but instead he chose to see through honest self-evaluation, meekness, and trial and error, he came to see how adherence to certain principles could liberate him from darkness and bring him to light. He made the conscious choice to learn from his tragedy, to let it sculpt his character and show him things he didn't know existed throughout his life.

It became more and more clear to him. That he had access to things that others did not. By virtue of the handicapped he experienced in this way, he chose to align himself with truth, to let it teach and train him, and to see the beauty it could bring into his life. Here again, the choice was his. While others may have made him an exception out of pity, he didn't need pity.

He needed to change what was vital to. His self-respect and confidence was the discipline to align himself with natural law principles that could change his nature and free him from his own defects and flaws. I've needed to level up my self-discipline many times. One powerful lesson came when my children became old enough to make choices I didn't like.

These choices caused me pain, and I began beating myself up over them. I was certain that I had done something wrong as a mother, otherwise they certainly would've chosen differently. I combed through my past, blamed myself constantly, and focused on the things about them and about the situation that didn't align.

With my expectations until one day through striving to see myself in this situation more honestly, I finally realized how selfish I was being. I was allowing my thoughts and perceptions to be hijacked by negativity through my dissatisfaction with short-term outcomes and my fears about the future. I had let myself entertain lies about myself and my family.

Not only had this distorted my perception. Perspective of my past, my present, myself and my children. It had crowded out the better, more worthy thoughts and attitudes that I should have been nurturing. I had made it all about me, and instead of focusing my intention on the good and putting my brilliant mind to work on problems in the world, I could do something about people I could help, and community service I could render.

I had wandered around complaining about things entirely out of my control, blowing them out of proportion and letting them wreck my peace of mind. Ever since then, I have put better mental practices in place in my life in addition to regular scripture reading and prayer, both of which I was doing before I began living.

Other principles of mental and emotional resilience, like daily gratitude, telling myself the truth, visualization, daily planning, goal setting, and so on. These principles have born beautiful fruit in my life. Not only do I have much more optimism and peace, I know exactly what to do when I begin getting mentally, emotionally, or spiritually off track.

The third type of problem we face is when we take on a big project or volunteer for something at church or work or in the community. This could be things like becoming a PTO member, helping on a political campaign or even starting a business. These are activities we don't have to engage in, but we see a need and we don't want.

We want to help or make a difference. The struggles here come for many different reasons, but sometimes the hardest part is learning to work with others. This can be made worse when we are in circumstances over which we have little or no control. The temptation with this kind of struggle is often to get negative and complain because I don't even have to be here.

I'm just doing this out of the goodness of my heart. For Jacques, this was the resistant move resistance movement. He started. In this work chosen freely by himself. He was a great example to us. When we are considering becoming involved or taking risks for the benefit of others, first he could see that something needed to be done and someone needed to do it, rather than telling himself that someone else would be better at it or that he wasn't qualified, or that it was too risky for him because he was blind.

He took all the potential excuses off the table. He didn't make it about him. He asked himself if it needed to be done and if the cause was just when he knew the answer was a resounding yes. He committed. Then he moved forward with absolute conviction and never wavered. Of course, there's no question that he suffered and suffered immensely.

For becoming involved. Yet there was intense joy as well, and deep purpose. Perhaps. Most importantly of all, there was the sure knowledge that he had done all he could, that he had given himself for the benefit of others, and the inner peace, confidence, and self-acceptance that knowledge brought was priceless.

He never had to wonder if he could have done more. He never had to question his integrity or his conscience. He was truly free. For me, the call to step out of my comfort zone and try to make the world a little bit better place has come many times. Perhaps the most important was when I was sitting in a women's class at church.

Before she started her lesson, the teacher had handed out roses to women at random. Then she stepped up behind the table at the front of the room and asked the women to whom she'd given a flower to please come up individually, place the rose in the vase she had provided and share with everyone one thing they were good at.

This could be anything she said that they did well. What happened next? Shocked and disheartened me one by one, these women filed up to the front, placed their rose in vase, stood there uncomfortably, and then said something self-deprecating I'm good at eating lots of chocolate. I'm good at sleeping in.

I'm good at yelling at my kids. I knew these women. They were my neighbors and friends. I knew they were talented and smart and loving. I knew the sacrifices they made for each other and their families. I could not believe that. They could not even say one nice thing about themselves. Had it been just one or two of them, I might have understood, but there were close to a dozen women who had been given a rose, and all of them except one said something negative about themselves.

Now I understood that these women hopefully didn't really believe there was nothing they were good at. But I also knew that if these wo women couldn't stand in front of their friends and say something good about themselves, there was something really wrong. They either didn't believe they were good at things or they didn't have the confidence to state those things.

Honestly, either way, there was a major problem. I thought about this for weeks. I couldn't get it out of my mind. The biggest shock to me was the realization that these women were suffering in ways that I had suffered years before with my negative self-talk, lack of self-knowledge, distorted self-image, and low self-confidence. When I couldn't find the answers through school therapy or coaches, I had gone on a search for answers.

Through the years I had found tools, including my understanding of the natural law, which had brought me self-acceptance and increased confidence. I wanted them to have the tools and skills I discovered to help them overcome their pain. I knew that writing curriculum was something I was naturally good at, so I went to work for the next year.

I and two other women made their way through books and resources, met early in the morning for discussion and finalized a program for women and mothers that. To my joy and satisfaction has blessed many lives for me, just like Jacques, the cost this.

For me, just like Jacques. The cost to launch this program and try to build an organization that would support these women on their journey was greater than I thought it would be in time and risk in money and personal hardship. Yet in the midst of the pain and sacrifice, there was a deep sense of purpose and so much joy.

I not only had the privilege of meeting some of the most incredible women I've ever known, I'm so grateful to have had a front seat to watch the liberating power of truth in their lives. I like Jacques. Know what it means to feel completely free while carrying great responsibility. The fourth type of trial we go through in life are those.

The fourth types of trials we go through in life are those created by the choices of others. Of course, Jacques experienced this many times, but especially in the concentration camp, seemingly the whole world had turned against him first taking over his country and then deporting him to a living hell.

He could have become bitter and resentful. He could have chosen hatred, but instead he chose love. Through leaning in once again to the truths he'd learned about himself and others. He was able to rise above his circumstances and not only grow as a person, but also radiate optimism and hope for all those who knew him.

As he said about this time in his life, the remarkable thing was that listening to the fears of others had ended by freeing me almost completely from anxiety. I had become cheerful and was cheerful almost all the time. End quote. It seems almost inconceivable that his cheerfulness was possible in that place, but truth had again freed him.

Even in a concentration camp, I like you have felt the pain of others' choices Many times. Sometimes these were people in my close circle who have made choices that hurt or disappointed me, or they have even betrayed me sometimes. It was those in my community. The person who called the cops because we were watering during the day, the backyard neighbor who stopped speaking to us because we wanted to build a fence.

The school administrator who wouldn't be fair about our child's behavior, or the boss who expected too much. There are even high level leaders, business owners and governments who escalate prices, make choices that create public outrage. Cause the 2020 pandemic, or even nine 11. In every case, there have been times when I didn't choose truth, but chose to let them spoil my fun and poison my attitude.

One such experience was when a person quite close to me once asked if she could come to my home and talk to me. She sat down in my living room and proceeded to lecture me on all the ways I had disappointed her and not show shown up for her as she wanted me to. Strangely, her complaints were not the normal kind of expectations, like calling or spending time together.

They were things like introducing her to important people I knew or somehow making her way easier to goals she had set for herself. I was speechless. I had no idea she'd wanted me to do anything.

I had no idea she wanted me to do any of the things she was upset about. I would've gladly done what I could, had I known, but more importantly, the more I listened to her, the more clear it became that she was blaming me for her failures. She had not accomplished. What she set out to do was obviously disappointed and upset about it and wanted it to be my fault.

Unfortunately, I didn't have some of the relationship tools and skills I have now, and I literally had no idea how to handle the situation. I listened, apologized and said I would try harder once she'd left. I felt the deep discomfort of not knowing what in the world to do next. Our children were close.

Our family spent time together regularly, but I did not want to see her. Weeks went by as I ignored the situation and struggled with my own anger and resentment. All sorts of negative thoughts swirled around in my head, like, how dare she blame me for her own choices, goals, and problems? Why would she just blindside me like that without ever saying anything before?

Is she right? Am I really a terrible friend? I walked around grumpy and upset a lot of the time. In the meantime, my children grew more and more insistent that they missed the family and wanted to play with them. Finally, after extensive journaling and talking to my husband and praying, I determined that the only way forward was to have a hard conversation with her.

I definitely didn't want to. I knew I could make more excuses and just disappear, but I knew these relationships meant a lot to my children, and there was simply no way to maintain these friendships without continued contact with their mother. Luckily, I took the time to write down what I wanted to say and I had the foresight to own the things that I thought I genuinely should have done better while laying the responsibility for her life, her choices, her failures and successes squarely back on her shoulders.

It was incredibly difficult. I. But when it was all over, I felt a tremendous sense of freedom. I knew I had done the right thing, I had preserved the relationships, and I had faced my fears. I felt more confident and courageous. I had not allowed the choices of others to dictate my choices. That is real freedom.

So those are the four types of problems. And as you can see, jock had them, I've had them, you've probably had all four of them multiple times throughout your life and. Part of the answers is to solve those problems. Definitely lies in understanding the natural law and principles and seeking out principles and the tools that we teach in the academy.

But next week I want to give you four clear solutions taught by M Scott Peck, that you'll see threads of those throughout the stories that I've shared this week. I want to read you a couple things that he said as we finish up here.

“Like I said earlier, the process of meeting and solving problems in life is where life has its meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom. Indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.”

Isn't that profound to think that? The pain that we feel is because we have a problem and that problem is there because we're stuck in some way. And one of the things I like to remember when I'm facing problems that are causing me pain and I'm tempted to not move through them, is that this is a problem.

For me, it wouldn't necessarily be a problem for someone else. This particular problem is a problem for me because something about me is helping create the problem and I can find solutions only by changing. And next week, when we talk about the four types of solutions, you'll see more about what I mean about the tools we can use to move through them.

Scott Peck goes on,

“As Benjamin Franklin said, those things that hurt instruct. It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread, but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.”

Wouldn't it be wonderful to always be that wise, to get to the point where we see that we've grown so much from the problems that we face, that the next time we have a problem, we really want to learn from it.

He goes on,

“This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all mental illness that, but the substitute itself…Since most of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree, lacking complete mental health.”

In fact, he talks a lot about the process of maturation and we can't think that just because we've aged we've matured. Those are two entirely different experiences, and we can eradicate tendencies to mental illness by leaning heavily into these four solutions that he talks about that we'll go over next week.

Carl Young said, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering, but the substitute itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was meant to avoid.”

So what's important to remember most of all, as we finish up this first part in the four types of problems and the four solutions is something that Scott Peck says:

“When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow problems.”

Problems offer us the opportunity to discipline ourselves in key ways that we'll talk about next time.

And it's only in meeting these problems head on, recognizing that their problems for us, because something in us needs to change. Recognizing that they are the tool to personal growth and that discipline is always the answer to move us through. That is the way that life has its greatest meaning.

That is the way in which life holds its greatest meaning for us. And it's such a beautiful process that if we can have the courage to look honestly at these four types of problems that we face, problems that happen to us accidentally by life, that we have no control over, problems that we create through our own bad choices.

Problems that we lean into because we take on something bigger than ourselves and problems that we experience because other people cause us suffering and pain. We can begin with the tools that we'll talk about next time, and with really ex understanding and getting excited about the freedom that awaits us through understanding and embracing truth and principles.

We can overcome these problems. They will cause the growth and maturation that we long for, and they will bring deep lasting meaning into our lives. I'm super excited to dive into that with you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today, and next week we'll hear part two, the four solutions to the four types of problems and how we can move forward in solving them for ourselves.

After years of admiring Sir Thomas More, I finally dug deeper into his life and story and I was blown away by what I discovered! Like so many other mission driven individuals, his final acts of moral courage were built solidly on a lifetime of deliberate actions in living the 7 Laws of Life Mission!

Join me this week as we deep dive into what made him the man who would DIE for his convictions!

If you don't already have it, grab your FREE 7 Laws of Life Mission Cheatsheet: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

You can also get TWO FREE CHAPTERS of my book The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution in the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript:

 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher author of The Mission Driven Life and Founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I'm so grateful to have you here today we get to do a mission-driven story about Sir Thomas More. Did a bunch of research, read some books, found some original sources that I'll share with you, and it's gonna be really inspiring, honestly, and enlightening all that we come to know about him.

I'm going to share some favorite anecdotes and stories from his life and demonstrate how he lived the 7 Laws of Life mission to become the man that he became one of the most famous martyrs in history.

I'm so glad that you're joining me here today for that. If this podcast has been benefiting your life, blessing you in some way, it would really help us if you pass it along and. Leave a review. That's also really helpful to those that stumble upon it and want to know what they ought to think about what we do here so that they can know that people are enjoying and appreciating these podcasts. Today. I've got a bunch of papers in front of me, so if you hear some paper shuffling, then I'm sorry.

I'm just trying to get to all the best stuff to share with you. So let's dive into the life of Sir Thomas More. He was born in London in 1478, and if you look at kind of a map of where he spent his life, aside from a few excursions outside of England, his life pretty much took place in London. It's really pretty crazy.

He had a pretty happy and comfortable childhood. His father was a lawyer. He belonged to some guilds, and so they were the upper middle class. Middle class, and his parents had several children. Four survived to adulthood, but his mother died when he was a child and his father went through three subsequent wives.

So these women kept dying before his dad did. In fact, his dad lived to be 79 years old, which was, even by today's standards is a pretty good run. And he was very close to his dad when his dad finally passed just a few years before his own death. It was very, very hard on him. So he would've had a typical tutor education in the tutor period of history.

The women at home would've begun his education. He would've learned some basic things at home. And then by the time he was seven years old, he was off to grammar school. He went to St. Anthony's, and it was one of the best of London's grammar schools. It was a really long day, was from six in the morning until six in the evening, only with a couple breaks.

And the curriculum of these grammar schools was the same for several hundred years. And basically how education worked at this time was that boys were traditionally the only ones who went to some kind of formal school. The girls were taught at home, and we'll talk in a minute about the way that More ran his home and how he educated his children, which is really pretty cool.

The boys were trained either for a career in the church or public office. Everything else that was learned by boys or girls was done in more of a trade school, an apprenticeship. There were many other ways of getting educated or having a skillset to do certain things in the community. He came from a father who'd had this formal education, and obviously was an attorney and influential person, and so he wanted his son to have the same, so he was there for a few years.

They would've gone through Latin. They would've argued and debated publicly. They would've learned writing and reading and languages. They also would've learned music, playing an instrument and singing, neither of which More was never very good at. So that's how he, but in the meantime, there was a huge emphasis on rhetoric and debate even in these younger years, and it was far more rigorous than our elementary school education is today.

So when he was about 12 years old, his father secured a place for him in the household of John Morton, Archbishop Bishop of Canterbury. Now this was basically him becoming a page, which when I first heard that was strange to my mind because I thought that was like the poor kids became pages to work their way up to knighthood.

But actually the culture of the time was quite hierarchical in the tutor society. But what's cool is that they believed that you couldn't know how to effectively. Lead others unless you knew how to serve. And so all of these boys became pages, and that meant that they lived in the home of the person that they worked for and they slept in common.

And they were, they had a handful of things that they did. They were waiting on the people. They would wait at the table, they would offer bowls for hand washing. They would clear tables and make up people's beds and run a lot of errands, run letters back and forth. Some of these kinds of things these boys were learning how to do.

And there was a huge emphasis on etiquette, personal deportment, and hygiene. There were books that the boys read about these social skills so that they could go out into the world and manage themselves properly according to societal mores. And he stood out. He was noticed by the people that he was working for as a page.

And what would normally happen is that you would be a page when you were younger, and then you would be squire in your, and from about 14 to 21, and then after 21 you could try to become a knight. While that wasn't his path, although plenty of young men followed that path, he at 14 was nominated for a scholarship to Oxford, to the Canterbury College at Oxford.

And this is partly probably due to his own conscientiousness and hard work and the ethics that he displayed the character that he had. And he went off to Oxford and spent two years there. One fascinating thing about Oxford at the time was that all the colleges, all of the classwork was given in Latin. That was the language of the educated. And it's actually pretty cool because it meant that everybody could talk to everybody else In the academic world, if you publish something, anybody anywhere could read it because everybody was learning their native tongue plus Latin.

Now at the college level, there was a system of education called Scholasticism that had been in place for a long time. In the past, in the previous couple hundred years, these older documents were resurfacing and coming more to the fore and taking more of a center stage in education. And what they would do is they would get into these original works and they would pick them apart and study them more and more in depth.

Now, we'll talk more about this in a minute, but interestingly, Thomas More became a good friend of a philosopher named Erasmus, and he's one of the most is really, really famous philosopher and thinker. And they were contemporaries became good friends, and Erasmus was largely responsible for the movement of humanism.

This was not what we think of as humanism today. That's antithetical to religion or faith or belief. It was very much a Christian humanism. It was a new movement that was more open-minded, that was letting more of these original works into the classroom. That was more open to. Your own interpretations about things, and a good way of putting it is it was an appreciation that God had granted man, the ability to think it was a very strong all his life.

So even though More became a huge fan of humanism and seeing the body as more beautiful, everything that came out of that over the next two or 300 years, opening up the educational model and seeking truth through reason and logic in a, in an even more aggressive way. He also retained a very strong belief in the Bible and the teaching and custom and traditions of the church, which we're gonna see more and more and more in his life.

But he left Oxford without taking his degree. Instead, he went to live in what was called the Inns of chancery. And this was basically where you went to study law. And his temperament was perfect for the law. It was one of the things that they like to talk about that made you a really good lawyer was ambiguity of mind. Being able to see a problem from every aspect and having a very.

Flexible ability to analyze something from every perspective and really pick it apart and see the problem and argue the case from a lot of different angles. He was top of his game at that kind of thing. One, one thing that people would say about him is sometimes it was really hard to know what he really thought about stuff.

Because of that ability to do that, this is where they taught the English common law, and this was a huge system of precedent and repeated interpretations. One of the things I thought was really fascinating about how the court system was at this time and place in England in the 14 hundreds and end of the 14 hundreds and the 15 hundreds, is that.

It was managed with a mixture of multiple languages. So the parliamentary statutes and legal papers, the documents and everything were in Latin. But in court, in the court itself, there was this strange kind of what they called bastardized Norman French. So they called it law French, and it was like French, but not, it was a different kind of French.

And then almost all the pleadings and witness statements were taken down in English. So, so, so fascinating. So he's in this world where he's, very versed at multiple languages, he's very brilliant. He is mastering the common law, and in the meantime, one of the. People that had a huge influence on him was a man named Sir John Fortescue, who died in 1479.

And he wrote a book that was later published as a book, but it was in print and it was a treatise that was passed around among these law students a lot, and it was called Commendation of the Laws of England. And his central arguments were that the law was supreme and that it was necessary for kings to obey the law.

And according to Fortescue, if the king did not obey the law, the people were entitled to disobey their sovereign. So we can see that thread of that thinking all the way to modern America. So really, really cool stuff and more is really credited with being one of the people that pushed that forward even more and champion that.

So he loved the law and he mastered the law, but in his day, and he adopted these ideals, it was just the mainstream belief that there was absolute truth and that that could be discovered by study and argument, and it didn't negate the fact of the law itself. Even if there was a bad legal document, the law itself was still pure.

That document wasn't the law. This goes back to what we talk about all the time here with natural law, objective truth, that we can reason that out and we can live according to it. That was definitely the worldview and the belief was that the church sacraments were valid even if they were administered at the hands of a bad priest.

And the law was valid, even if it was badly conducted. So this is where he's at. He's now, we went to Oxford for 14 to 16. He studied the law from 16 to 18, and now it's time for him to start practicing the law. Now we have actually a lot of evidence about Thomas Moore because he was so famous at the time and he wrote quite a bit, and the people around him wrote, and many of his letters have survived, and he knew famous people who talked about him and who he exchanged letters with.

One of the sources that I'm going to give you some quotes from in a minute, are from his son-in-law, William Roper, who wrote a biography of him just almost as soon as he died. And that has survived. And so we have firsthand evidence. Roper was his son-in-law for 16 years and lived in his house with him and his daughter was Meg or Margaret, who arguably more was closer to her than maybe anyone else, maybe even more than his wife.

And so he definitely knew more inside and out and wrote about his life, especially the last few years and justified the kind of man that he was and the decisions that he made. Now while he's studying law, and he is been at Oxford and his father is also moving up in the ranks in London in the government, he's gaining a circle of some of the most distinguished men of his time, and he was always a very meek and teachable person. So he was always willing to learn from anybody, people older than him, even younger than him. And so he progressed more quickly because he was so teachable.

Some of the things that we know about him because of who he became later on, was that this was a great time of character building for him. And near the end of this podcast, I'll go through the 7 laws for you after we know some facts about his life, and I'll point out to you how he was living each of those 7 laws.

We don't have a lot of details about, exactly what did he do every day, all day, when he was a child. But we know about the time period and we know how he lived and we know the kind of man he became and we know what kind of education he received. And so we know that he really was growing in those seven laws during these years.

So is now practicing law, meeting influential people, making friends. He's from the very beginning, a man of really strong ethic and integrity, who is just always keeps his promises, keeps his word, is very honest and upstanding. And by the time he's 21, his paths cross with Henry, the Duke of York, who later becomes Henry VIII.

And he's running in the same circles where this future king is. And so they're acquainted with each other. By the time he's about 21, 22, he starts getting asked to do what they called readings. And that was when he would go to the law schools and he would give lectures, often weekly lectures. And the first series of lectures that he did, which is very, very telling about the kind of man he was an in-depth lecture series on St. Augustine's, the City of God. Now the city of God is all about the difficulties of leading a virtuous life and at the same time being part of secular s society it's trying to answer the question, how could a good Christian best live a spiritual life while still contributing to the wider community?

And so we know from a young age that Moore is choosing to be in these kinds of works. He's thinking about these key ideas and he's studying them enough that he's mastering them and lecturing on them. And this is a central theme, a central question that dominated Moore's life. He wanted to know how to be the best man he could be.

He wanted to know how a Christian can behave in a secular world and be true to what's real and true and to himself. And of course, conscience is a key theme of his life and writings about him. And plays about him and so on. Now, about this time, and I don't actually know, he was living at Lincoln Inn or studying at Lincoln Inn and sometime around this time in his late teens, early twenties, he spends four years living at Charter House, and this is a Carthusian monastery.

Now, this is one of the most strict monastic orders that the way that these monks lived was really rigorous. It was very secluded. They lived in their own basically rooms In these cloisters. They only interacted at mealtimes and on communal walks, and they spent a lot of time doing like even extra prayers and extra things that other monks did.

And there's quite a bit of debate back and forth about what was going on in. More's life during this time, but his son-in-law Roper is gotta be the most trusted source for this kind of information. And what Roper says is that he thought really seriously about becoming a monk. That he felt like that would be a very righteous way to live his life.

That he was very seriously considering it. And he was watching these monks and interacting with them, a little bit and really contemplating the religious life. And it was difficult for him to decide what he should do. But eventually he finally felt that God was calling him to play a public role.

That he had been given the gifts and the education and the opportunity to do work in the world, in a leadership capacity with the law and eventually in government. And to have an impact that way and to have a family and to have the responsibility of a family. And he felt like that's the path that God wanted him to take.

But his religious commitment never waned and as we'll talk about it in a minute, the way he ran his home was in a very faithful way. So he did not choose the monastic life, but the fact that he interacted with these monks and knew them well, did play a role later on, which is really, really fascinating.

So he wanted to make sure that he was a man of great character and that in his public life, he was always acting as God would want him to. So he was really conscientious about that. As he goes on, by the time he's in his early twenties, I think about 23-ish. He qualifies as a barrister. So he levels up. So now he's got more authority in the courtroom, he's got more responsibility and he's asked to give a series of public lectures again as a reader.

And so he's studying, he's gaining more of an influence in the community this way, and by this time he decides by the time he's 26, he decides to marry. And that's a little bit late for a man to marry in this time period. But not unusual for his bride to be quite a bit younger than him. She was 17 and he was 26. That was pretty normal. Girls were very marriageable by the time they were 15, 16, 17, and men often had to pay a bigger price to be in a position to provide. So he felt like he was solid in his career.

He felt like he was solid in his career and ready to take on the responsibility of a family. His bride was Joanna Colt and some people called her Jane, and she came from a pretty important family and he took his role as husband and father like that of a teacher. He really was a very, very conscientious husband and father, and he wanted to mold Joanna into an intellectual companion.

She was known to have a very gentle and humble nature. She went along with his plans, was cooperative and very sweet. And what's amazing about her is that she had six children in seven years.

Four of them survived to adulthood which was a pretty good percentage survival rate for the time. Margaret, Elizabeth, Sicily and John were the four children that survived into adulthood. And he took on he had a home and he rented out part of it, and they were in part of it, as just as his income increased.

Eventually he took over the whole home as he had this family. And w by the time, I think Joanna was 24, just seven or eight years of marriage, she died of influenza. And More did not want to be alone. He knew a widow who was a little bit older than him. She had one surviving child, a daughter, and she had some property that she'd inherited from her first husband.

She had a little, some income of her own. She was of his class, so it was a very good match. And he married her again very quickly. He had a lot of very small children. You can imagine four out of six in seven years and they're all surviving. You know, he needs help and he marries her and it's a good marriage.

In fact, there was a point that one author made to attest to that, they said one of the reasons that we know it was probably a pretty happy relationship was because when he was planning out his burial plots, he wanted to be buried between his two wives because he loved them both dearly.

And Joanna chose to be buried next to him rather than next to her first husband. So that says something about their commitment to each other. And when they married, he adopted, her daughter, raised her as his own. They also had another kind of foster child. I don't know much about how that happened, but they were a pretty good house full, pretty quickly on.

He was a really conscientious husband and father, and he did something that was pretty revolutionary in his time. He educated every single one of his daughters equally as well as his sons. He just felt that women had the same intellectual capacity as men, and all of his girls had an equal education with the boys.

It was very practical. In fact, some people gave him grief and said, well, you're just spoiling them. They won't be obedient or whatever. And he said that the most important virtues in a woman are chastity and obedience to God and to their husbands. And education was more likely to mold women who could better resist the temptations of their nature, of their if if they had weaknesses.

If they had troubles, then this was just going to help them to be better women, more virtuous women. He really believed it. He acted it out. He hired really good tutors. He was very conscientious. He watched this with great interest. He told lots of people about it. And even when he was away, he would write home a lot and make sure that things were going well.

In his children's education, he called it his little school. He hired the very best teachers who were. Became famous later on and he shared what he was doing with other leaders. In fact, Erasmus, who was such an influential philosopher at the time, wrote to another friend and talked about this program of education he was doing with his daughters, and he said he was quite convinced that this was a great way to go.

He used to think that it wasn't a good idea, but he'd completely been converted to it. He realized that through education, they would be preserved from idle idleness. They would imbibe noble precepts and they would be trained in virtue to those who thought that learned wives might disobey their husbands.

He could see no reason to fear that because the husband should not try to command his wife in anything that wasn't honest and virtuous, and so she could better check her husband and only obey in terms of what was truly. Honest and virtuous because she would know. This goes back to something that I say often on this podcast, and in our programs that virtue becoming a virtuous person was the core reason for education.

And so they're helping women to be more virtuous. And in fact, according to Erasmus, there was now no nobleman in England who did not seek to have all his children well educated. So to me, there's a lot of legacies of Thomas Moore, but this is one of the coolest, he made a huge impact in the way that the public thought about law, about Catholicism, about revelation, about authority, about a lot of things.

But he also changed public opinion by changing the minds of the nobleman that he interacted with through actually living out this quote experiment. And then. Seeing how successful it was and converting everybody to it. In fact, his daughter Margaret, became a top scholar and she was the first English woman to publish a book in English.

They said that Catherine Parr has often claimed to be the first, but Margaret actually did it before her.

So in 1509, Moore was 30 years old. He was growing more and more successful as a lawyer. He was in a well-respected guild and he was potentially gonna be an alderman and maybe even lured mayor of London. And so his reputation is growing. His family is growing, he's really succeeding and.

So his reputation is growing and his family is growing, and then there starts to be this call for reformation in the spirituality, especially of church leaders. And they wanted a reformation of manners and morals, especially of the clergy. Now this leads us to another really interesting aspect of Moore's life, and that is that he's a contemporary of Martin Luther.

And Martin Luther puts his 95 theses up on the church door, and he writes all these tracks and he translates the Bible and he marries a woman that was previously a nun, and he does all these really radical things, and he's right about a lot of what he's saying, but. Moore and Henry VIII are really concerned about the fallout from what Luther is doing.

And one of, and it wasn't just that they were like, just traditionalists and they couldn't handle change. They had good reason to be concerned. For example, in German, in Germany, the peasants war had taken the lives of up to 300,000 people. And it was all about this, change in authority. This radical shift from who's really in charge is the church in charge, is the king in charge?

Is God in charge, is common law in charge, is natural law in charge? And so it's a turbulent time, it's a difficult time. And that kind of opens the door to what happens then over the next 20 years of Moore's life because he. Is vehemently against Luther. He's trying to shut Luther down.

And people that, that start teaching Luther's writings, he eventually, he's in a position of authority and they jail some of these people and they reprimand them publicly and they get them to retract and they burn Luther's writings and things like this. And, it seems maybe kind of backward looking or whatever.

We might think in our modern day about it. But it, they had real reason to be very concerned that this would literally create total chaos and cause the deaths of many hundreds of thousands, if not more, if they let this go on. And so More really believed in the absolute authority of the Pope.

He believed 100000% that the Catholic church was God's church, that Christ had instituted it, and that the Pope represented him on Earth. And even if Popes had become corrupt, the authority was still in the church. And that that couldn't be changed. And he never changed his mind about that. And that's why eventually he got into trouble and became a martyr.

So, one other thing I want to say, actually before we leave, all of this context and his family life, one of the things he was accused of later on when he was in this place where he was trying to help hunt down the heretics or participating in this, he was accused of battering people.

And he always denied it. And of course he died for what he said was true and right. So we have every reason to believe that. He just always told the truth besides which, we have no other contemporary evidence at all that he ever did that. And in fact, what we do know is that it was pretty common practice.

Now, not every man did it. Not every man did it all the time, obviously. But legally, if your children were really disobedient, you could beat them. Like you could hit them, whack them, whatever, even your wife, and they didn't really have a lot of legal recourse. Well, more was not like that. And it's always so important that when we look at history, that we look at who that person was in the context of their time.

When we look at someone and we judge their behavior based on our modern culture and morays and standards, and we think, oh, well they should have known this or that, they should have done this or that different, that's. Not actually fair or honest or helpful. What we have to do is in their time and place, how did the people around them think about them?

How did they compare to the people of their day? And on other future mission-driven stories we have coming up? This same principle will apply. We have to compare them to the people of their time. We have to look at them through the lens of what was accepted, what they could get away with more. Could have gotten away with a lot, but he, it was.

Commonly known, or at least Roper wrote about it, that he beat his children with a peacock feather. In other words, he didn't. And he just would talk with them and try to work things out using reason. And he was easier, even easier to do this because he was educating them properly and teaching them all of these things.

And so he was a very moderate man, very kind. There's some really sweet anecdotes about how much he missed his family. Every time he was away. He wrote home a lot and asked how everyone was doing and you can tell from his letters that he really missed his family and he loved his home life. So just such a good man to the core in so many of those ways.

So eventually he's made the undersheriff of London, and this is actually a really important role. He had several different government positions, but I think this one is a very important one because. What it meant was that he was dealing with the mass of everyday criminal cases in the city of London. So every Thursday and Friday morning, he would go and sit in judgment.

They called him an undersheriff and he would hear all the cases of the people so that they could get them through more quickly and they could have some kind of arbiter or judge to resolve their conflicts. And he came to be trusted and well known by just the normal, average, even poor people of London.

And this was really important later on, when all of this stuff was going down with Henry VIII because and in the final court case against him, he said “I've been silent.: And the law says that silence doesn't mean that you agree. And the person that was. Running the case, the attorney or whoever it was made the comment, no, actually your silence is reverberating across the realm basically that, because you won't take this oath, everyone feels like they know how you feel and they care because everybody knows who you are.

It wasn't like, some of these noblemen or higher level people in this society. They might just know famous people, or I shouldn't say famous people, important people. They would know important people and they would rise up in the ranks and they would maybe even work really closely with the king.

But the average person, wouldn't necessarily know. I mean, they would know they were important because of their dress, but they wouldn't know who they were. Most everybody knew who he was and his reputation for never taking bribes, for being completely fair and all of this was his reputation being formed.

Now another thing about his household was as he took over this whole house, as he grew inability and income, it was just busy. It was very large. Lots of people there. He was very, very generous. There was a guy close to his age that he let lived there for a long time, and when he remarried, his new wife kicked him out.

But Erasmus would come and stay there. People would stay there. They had gardens, they had an aviary. And actually one little fun fact about him was that he really loved animals. His second wife really loved them too, but he owned. Oh, in his lifetime at different periods, I don't know how many of these animals he had at the same time, but he had monkeys, a fox, a weasel, a beaver, rabbits, dogs and other animals.

And so he just, it was a busy he household with a lot going on all the time, and they presided over it in almost model Christian fashion. One author said the servants were well treated, but worked hard. Gambling, dicing and cards were forbidden. Prayers were read at morning and evening for the household and on holy days, which were frequent, and everyone was obliged to wake for night prayers.

One of the things his son-in-law Roper said about this was.

“If he were at home, besides his private prayers with his children to say the seven Psalms, litany and suffrages following was his guise nightly before he went to bed with his wife, children, and household to go to his chapel and there upon his knees ordinarily to say certain Psalms and collects with them.

And because he was desirous for Godly purposes, some time to be solitary and sequester himself from worldly company, a good distance from his mansion, he builded a place called it the New building, wherein was a chapel, a library, and a gallery in which as his use was upon other days to occupy himself in prayer and study together.

So on the Fridays there usually continued. He from morning till evening spending his time duly and devout prayers and spiritual exercises.”

That was kind of long, but basically what it means was he was super devout. He was, some people said he prayed for an hour and a half every morning. He read his, studied his scriptures every day.

They did scriptures in prayer multiple times in his home. They went to chapel all the time, and he built this special place of retreat for himself on his property where he would spend as many Fridays as he could, all alone nurturing his spiritual and mental self, finding time to be with God, time to be alone with himself, and really meeting his needs in that way and rejuvenating himself for all of the responsibilities he held in increasingly higher and higher positions.

And his household grew and grew, and he was just an incredible leader and his level of responsibility grew as well. He became increasingly involved in public life and was called upon for higher and higher positions. I. One interesting thing that he did was in 1512, he was responsible for ensuring that all the biscuit required for the army of King Henry, that he was gonna lead his force into France was available and of appropriate quality.

So he had basically take over the food required for the war that Henry wanted to rage on France. As time went on, he had more calls to be a reader. He had more responsibilities. He was asked to join Parliament and it took him quite a while to decide that he wanted to do that. Eventually he, I think it took him two or three years to say yes.

He was offered the formal royal appointment in 1516. I think he took it in 1518. And more and more he just worked closely with the king. There was a deep relationship, the form between them. In fact, they used to spend a lot of time together. He was actually, ironically, a really funny guy. People talked a lot about how humorous he was, and he says.

So he and the king formed this really close relationship. They used to talk about intellectual things. They wrote the seven sacraments book together to push back on Luther. They used to laugh a lot. Thomas More was actually a really funny guy. People talked often about how humorous he was, how engaging he was.

Easy to talk to, easy to get along with. And the king loved him and had him over to dinner with his wife and took him into his confidence. There was a really great relationship between them until things really started to fall apart. So he finally took this public position that put him working even closer with the king.

He finally took this royal appointment and one of the first things that he had to do was negotiate attacks that the king wanted to levy, 'cause he wanted to go back to war with France. And he wanted a huge amount and he had to present it to the House of Commons. And then he negotiated it down a little bit and just had.

He negotiated down and everyone was really impressed with his ability there. So now we're up to the 1520s and King Henry has been king for 20 years. His wife Catherine, can't have children anymore and she's only given him one surviving daughter, no sons. And of course he's been having affairs. He did really love her and I think they had a pretty decent marriage, but she had a lot of stillborns and babies died after they were born and all kinds of things like that.

And so here we are in the early 1520s and he doesn't have an air. He does have an illegitimate son from some other relationship and he makes him a Duke. And so someone somewhere plants the idea because as time goes on, king Henry becomes more and more dissatisfied with his situation. He becomes more and more paranoid that he doesn't have an error and he doesn't, he just thinks it's absolutely vital.

In fact, the people around them too, some of the, one of the reasons why some of the people around the king went ahead and went along with all his divorce stuff that we'll get into in just a minute, was specifically because there had been these kind of problems in other like kingdoms or whatever, and it would often erupt in bloodshed when there wasn't a legitimate error.

And so that was one of the things that they were trying to avoid. And what happened at first was that. He gets dissatisfied. He's, the king is like unhappy with Catherine. She can't have kids anymore. He becomes really enamored with this woman, Anne Boleyn, who is in the upper class circles.

And actually I didn't know much about her, but she was actually chased enough that he kept writing her letters and they got more and more kind of erotic. And she kept telling him, if you want me, you've gotta marry me. Because she was gonna, she wanted to be queen. So Moore is working with the king for the king.

He's writing against Luther and against heresies against the church because he is a stout Catholic. And by 1525 and 26, this idea gets planted in Henry's mind that. He can get out of this marriage with Catherine because it's not legitimate. There's this verse in Leviticus that talks about marrying your brother's wife, and she'd been married to his brother and so he, his wi his feelings for her were fading and he was obsessed with Amber Lynn, and he was paranoid that he wasn't gonna have an heir.

So he starts by 15, 27, he starts telling more, okay, my marriage isn't legitimate. I need to get it anul and more, divorce is against the law. It's against the law of God, and the Pope is in charge of these kinds of things. It's a religious sacrament to be married. It's a holy thing. In I, I think it still is, but in Moore's day for sure.

And it was something that the Pope had to oversee. It wasn't something that the law could manage because it was a holy union for life. And so what Moore needed to know was that the Pope was okay with it. The Pope was gonna grant him an annulment or a divorce. At first he wanted a divorce, then that wasn't gonna happen.

So then he thought, okay, well I'll use the Bible to prove that this isn't a real marriage, and then they'll grant me that. And so Moore never spoke against it, but he didn't go along with it. He didn't give his verbal consent. And so he just waits it out eventually by 1529, Charles V had been at war with France, and then there was gonna be this treaty signed, and Moore was sent off to France to manage this treaty.

And in the meantime, the Lord Chancellor's position came open. The current one was dismissed from office. And so Henry VIII asked Thomas Moore to be the Lord Chancellor.

He accepts the position, and everybody thinks it's a great idea because he has an impeccable reputation, and he's absolutely honest. And he never, ever, ever took a bribe. And in fact, there's one story that kind of came back to bite him. In fact, there was one story that people claimed that this woman had given him this silver cup.

And it was a bribe, and he had actually given it away because he knew she was trying to bribe him. And that's why many men around him, by the time they'd had the kind of positions that he'd held, had way more wealth than he did. And he had built himself a really beautiful home outside of town, but he'd never been really flagrant or he'd always been good with his money,

He just wouldn't take any bribes. And so he wasn't as rich as they were. In fact, there's a couple interesting incidents from when he was Lord Chancellor and in fact. Woolsey who had been the Lord Chancellor before him, had seen half as many cases as more Guess why? Because everybody knew more and they trusted him, so they would prefer to take their case before the Lord Chancellor.

So he saw over twice as many cases as Woolsey did in just the short time that he was Lord Chancellor. While he was in that position, he tried to be completely impartial in all his judgements all the time. In fact, at one point he ruled against his own son-in-law. And in another instance there was a stray dog that his wife had picked up and adopted and taken care of.

And then another woman claimed that it was hers. And so he had them bring the dog in with both of these women. And then he had them both call the dog and whoever the dog came to that was the rightful owner, and the dog came to the poor woman. So he gave it back to her earth.

In the meantime, things are accelerating with King Henry. He goes ahead and annuls the marriage. I don't know if he called it a divorce or an annulment originally. Puts away Catherine and marries ambient and more, does not go to the coronation, and they want him to sign a petition and more, won't sign it.

And then finally they get word from the Pope and the Pope says, this new marriage isn't legal. You're married to Catherine, so give up your Anne Boleyn and go back to Catherine. So it gets to this point. Now we're in 1531, 1532, 1533, and the king has married. In 1533, they get word back from the Pope right after that, and now it's time for everyone to go along with King Henry and what he wants at this point, this is how Church of England is formed.

He wants to break from the Pope. He wants to be the religious leader as well as the secular leader of England. And more just won't do it. He just won't go along with that. His conscience tells him that the Pope is the representative of God on the Earth, and that the Pope has the final say as to religious decisions and religious sacraments, which marriage is, and that he won't take an oath that this is his wife, that the divorce is legitimate, that Abilene's children should succeed on the throne.

And Henry isn't having it. And what's so fascinating is now here this, here's this really complicated situation where, Moore's not an idiot. He knows that Henry likes him and they've had this good relationship, but Henry is wants Henry's way and he's gonna bulldoze anybody in his way. He just knows that who's, that's who Henry is, even though he only ever talks very nicely about him, even when he sends him to his death.

And so they go arrest these car and monks and try them because they won't sign these oaths either. They won't take these oaths either, and they actually have a worse death than more. They're actually drawn and quartered, which is just awful. And so you can imagine there's this added layer of conviction with more, already his conscience tells him that what King Henry is doing is wrong.

He never speaks against the king, ever. And he never tells anybody his reasons for not signing petitions or taking oaths. But he just won't take them. And he just wants his silence to be good enough. And he thinks because he understands the law intimately, that his silence should be enough to keep him safe according to the law.

But of course, they're not gonna follow the law. They don't care about the law. They care about what they want. And he's already in this marriage with Annie Boleyn, and he's already pushing that her children are gonna be the rightful heirs. And of course we know there's four more wives to come.

So we know his track record now looking back, and people were just appalled that he would kill these monks over this. And then of course, it led to Thomas More's death.

So eventually More sees the writing on the wall. He goes home, he tells his family they're gonna expect me to take this oath. I'm not gonna take it. They're gonna arrest me. And they do. They send him to the tower. He's up in the most secure place, even though it's a normal room. He has a desk and books and writing utensils for a while.

He's there for about a year. Eventually they take away that stuff, but his health deteriorates while he's there. He only is able to have visitors a couple times and over and over again. These top leaders come in and try to convince him to take the oath. His family takes it. They're all safe. They don't understand why he won't take it.

They come to the prison, they try to talk him into taking the oath. He won't take it. Eventually he's charged with sedition. They take him into court and there's this little conversation between him and Sir Richard Rich and. Sir Richard Rich lies about what was said between them in order to try to get him found guilty, and sure enough, he is found guilty.

Sure enough he is found guilty and a few days later he is beheaded.

A few days later he is beheaded, which is just unbelievable. There are so many people around him who profess the same beliefs as him, who would not stay with their conscience in the way that he did. That would not stand up for what they knew to absolutely be right and true.

For the next few minutes, I just wanna give you some of my favorite quotes and anecdotes about him. I'm gonna first give you a few from Hi his son-in-law's biography. One of them was this really beautiful story about when his daughter Margaret got sick.

He talks about how it delighted him evermore not only in virtuous exercises to be occupied himself, but also to exhort his wife, children, and household to embrace and follow the same to whom for his notable virtue and godliness. God showed as he seemed a manifest miraculous token of his special favor towards him.

So his daughter Margaret, was sick and it was a sweating sickness. He says, who lying in so great extremity of that disease as by no invention or devices that physicians in such case commonly use, she could be kept from sleep. So that both physicians and all others despaired her health and recovery and gave her over.

So they've had paraded all these doctors through there. They've consulted everybody. They can find no answers. They're sure she's gonna die. And this is the situation. Her father as he that most entirely tendered her.

"Her father being in no small heaviness for her by prayer at God. His hands sought to get remedy where upon after his usual manner going up into his new lodging, that when I was telling you about earlier where he went to pray and spend his Fridays therein, his chapel, upon his knees with tears, most devoutly be sought Almighty God, that it would be like his goodness unto him.

Nothing was impossible if it were his blessed will at his mediation to vouchsafe gracefully, graciously to hear his petition where incontinent came into his mind that a glister should be the only way to help her.”

So he goes into his special space and he pours out his heart to God and he begs him to save his daughter.

And weeps over her and says, there's got to be something we can do for her. And God plants in his mind, this idea of doing a glister was the only way to help her, no idea what a glister is. So when he told the physicians, they by and by confessed that if there were any hope of help. That if there were any hope of health, that it was the very best help indeed, much marveling of themselves that they had not afore remembered it, so they couldn't believe.

They hadn't thought of it themselves, and they thought, yeah, if there's anything that's gonna help her, it's gonna be that.

“Then it was immediately ministered unto her sleeping, which she could by no means have brought unto waking. And albeit, after she was thereby thoroughly awakened, God's mark evident undoubted token of death plainly appeared upon her. Yet she contrary to all their expectations was as it was thought by her father's fervent prayer, miraculously recovered, and at length again to perfect health restored.”

So he really felt like that was God's hand answering him, performing a miracle on behalf of Thomas More, because he was such a great man.

Now, this particular quote is when. They are heading off. When he came home and told his family that they were gonna come get him and he was gonna have to go to jail to prison, his son-in-law, William Roper, came with him. And as soon as they got outside, he said he came and whispered in his ear, son Roper, I think our Lord, the field is one.

And he said, I realized afterwards that it was for that the love of God, the love he had to God rod in him so effectually that it conquered in him all his carnal affectations, utterly. So what he took that to mean was that he had prayed and done the spiritual work so that when he was taken to prison, he wasn't a mess and he was in control of himself and he was trusting the Lord.

Now when they went to court and Richard Rich told this lie about their conversation had been had when he was in prison. One of the things, one, the thing that Thomas More said immediately was, “In faith, Mr. Rich, I am sorrier for your perjury than for my own peril.” And he really meant this because he knew that by straight up lying in court when a man's life was on the line, that kind of perjury that he was committing was gonna damn him to hell.

That's what it meant for Thomas More. And he was more sorry that Richard Rich was of that caliber of person and that he was condemning himself than he was that, that he was gonna die. That was kind of a foregone conclusion for Thomas Moore at this point. He just knew that's what was gonna happen.

This I think, is one of the most amazing things that I read about him. After they had pronounced judgment on him because he keeps saying, I don't understand. This is just my private conscience. I don't understand why you guys won't leave me alone. I don't understand why it matters so much to you.

They make their judgment anyway. They condemn him to death and here's what he says to them. And it's in this older English. So if you don't understand exactly what it means, I'll explain a little bit better. But I wanna read the exact words because they're beautiful.

“More have I, not to say my Lords, but as the blessed Apostle St. Paul, as we read in the acts of the apostles, was present and consented to the death of St. Stephen and kept their clothes that stoned him to death and yet be they now both twain, holy saints in heaven and shall continue their friends forever. So I verily trust and shall therefore write heartily. Pray that though your Lordships have now in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hear after in heaven merely all meet together to our everlasting salvation.”

So even in the moment when they are condemning him to death, he is placing no judgment on them. He has no enmity and no hard feelings. He's thinking about how Paul didn't understand what he was doing. And he condemned Steven to death, and then he was converted, and now they're both in heaven together. And he says, actually several times that he judges no other person for what their conscience tells them.

He doesn't know what another person's conscience is telling them. And if they don't feel that they have to stand up for their conscience in this case, then that's not for him. He tells one of his friends, he says I'll read you that quote in just a minute. It's really fascinating what he says to his friend about that.

One of his friends comes to him weeping after he's condemned to death and more ends up comforting the friend. He says, quiet yourself good, Mr. Pope, and be not discomforted for I trust that we shall once in heaven see each other full merrily, where we shall be sure to live and love together and joyful bliss eternally.

And then when he comes up to the block where they're going to chop off his head.

So Roper says that when he went to be executed. He actually made sure that he had one angel of gold and he gave that to the executioner and then he asked everyone to pray for him to bear witness with him. Then he should suffer death in and for the faith of the Holy Catholic church. And then he kneeled down and prayed and then turned to his executioner with a cheerful countenance and said, “Pluck up thy spirits man and be not afraid to do thine office you send me to God.”

The play A Man for All Seasons is one of many really awesome readings that are in the MDM Academy as an option for students to read. Largely because we spend some time in the academy is one of many key elements that we discuss is conscience and what conscience means and how we're true to our conscience and why that matters.

Many of these quotes are taken right from Thomas Moore himself. The author Robert Bolt really wanted to be very true to Thomas Moore. And in fact, you can read the play or watch, there's several movie versions of it that are really good. But just to wind down today, I want to read you a few of these quotes because they're really great.

He says “A man should go where he won't be tempted. He's talking to a young man that wants him to advance him and he says, you should go be a teacher. And he doesn't wanna be a teacher 'cause he wants to be famous. And he says, but Richard, in offer in office, they will offer you all sorts of things and basically you don't wanna be tempted.

So then he says to this young man, Richard, in office, they offer you all sorts of things. Basically they're gonna bribe him and he says, why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher, perhaps even a great one. And Rich says, and if I was, who would know it? And more says, you, your pupils, your friend, God, not a bad public. That, oh, and a quiet life.”

Because Rich sees the positions that more holds and he just sees glory and honor. But it's not like that for more, it's just a whole ton of responsibility that frankly, he's tired of having.

Here’s another great quote. “I believe when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”

Here's another great one. They're trying to get him to be ruled by the king and saying, why won't you be ruled? You need to let your king be your ruler. And he says, "I neither could nor would rule my king, but there's a little, little area where I must rule myself.” That's in his conscience. He's gotta be his own man.

Here's the quote I was mentioning earlier. His friend says to him, “You know I am. He says, I'm not a scholar as Master Cromwell never tires of pointing out. And frankly, I don't know whether the marriage was lawful or not, but Thomas, look at those names. You know those men can't. You do what I did and come with us for fellowship.

And then more says, and when we stand before God and you are sent to paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I'm damned for do not doing according to mine, will you come with me for fellowship?”

Because again. He really honestly trusts that these people are doing what their conscience dictates.

He just thought the best of them. He just assumed the best in them. He wasn't gonna make a judgment about them. He was only gonna make a judgment about his own conscience and what he knew was right.

And here's one last beautiful quote for our own deaths, “My Lord, yours and mine, dare we for shame enter the kingdom with ease when our Lord himself entered with so much pain. So he didn't expect life to be easy. He didn't expect choices of conscience and choosing what was right to be easy.”

He knew it would be hard, and he was actually pleased to go home.

He had reconciled to himself to dying, and he believed he was going back to his God and that he had done what he had, fought the fight he had. Let his conscience rule. He had stayed true to those things he knew to be true and followed those. Those worthy monks to the death and stood for what he knew was right and true and just such an incredible, incredible man.

Lastly, let's really quickly go through these 7 laws of life Mission, as I'm sure you can see that he definitely lived them.

Love God: He really loved God. Daily prayer, multiple times, scripture reading, leading his family devotionals, worship, putting God's will first owes, obey his conscience to the death. He could not have shown his love for God and his commitment to God's, the things he believed to be his sacraments in his church

Love self: He definitely always made time to meet his needs. He worked hard to discipline his heart and mind. That's why he told Roper that he was grateful that. He had conquered himself that he had won. And the self-discovery, he spent time alone each week. He nurtured his self-image. He made healthy choices.

He took time with animals, with family, with friends. He just really did care that his conscience and who he was, he gave everything really to other people. But he always cared for himself. He renewed himself and he was true to himself. He was true to what He knew to be right. Loving truth. He was a lifelong student, very meek, very willing to adopt what he knew to be true and right.

Love truth: Always told the truth. He was going to the sources of truth. He lived by principle. I didn't cite them, but there's some really great quotes about, living by principle he was. He educated his daughters. He oversaw his health household. He let love reign. He didn't give way to either his passions or to doing things the way other people did them.

He thought for himself he embraced the truth and he lived differently than other people. He just lived differently than other people because he was a truth seeker and he was gonna live higher truth, the way that he managed his children and managed the people that came when he was the sheriff, and on, and on and on.

Love Humanity: Definitely always loved truth and loved humanity. He was such a great listener. He learned about all kinds of different people. He cared for them. He represented them in court equally and honestly. He saw them all as equal and treated his enemies with love and compassion and assumed the best and didn't make judgments and was empathic.

He wouldn't take bribes. He loved all sorts of people. And then of course, he heard the call. Probably the biggest call was away from a monastic life into public life. And eventually it ended up costing him his life as he tried to live. True to both. But he heard that call and he served in the law and he served his family.

He served his country and his king and his pope and his God as conscientiously as he possibly knew how he, there were many calls, many, new opportunities that he accepted different positions and different opportunities. He knew the kings of the world, the most powerful people of his day. He mingled with them.

They trusted him. In fact, king Charles, I'll read you this quote after he, after Charles found out because Moore had gone and helped with the peace treaty between Charles and the French and. Charles knew him and trusted him and liked him. This was what he said about him. It is very true. And this will, we say that if we had been master of such a servant of who's doings ourselves, we have the, had these many years, no small experience, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than have lost such a worthy counselor.

So he was just appalled that Henry VIII would have him killed. He knew the caliber of man he was, and he would rather have lost his best city than to have lost Thomas Moore. And so that's the way that, that the very, most powerful people in the world thought about him. He also, wrote these beautiful he did a lot of other things.

He translated things, he wrote the book Utopia, which I didn't even mention, which was really famous. Still read in colleges and. Even, maybe even high schools today. He was deeply involved as a parent. He heard the call to be a husband and to be a father, and to be a lawyer, and to be a negotiator and a judge.

All of those calls, he answered with complete integrity and did his best to show up the best that he knew how He wasn't a perfect man. He had many flaws, but his willingness to follow God and to find and embrace truth made him a force for good in the world. That reverberates still today, all these hundreds and hundreds of years later, and he continues to inspire so many people with the way he lived his life.

So that is Sir Thomas Moore, a truly mission-driven life, a man I greatly admire. And when I think of conscience, he's one of the first people that comes to my mind because he was truly a man of conscience. Who died for what he knew to be right and true. And I hope that all of us can learn something from him and strive to be a little bit more like him and to practice listening to and obeying our conscience in the small things so that when we are met with the bigger moment where it really matters, the character that we forged, we will be of the caliber of person that can continue to do what we know is right in the face of great adversity.

Thank you so much for joining me today for this incredible story of Sir John. Thank you for joining me today for this incredible story of Sir Thomas Moore, and I will see you next time.

 When I ran across the 4 Levels of Self-Discipline, I could see the wisdom of the framework. Then I realized there was a 5th Level and my mind was really blown! 

These levels bring a fresh perspective to the desire for greater self-discipline that we all have. Once understood, we can self-evaluate and have more clarity on where to begin! 

It's also pretty amazing how perfectly these levels dove-tail with the 7 Laws of Life Mission!

If you haven't already, go grab your FREE copy of the 7 Laws of Life Mission cheatsheet here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

You can also learn more by grabbing your own copy of the book that goes into great detail about these laws here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/store

There are also several episodes on the 7 Laws of Life Mission that you can find on this podcast!

Transcript:

 Welcome to the Mission-Driven Mom podcast. This podcast is for moms just like you, who want to learn how to glorify God through finding and embracing true principles, discovering and developing your greatest gifts, and using them to serve your family and community. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Reba, author of the Mission-Driven Life founder of the Mission-Driven Mom.

I am super excited to be joining you today. We are gonna have a great conversation about self-discipline and the formula for gaining it, and it's 11 components. There are five levels of self-discipline that we're gonna go over in just a minute, which I'm excited to tell you about because this has been.

Very helpful information to me in making connections between these levels and the Seven Laws of Life Mission found in my book, the Mission Driven Life, and just in my own life experience and that of others. Before we get into it, I want to make sure that you know that we currently have a Mother's Day Cell going on.

You can get a hundred dollars off until Mother's Day of level one of the MDM Academy. We've had several women come in recently and we're having some great conversations. We're gonna have some student orientations coming up and then I'm gonna be doing some live q and as, some group discussions, some workshops.

It's gonna be a lot of fun. You've got the member directory in there and the the robust. Community component as well as all of the incredible information in the Academy course itself. So I hope that you'll make that decision to take advantage of the sale and to join us. One last thing. We would love for you to leave a review on this podcast.

It helps others know the quality they can expect to find here and get a sense of the kinds of things that we talk about and why it's benefiting you. And it would also be great for you to pass it along to a friend or family member that you think might benefit. From the content that we discuss here. So last night I had a book club at my house and we had a handful of people over and we were discussing the book, the Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.

I don't know if you know much about Oscar Wilde. Years and years and years ago, I used to do a program called Enlightened Minds, and we would focus on a book every month and I would go into all kinds of depth. And back then I did this, a focus on Oscar Wilde. And I think this book, or maybe the importance of being Ernest, I'm not sure.

Anyway, at that time, I did some extensive research on the life of Oscar Wilde, and I don't have time to go into it today, but it was really quite mind blowing because he latched onto the aesthetic movement. He. Really felt like the pursuit of pleasure was the way to live. But he fell in love with a woman, married her, had a couple little boys, and then over time his life really fell apart.

He ended up in prison for sodomy and then died three years after he was released, after making a confession in prison. Anyway, the point of this book discussion and what we're gonna talk about today is that when we were talking about it. A picture of Dorian Gray. One of the things that I brought up, which was incredible to me, is that he wrote the book of the Picture of Dorian Gray is kind of a cautionary tale.

It talks about a man who, Dorian Gray, who pursues a life of pleasure and his life precedes to fall apart and. Oscar Wilde wrote this book, serialized it in the newspaper like they do back, like they did back then. And then he proceeded to live it out. He proceeded to do all the things that Dorian Gray did and kind of come to the same demise that Dorian Gray did.

And I was telling the group, it's always been incredible to me that this was his path. Like he knew where this might lead. He knew the consequences. Of making these kinds of choices, and yet he still went all in, made all these choices and his life completely unraveled. And I was like, what? Why would he do this?

This is so crazy. And one of the men in the book discussion just said, you know, just because you know something doesn't mean you can do it. Just because you know better doesn't mean you can always. Do that thing that you aspire to do. And of course I know this, and of course I don't show up for myself in a lot of ways that I wish I did.

His is just such a dramatic example that I was really like, oh my goodness, how in the world did this happen to him? But I also understand that you and I experience this every day. We don't have the discipline that we wish we had. And how can you do it? How can you take a good idea and really integrate it?

Into your life and into your lifestyle, and there's a lot of good answers to this question. Today we're gonna talk about the five levels of self-discipline. So it's going to be kind of the big picture structure that you can look at and plug yourself into. I think I need to work on this section of my self dis discipline or this section of it, and we'll give you some.

Tools, some ideas about what you can do next, what might be some of the next right actions for you to take in being more self-disciplined. Because you and I are probably not gonna have the path of an Oscar Wild or a Dorian Gray, but we both def definitely want to. Have more control over ourselves and our behavior and our emotions, and to have greater success moving towards our worthwhile and meaningful goals.

So how can we do that? Well, I found this article, and I'm gonna link it in the description for you. It was actually on a. Karate website, which is really fascinating. But he said some really valuable things. He turned me onto four of the levels of self-discipline, and I think there's probably five. And then he touches on the 11 components, which we'll talk about in, in near the end.

So he starts out by saying that discipline is a vital component of success, whether in school, in competition, on the job, or when you're pursuing your goals. Discipline is the mechanism that breeds success. And he also says, which I think is so profound, that discipline lies between honesty and belief.

Discipline is to obey what's right. So how do we do that? So I traveled back as I often do to the 1828 dictionary to get to some terms and some root definitions of some things because it has better definitions than we often do today. So on discipline, here's how it defines it to instruct, educate, inform the mind to prepare by instructing incorrect.

Principles and habits, and if you've been around me, you are the mission driven mom very long. You know that those are really incredible words. We are very focused on understanding the correct principles which bring lasting success and happiness. In the words of Stephen Covey and the 1828 dictionary goes right to that.

It also says to accustom, to order and subordination to correct. So discipline means all of those things, which is really, really cool. And of course, discipline comes from the word disciple. And disciple is defined as a learner, scholar, follower, one who receives instruction and follows the doctrines of another.

So if. Discipline were simply to do what I want to do or what I can do, then that would mean it wouldn't be something hard. I would just be doing something that comes naturally and to just do something that comes naturally that's easy, that I like to do, that I want to do that doesn't actually require this concept of discipline.

I don't actually really need to change or be different. The very nature of discipline is change, it's growth. It's being different than we were before, and that is gonna be something that's hard. Discipline is something that we're not inclined to do. And it's hard because we can't or don't want to do something, but we feel we should, and this goes back to that concept of the definition that was submission.

It means that discipline is trying to change to do things in a better way. You're trying to uplevel, and that's why it's hard because it's different. It's not what you're naturally inclined to do. It means that. We need something besides our way. Something besides the way we've been doing things, something besides what's natural or easy for us.

We need that to reign in our lives. We need that to take over our behavior. Ultimately, it means that we are working to conform to something above us. And this reminded me of the abolition of man, which I absolutely love. And this is CS Lewis, and he talks about this concept of the way, this is another way of talking about the natural law or the natural moral law, or the law of human nature that we reference a lot in the mission-driven mom programs, books, academy, all that kind of stuff.

And this is how CS Lewis puts it in the abolition of man. The Chinese also speak of a great thing, the greatest thing. Called the Dao. It is the reality beyond all predicates the abyss that was before the creator himself. It is nature. It is the way the road, it is the way in which the universe goes on the way in which things everlastingly, emerge, stilly and tranquility into space and time.

It is also the way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and super cosmic progression, conforming all activities to the great exemplar I. In ritual, say the annex, it is harmony with nature that is prized. The ancient Jews likewise praise the law as being true. So this is the way discipline is essentially.

Us recognizing and honoring a way different than the way that we're inclined to. We are trying to order ourselves in line with the divine order. We are restructuring our habits, our thoughts, our actions to be in line with a better way of living, A way which brings greater levels of health and peace. And harmony and unity.

And. Success and inner happiness because they conform to the way things really are. And this is why I talk so much about being willing, this concept of being willing, that I talk about in my book, the Mission Driven Life and in our academy, that we have the choice of being willing or willful. We have the choice of going the way that's easy for us, or taking shortcuts to try to get short term solutions.

But there will be long-term breakdown if we try to short circuit the correct way of doing things in the correct way of being. But if we submit, if we admit that it's there, if we admit that there's something that we've gotta conform ourselves to, that's hard, that's different. That's above us. We're, we're striving, we're reaching, we're climbing.

That's why it stretches our muscles. That's why it doesn't come naturally. So how can we do that? What are these magical five levels of self-discipline that are really gonna help us to step into that? Okay. The first one is something that, and this is kind of the way this author talks about it, but there's a lot of ways of thinking about it.

He says, rules without relationships lead to rebellion. So another way of thinking about that is. The first step to true self-discipline is about your relationship, and in this case it's about your relationship with yourself and it's also about your relationship with God or the universe or the way or the da, this thing that you didn't, you don't get to make it up.

It's just the way things are and. How much you respect that, how much you honor that, how much you're willing instead of willful makes all the difference in being able to engage in greater self-discipline. And you must have a better relationship with yourself if you want to be more self-disciplined for several reasons.

One very important one is that if we. Don't have a good relationship with ourselves, then why would we bother to discipline ourselves if we don't like and love and care about ourselves, we won't do the work. We put in work for things that we really, really care about and love is a choice. It's a decision to take an action that would be best for whoever or whatever.

We can love our animals, we can love our lawn, we can love our world. We can love our PTA by taking actions that we don't necessarily want to take, but that are in the best interests of that entity or that person or that living thing. It's the same with you. If you wanna uplevel, if you want more discipline, you've got to learn to like yourself more.

And that means learning to take actions that are loving by striving for self-mastery. Now, there's three principles that I talk about in my book, the Mission-Driven Life. You can go grab a copy of that book. You can listen to the seven laws podcasts that we've got in this podcast series. You can also join the academy.

This would be a great time 'cause it's on sale right now. And we will walk you through these three laws. These three principles of loving yourself, which are meeting your real needs, disciplining your heart and your mind, and discovering and developing your gifts. But I think it is very obvious if you think about it for just a moment, that your level of self-discipline is gonna be in proportion to the level at which you truly honor, respect and care about yourself.

That's when you're gonna be willing to extend yourself. For your own spiritual growth, which is our MDM favorite definition of love. So if you want greater self-discipline. If you really have goals that are meaningful to you or you want things to be different in your life and you're striving for that to be different, and you're wondering why you can't get there, I would look very seriously at your relationship with yourself first, and if you find some vacancies and deficiencies there, if you find that you don't like yourself as much as you should.

Or as much as you would like to, you don't know yourself as well as you would like to, and I promise there's always more that you can learn about yourself if you don't really know what your real needs are and you don't know how to meet those, work on that first. Now, the second level, which this article starts with as the first level, but I'm saying it's the second because you need the relationship.

That second level of self-discipline is obedience. This is where you have an instructor. A mentor, a role model or God, and they set down some rules for you, and you just kind of blindly follow, you know that they have the fruits in their lives that you want, you know that they're a trusted source, and so you just do what they say.

You don't really consult whether or not it feels like a good idea to you, or you really want to, you just really try to get busy just doing it because they told you to and you put some parameters around yourself that help you to get it done. You know, this is where you're just doing what you're told.

And if you're an adult, it's doing what you're told. You know, you're, you're, you're told what to do at work, for example, and so you just do it because they're the ones that are paying your check and they're the ones that you're there to please. And so you just do whatever you're told to do. Now, that doesn't mean you don't think for yourself.

It depends on your maturity level, but this obedience level is where we begin. It. The second level is what they're calling self-discipline, and this means simply that you're no longer need to be told all of the time. Okay? This is a level at which you're learning and modeling principles because you're starting to understand.

That there's something above the level of just the rules. The rules of whatever you're trying to obey. Let's say for example, you're following Dave Ramsey's financial rules and he just says, put a thousand dollars in savings and then pay off your credit card debt. And so you just kind of blindly obeying the rules 'cause you like Dave Ramsey and you really trust him and believe in him.

So that's how you're obedient. You're just doing what you're told when you get to the next level, level three. This is what they're calling self-discipline. The third level of discipline. This is when you don't need to be told what to do all the time anymore because instead of just blindly obeying, you are now learning and modeling principles.

This is why in that 1828 dictionary, we receive instruction on principles and instead of always looking at what the rules are. And why we need to just do whatever we're told, whether it's following blindly, Dave Ramsey or our fitness instructor, instructor, or even a pastor. We now understand that those rules or applications of what lies beneath in deeper principles and foundational ideas, and that we can learn to navigate those ourselves and we can learn to harmonize our lives.

A little bit better. We're taking actions and we're modeling these principles. We're trying to understand them and live them for ourselves. The next level beyond self-discipline is what they call self-control, and this goes at an even deeper level now. E. In addition to understanding principles and taking actions on those principles, we're seeing that it's also a cul sculpting our emotions and the way that we're feeling about ourselves and in the world.

When you get to the level of self-control in this model, you're no longer. Are actively having to work on your relationship with yourself all the time because you're not sure how you feel about yourself. You feel settled. You're not just blindly obeying what everybody's telling you to do, and you're not just referencing the principles and trying to apply them.

Now you're feeling a greater sense of mastery. You really do feel in control of yourself. You don't worry anymore that you're gonna just fly off the handle and go out of control, or that you're gonna make some kind of meaningful goal and never know how to get there. You have better control over your emotions, but just over yourself in general.

And you feel like you really like yourself, you love yourself, you're at peace with yourself, and you have more control, not not every single moment of every day, but there's like this settled confidence that it's gonna be okay, that you're gonna be able to manage obstacles that come in your way. And then the highest level is what they call self-awareness.

The 1828 definition of this is watchful, vigilant, and aware of how your motivations and actions impact others. They call this the highest form of discipline, and it's an understanding of our importance in the world and in the universe, in the grand scope of things. This is not just me trying to reach my own goals and me trying to kind of get a handle on myself or me trying, trying to like myself or.

These kind of lower levels of discipline. This is me understanding now that even my motivations are affecting the people around me, and I'm willing now to. Forego things that might be pleasurable or even important to me for the greater good. The way that he says it is we realize our every word and action has an impact on others, and that we sometimes have to take on tasks that are unpleasant because those tasks help achieve a greater good.

So this whole framework is really helpful in terms of knowing where to begin. If you need a better relationship with yourself, work on that. If you just need to follow a mentor and just kind of do what they tell you to do for a little while because you trust them and they know that they have your best interests in mind, and they've worked with a lot of people and they know what they're doing, then just start doing what they ask you to do.

But then you need to get to the point where you're also. Learning the principles for yourselves, for yourself, and finding ways to apply those principles for yourself. This is, you know, we kind of walked through this process in the academy and it was really crazy to me how it really mirrors those laws of loving God, loving yourself, loving truth, and loving humanity.

Because at first we're just working on a relationship with God and on ourselves, and we're kind of. We have principles and like in the academy, we have principles list in every section, and those principles are set down for us and we're just applying them and kind of blindly obeying the process and working on our relationship with ourselves.

While also starting to see the true impact of the principles that underlie those, those good results that we want. And then in level two, we get heavily into love of truth. And this is where we learn to write actionable principles for ourselves and find better applications of them, which really reflects this self-discipline component.

And then in level three, we're loving humanity and this is that highest level of. Having greater self-control. We're becoming servant leaders. We're learning to love humanity and gaining this awareness, this self-control and self-awareness that our actions affect everyone around us and that the greatest purposes and the deepest meanings that we could have in life are to develop and utilize our gifts and the blessing of the people around us.

And. All of that is also just self-discipline. You're growing in discipline all the way along, and you are a true disciple. You are a disciple of the way you're disciple of the natural law and, and the God whose law it is. You're a disciple of the principles that can change you, and you're becoming a better and better disciple if you think about.

Jesus's 12 apostles, you can watch their growth in this process. At first, they were just doing their thing and then they had to just do whatever Jesus told 'em to do. And they really, and and, and they struggled with understanding why he was saying the stuff he was saying and why they were supposed to do the things that they were supposed to do.

And then they started to see the doctrines and the principles that underlie it and they gained kind of a testimony or a conviction about that and gained discipline and. Then they tried to do the things that Jesus did, and sometimes it was totally fell flat and didn't have any impact. And even when Jesus was headed to the cross, Peter didn't have that self-control and the discipline and the conviction.

To defend Jesus. He denied him. Right? And then after the resurrection, that self-control and that self-awareness going out into the world and taking this message to the world and sacrificing themselves for the greater good. So you see this really cool path of the disciple and the true servant leader through this process of these five levels of self-discipline.

Quick example that I thought of in my own life, of my own journey through these. Levels of self-discipline is in my journey to have a better relationship with money. I grew up pretty poor. Uh, we, one of the running jokes at our house was we never knew how much of the milk that was in the pitcher on the table, how much of it was powdered, and how much of it was real milk.

And my mom would try to trick us, you know, by mixing different combinations because we had to subsidize our meals with, you know, these powdered milk and lots of beans and. We had a little more money in my teenage years and, and we're, and we're comfortable, but I had a poor relationship with it. I didn't think I was really worth spending much money on.

There's stories that I've told in books and podcasts and in the academy about myself and my own struggle to be able to spend money on myself and to see myself as worthy of that and to understand why that was important. You know, but I was going along, being obedient to really basic financial principles to, to paying a tithe and to not getting into too much debt, but we were getting into debt and we weren't saving.

And so then eventually I gained greater self-discipline when I started learning the principles around. Finance it. And uh, one story in particular was I went to a retreat and this woman was a multimillionaire and she was teaching us these deeper level principles of finance. And we had a mentor meeting with her after this workshop, and she wanted us to save 10%, but we didn't have enough income to save 10%.

That's why I was in, I mean, I don't, I, I'd heard about it. People had told me that I should do that. And I sometimes obeyed and sometimes didn't, 'cause I didn't have a deep enough understanding of it at this point. I thought we didn't have enough money to do it anyway. I told God that when I got on this mentor meeting with her, that I would just do whatever she told me to do and in this space of being obedient and trying to gain more discipline, and she told us, I don't care if you have enough money to save 10%, it's a principle you'll do it.

You need to do it. And so we committed to it. We saved 10% and then literally, magically a check came in the mail. Someone in our extended family decided to give out a disbursement check of inheritance. They'd never done this before. They never did it again, but that particular month, they, we got money in the mail and that was, I really believed God showing me that I needed to be disciplined and living according to this principle and I.

I got better and better and better at it, and no one needed to tell me to do it anymore. I did it because I knew it was right and I did it because I knew that we could not have financial success unless we did it. I had a woman tell me once as I was going through this process that she was asking me about financial principles and I said, well, philanthropy is one.

You need to give money away. And she's like, okay, I'll go talk to my husband about that. And she came back to me and she was like, well, we've decided that we'll try it out. We'll live the principle of philanthropy as you're calling it for three months. And if we don't see the results, then we're not gonna do it anymore.

And that's just actually not how principles work at all. And you're not just gonna have magically the life that you want three months later. They are the foundation for a lasting success. It's like putting a foundation in your home or getting the root system of a tree established. You're just not gonna see the results in three months, but you will have, if you will pay that price for five years, you'll never be hungry again because that apple tree will produce apples for the rest of your life.

So anyway, I told her that's not how it works, and she was at that level where she needed to go backwards. She needed to find a mentor she trusted, and somebody that she could obey. She needed to work on her relationship with money because it's always about relationships and money is a thing that we do have a relationship with.

Anyway, long story short, I eventually gained more self-control as I lived according to those principles and grew in self-discipline. I don't ever worry about, are we gonna get into a ton of debt? Are we gonna make a stupid decision? Can I buy this shirt that's really cute at this store that I like, those kinds of things.

My relationship with money has completely healed. I feel abundant and confident and know that, you know, no matter how little or how much money we have will be conscientious. And our income has fluctuated. This year it went down, so we made plans. Blaine went to work, he earned more money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And. So this is, this is something that is a path. It's, it's a journey, but you can't, over time, incrementally have more self-discipline in whatever area you want. And now there's a self-awareness. We go on, um, service trips. Yeah, we give money away more than we ever have. And I'm not saying that like to stroke my ego or whatever, I just understand that I've been given a lot and I had better give back because it's a stewardship and I'm gonna be accountable for it.

And my self-awareness about my financial situation has made me learn to be even more generous and to be looking out for others in a way I never did before. Looking out for them financially. So. These are some beautiful elements of how these five levels of self-discipline can create a framework in your life for understanding where you need to begin, whether you want discipline, it doesn't matter what area of your life in your marriage, in your parenting, in your finances, like I did in your health, and we've had to gain self-discipline in all of those areas of life.

And that mission-driven life, those seven laws of life mission are also the pathway that you can follow that will help you gain greater and greater levels of self-discipline, self-control, and self-awareness. Really quickly as we finish up here, I thought I'd read you these 11 components of discipline.

'cause I think it's really well said and it's something else to think about as you're growing in your own discipline. Number one, commitment. Commitment is when we make a decision and follow through, understanding the consequences. Without commitment, we cannot have discipline, and without discipline we cannot have commitment.

So their inner, their inner connected two punctuality. Punctuality is being on time and also being conscientious about the commitments that you make. Discipline people are always on time and have the ability to use time to their advantage. Three goals. To have a goal is to want something and be willing to work hard for it.

Discipline people are motivated by their goals. Four focus. Focus is when we direct all of our senses and energy to something specific. People with discipline are able to maintain their focus on what is important. Five, persistence. Persistence is to continue to attempt to succeed in our goals no matter what.

Discipline people have the persistence to try again and again, a million times as if necessary until their goal is met. Six. Determination. Determination is having the belief that we will somehow accomplish what we want. Discipline people show determination when working toward their goals. Seven.

Responsibility. Responsibility is to hold ourselves accountable for our actions and results. People with discipline always take responsibility for what they do and are able to find the best way to respond to their circumstances. Eight. Courage. Courage is having the strength to face our fears. Discipline.

People have the courage to face any situation and never give up. Nine, fitness. Fitness is taking care of our bodies and staying in shape. Discipline people take care of their bodies. Understanding that being fit will help in various situations. 10 vision. Having vision is. Having the ability to see in our minds what we are working to achieve.

Discipline, people are able to focus on their vision. And 11 passion. Passion is an incredibly strong feeling about something. People with discipline have great passion for reaching their goals, and I would add a 12th, and that is faith. People with discipline have faith. Instead of leaning into their fear or listening to their fears, they take actions that create results.

And they focus on where they're headed rather than the fears that can stand in their way. So that is a little bit on self-discipline today. I hope that you heard something that's helpful, that you have a better idea of where you can begin on on, on your journey to higher levels of self-discipline, to get from where you are to the goals that you're striving to reach, and from who you are to the person that you really want to become.

That is. The most beautiful journey you could be on. As Stephen Covey says, self-development is sacred ground. It's holy ground, and we ought to honor it and respect it. So I'm really grateful that you're here and really proud of you for being willing to learn something new and to look at yourself and to strive to overcome those challenges that beset you currently and to be more than you are.

That is. So incredible that you even desire that and that desire can work in you to become a motivation and the actions that will get you there. So thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you next time.

There is so much speculation in our culture around truth, especially the mantra "Your Truth, My Truth." For women like you and me who are actively pursuing the 7 Laws of Life Mission, the desire to understand and live according to truth is tremendous.

But what is truth?!

In this episode I share with you Chapter 2: What is Truth? from my new book How Truth Makes You Free! Join me as we explore the ancient and timeless definition of truth, that still has the power to transform our lives!

If you haven't already, go get chapters 1 and 2 of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World for FREE: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/!

Transcript:

 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey er, the author of The Mission Driven Life, and the founder of the Mission Driven Mom. I am so grateful to have you join me today. We're gonna do something really special. I've been working on my next book, how Truth Makes You Free, and for those of you that have been here for very long.

Especially, and I just wanna do a little shout out. If you're brand new to this podcast, you might want to go back and go through some of those first podcasts that will just introduce you to everything that we do here. Keep listening, but then you might wanna go back and listen to the some of those early podcasts.

But in the meantime, today, one of the things I introduce early on in the Mission-Driven Life book is the concept of the natural law and of truth that's immutable. And why that's so important and how the seven laws are built on this framework of the natural law and why principles matter so much. In this new book, I talk about how truth makes us free and why it really matters to have this lens through which to view the world.

It's the healthiest lens, it's the most real lens, and being aligned with it helps you to see everything differently. So. I've been working through this, I about, through chapter five that I, I think I like the construction of how it's gonna work, so don't quote me on what I share today, but I think I'm gonna read you most or all of chapter two.

This is the chapter called What Is Truth, the first chapter you would've been introduced to all of these kinds of things, and it's especially been on my mind because the women in the academy, especially in level two, have been talking about this quite a bit the last couple weeks. And talking about, you know, how do we define truth and what's the natural law and how does that coincide with truth?

Definitions really, really matter. For the purposes of our podcast today, we are defining truth, the way we define truth at the mission-driven mom, and that is the natural law, the law of human nature, and its governing first principles and principles and how we can discover those and be set free through living according to true laws to the truth.

That's always true no matter what, and I give some, I'm, I'm talking about truth in the natural law differently than I really ever have. In this book, and that's why I wanna share it with you today. And if you have thoughts or feedback or questions from this podcast, please let us know. You know, you can shout, you can go to the website and, and ask questions, send us your questions or on socials.

But before we get into the content and what I've got for you from chapter two of the book, uh, I would love it if you would give a review to this podcast. It helps others know that. The material here is worth listening to, that you value it, that you think it might help them. And if you leave a review and share it out, then it's the best way for us to share this message of how this natural law has such a huge impact on our lives, how it makes us free, and how we can, how it's a pathway through the seven laws of life mission.

That we, that we take you through in the academy, but which my other book, the Mission-Driven Life talks about. So all of that being said, I'm gonna dive into this and I'm gonna start with a couple. Analogies, I guess you would call them. And hopefully this gets your mind better around what this thing is and why it matters so much and why it's underneath everything.

It's even, that's why the second chapter of the Mission-Driven Life book touches on the natural law, because it's the foundation of everything. It's the lens through which we wanna see the world. So I'm gonna dive in this chapter is what Is truth? And of course quote from Jesus And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

The elephant. Six men were born blind in India all their lives. They were told stories about the many amazing things elephants can do from trampling down forest to carrying a princess on their back. Over time, each of these men had developed his own theory about the true nature of elephants. Some believed that they were fearsome.

Others said they must be strong. One even thought they weren't real. One day, these six men were taken to meet a real e elephant in person. Each man stepped forward and reached out to touch the huge animal. An elephant is smooth and solid like a wall. The first one declared. It must be very powerful. The second blind man put his hand on the elephant's limber trunk.

An elephant is like a giant snake. He announced the third, felt the elephant's pointed. Tusk. I was right. He decided this creature is as sharp and deadly as a spear after feeling one of the elephant's four legs. The fourth one said. What we have here is an extremely large cow. The fifth blind man felt the elephant's giant ear.

I believe an elephant is like a huge fan or maybe a magic carpet that can fly over mountains and treetops. He said, as the last blind man gave a tug on the elephant's course tail, his doubts were confirmed. Why? This is nothing more than a piece of old rope. I knew there were no such thing as elephants.

They're just tricking us. He scoffed. The men then began arguing about the true nature of an elephant. Was it a wall, a snake, a spear, a cow, or something else? Entirely? Just then the Raja interrupted their argument and asked, how can each of you be so certain that you are right? Remember, you each only touched one part of the elephant, and you must put all the parts together to know the truth.

This parable is quite helpful in understanding the nature of the kind of truth that can make us free As we consider the different elephants of the different elements of the parable, we begin to see our own narrow perspective, and its part in the big picture of truth I. First, consider the individual blind men.

Each had a lifetime of being told many things about elephants. Each went into his experience of meeting and touching the elephant with his own ideas and presumptions about them. When each touched the elephant for himself, he quote, verified the truth he felt he already had. And when he did this, the conclusions he drew were not wrong.

He had gathered information from others. For many years, and then he had briefly tested what he knew and found it to be true. He had, as we would say in our modern day, his own quote, lived experience from which he embraced, quote his truth. This truth felt very real to him. So when he forcefully shared and defended what he knew, he was not only telling the truth, he was right.

Every one of them was honest. Every one of them was correct. Elephants are like walls and fans and SP and spears, but that's not all elephants are. They are so much more, which is why even though each blind man had some truth as he saw it, none of them had the truth. This is because the truth about elephants is all the things that collective humanity currently knows about what elephants are and what they can do, and all the things yet to be discovered about them.

Although that level of truth may seem daunting, it is also exhilarating. It's a call to the adventure of analysis, testing, and collaboration, to uncovering new ideas and finding out how they can enlighten and aid us. It is the human opportunity of acquiring more knowledge about the nature of the truth and reality and harnessing it to bless ourselves and others.

That is why it's easy for us to see how small-minded and shortsighted these blind men were. Their assumptions and conclusions seem so silly. With our eyesight intact, we gaze at the majestic elephant and marvel. We also know that with their abilities so limited by their lack of sight in an experience, the blind men just don't see the whole truth.

Yet, understanding the parable of the blind men and the elephant can give us some very important insights about our own relationship to truth and how we communicate that with others. Watching these blind men feel so convicted in their estimation of what an elephant is, speaks to, why quote your truth feels so true to you.

It's the culmination of all you've learned and experienced. Of course you think you're right. Of course you're telling the truth and when you share what you believe to be true and right, and I don't believe you, it is because what I've learned and experienced seems to contradict what you're claiming. In this way, we can both be right while we're both also wrong, even though it can be hard to admit that perhaps we're not actually seeing the quote whole elephant.

It is this dynamic component of truth. The fact that it has similar parts that I see and know, but also has a bigger picture that I sometimes don't comprehend that makes it feel so slippery and confusing. Unfortunately, some in our modern culture have used our misunderstandings about truth to overcomplicate it, to try to change the very nature of it, or even to claim that there is no universal objective truth.

Just like the blind man who denied the existence of the elephant altogether. At the map, let's look at another analogy of the nature of truth and how we interact with it to see if we can gain even more clarity about truth. Back in the nineties, my husband and I went on a road trip. We began the journey with a big map of the several states we would be driving through.

Along the way, we wanted to sightsee in different cities. The large map we had started out with didn't contain all the specific streets and lights and turns of every city we planned to stop in. So as soon as we arrived in any new city, we'd stop at the first gas station, fill up the car, and buy a local map.

I have so many fun memories of me in the passenger seat with a large map spread out on the dashboard of some city we had never visited, trying to give my husband directions to the next tourist spot we wanted to see because we were first time visitors, even though our map nearly perfectly reflected the area we wanted to navigate our inexperience with this map, and this city inevitably led to wrong turns, missed exits, and lots of turning around.

We tried to make a game of it and laugh our way through, but as you can imagine, there were definitely frustrations and missed opportunities simply because of our unfamiliarity with the new territory and its map. The way we navigate our lives is much like using a map, except in our own lives we are the mapmakers.

As then Scott Peck explained. We are not born with maps. We have to make them, and the making requires effort. Stephen Covey taught. Each of us has many, many maps in our head. We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. On my roadmap with my husband, on my road trip with my husband, our success in getting from where we were to where we wanted to go depended on two factors, the accuracy of the map.

My accuracy and following it. Mental maps are like this too. From childhood. We've been building maps or constructions of reality and our place in it. We need them to navigate our lives. We are wholly dependent on them, but what if they're wrong? As Stephen Covey also said, quote, we seldom question their accuracy.

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be, unquote. So what if the map I've been creating in my head all my life, where I think I know exactly who I am, or exactly who my sister is, or exactly how to succeed in business? Or exactly what to do when someone hurts me.

Turns out not to be a fair or honest or correct assessment of real people or businesses or relationships. How would I know? I know because of pain. Pain is the great communicator. It is a gift. It triggers to me that something has gone wrong with my map and it needs revising. I have two choices in that moment.

Ignore the pain and hope it goes away, or listen to it and see what it can teach me about how I'm perceiving reality wrongly. At any moment, I can choose to get out my map and be open to reworking it to more accurately reflect the territory of life like pec taught quote. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be.

And if our maps are to be accurate, we have to continually revise them. He goes on to explain that many people have necessity generate maps throughout adolescence, but in adulthood they rarely, if ever significantly improve their mental maps. Others get stuck in middle age when things didn't go according to plan.

Rather than looking inward and realigning with what's real and true, they throw their heads in the air and emotionally give up. What then do mental maps have to do with the truth? In the same way that we are all, in some sense, the blind men trying to see the elephant clearly. We are also the map makers trying to draw our own maps as nearly as we can to the actual territory, just as there is the reality of the elephant.

There is the reality of the city streets and lights, neither of which we can change, but both of which we can learn to see and interact with properly. Scott Peck said it best, quote, the third technique of dealing with the pain of problem solving, which must continually be employed. If our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth or truth is reality.

The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world, the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions unquote. Now, of course, we're going to get this wrong. We'll never know all there is to know about EL elephants, and we'll never get our mental map perfectly accurate.

What we can do though is have the humility to admit that we don't get to make it up for ourselves. That there is a reality outside of you and me, that if we wanna thrive in life, we must come to understand and comply with more closely. We can behave just as an airline pilot does. It is estimated that pilots are off course 90% of the time due to weather, air occurrence, or other factors that require constant small course corrections to stay on track.

This is very much like our journey to become acquainted with and live within the truth. It is a very real way. In a very real way, we are discovering more about the elephant or correcting or adding to our map. We are gaining insight into the nature of reality and striving to align ourselves with new discoveries.

Luckily, much of the territory has already been clearly mapped out by others. It now becomes our job to test and accept the veracity of their work using the tools and skills. I'll go over later and get busy following it. As with a plane or boat or car, getting on the right road as quickly as possible and following the shortest route is always the best shortcut to our desired destination.

The resolution of painful problems and increased personal growth, the law. The analogies of the elephant in the map to the nature of truth are helpful perspectives. They remind us that the truth is much bigger than our own individual experience or knowledge, but that it has a vital relationship to our own daily living.

These metaphors make sense of the sometimes confusing situations where many people are being truthful and can even be right while they are also wrong, because their understanding of truth is limited and different from others. Most importantly, these constructions show us that truth is still very real and very much en force in the world and in our personal lives.

Whether we see and understand and honor it or not, it is something we can spend a lifetime pursuing. Anxiously looking for ways to see more of the elephant or correct our map. It is by doing this, that we can continually engage in our own personal growth. Because truth is so much larger than our present knowledge and understanding, it holds the information we need to correct our perceptions, decisions, and behaviors in order to overcome the persistent problems we face.

The question then remains if the truth is like an elephant and like a map, that we are trying to become acquainted with an honor, what exactly is the truth? I told you that there is a framework for properly understanding the truth, which will seem new, but is actually very old. I was introduced to it 25 years ago, and my life has never been the same.

By the time I learned about it, I'd been through a 12 year public school education and spent three years at university, lived abroad, had married and had three children. I. Through a series of providential events, I was guided to a little college where I took extension courses simply for my own enrichment.

While there, I was introduced to the greatest works in Western history, literature, philosophy, and science. I've studied these books ever since through my classical liberal arts bachelor's and master's degrees, and up to today, while still in my undergraduate work, I was assigned John Locke's second essay on civil government.

Written in 1689. In this essay, locks Locke invites the reader to imagine a time in history when there are no governments of any kind, no societies, no social structure whatsoever. He called this a quote, state of nature. Then he asked some questions I had never thought of before, which made me start thinking very differently about myself and the world.

He brought up questions like, in the state of nature, what would the laws be? How would people know how to behave, what would be right or wrong? Think about that for a minute. If you stripped away all the social rules and norms and expectations, if there were no government to enforce anything, if you were left entirely on your own to determine your behavior without reference to any other human being, how would you act?

Lot gave an answer I had never heard, but I have since Learned was not new to him at all, but has been discussed since the beginning of human history. He said this quote. Consider what a state all mankind are naturally in. This is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or permission, or depending upon the will of any other person.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and which teaches all mankind who will consult it. That all being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty or possessions. The law of nature hath brought men to know that it is no less their duty to love others than themselves.

There's a lot here, so let's break it down for a minute. The first thing that struck me when I read Lock was this brand new idea to me that before society and before government, there's some kind of law that human beings didn't create, but which we somehow know and feel obliged to obey. Law takes for granted that this is universally understood and is the foundation for human thriving individually and societally.

CS Lewis and many, many others agree with him in his seminal work, mere Christianity. Lewis begins by demonstrating how we all intuitively know this law. He describes how it is active in our daily interactions all the time, and we not only know it and believe it and defer to it often, we fully expect other people to know it, believe it, and behave accordingly.

He explains, quote, everyone has heard people quarreling. People say things like this. How do you like it if anyone did the same to you? That's my seat. I was there first. Come on, you promised. Quar means trying to show that the other person is in the wrong and there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what right and wrong are unquote Lysander.

Spooner in natural law or the Science of Justice demonstrated that even small children know this law. Quote, children learn. Or no, the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age. Thus, they very early understand that one child must not without just cause strike or otherwise hurt another, that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another.

That one child must not either by force deceit or stealth obtain possession of anything that belongs to another. That if one child commits any of these wrongs against another, it is not only the right of the injured child to resist and if need be punished the wrongdoer and compel him to make reparation, but that it is also the right and the moral duty of all other children and all other persons to assist the injured party in defending his rights.

And redressing his wrongs. These are the fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man. Their childish plays even could not be carried on without a constant regard to them, and it is equally I impossible for persons of any age to live together in peace on any other conditions, unquote.

Think about it. You're a natural lost, whether you realized it before now or not, you expect people, no matter their background, culture, religion, or race, to be honest, to not touch your stuff, to honor their parents, and to do or not do a whole myriad of things. Of course, you would have no right to expect people to know and do or not do these behaviors if knowing.

Them if knowing them were dependent on society to teach them or government to enforce them. This is the argument Lewis makes when he discusses World War ii quote, what was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless right is a real thing, but the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced if they had had no notion of what we mean by right then.

Though we might have still had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair. Here's what we know so far. There is some kind of universal standard for how human beings ought to behave, which we hold each other to, but which we also feel we ought to live up to ourselves.

In Lewis's words, we feel it pressing on us. What are we to do about this? According to Mortimer Adler quote, the first principle of the natural law is to seek the good, which brings us back to Locke's second point quote. Natural law teaches all mankind who consulted that all being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life.

Health, liberty, or possessions, the law of nature have brought men to know that it is no less their duty to love others than themselves, unquote. Locke is telling us that not only does this natural law exist and we actually do understand it well and defer to it often, it will also teach us the proper way to understand human interaction and how to live well.

In other words, as Adler stated, it enables us to know and seek the good Locke argues that natural law will demonstrate when we listen closely to it that all people are equal and independent, that because of this we shouldn't harm each other in any way. Not only should we restrain ourselves from hurtful behavior, he explains, but we should extend goodwill to all humankind by loving ourselves and others.

When I first read this section from Locke, I was intrigued. I. I thought Jesus was the first one to teach that we ought to love others as we love ourselves, and that Locke was probably just letting his religious ideas color his philosophical writings. But the more I studied the natural law, the more I found this idea in many sacred books, ancient writings and cultures, I realized that Locke was not making a religious argument at all.

This was not a spiritual mandate, but a component of the natural law. This really changed my perspective on what is genuinely religious and what is somehow intuitively human. All my life, I'd been told that these kinds of ideas, ideas, like loving your neighbor were what religious people believed in practiced.

But I've come to see that, like Locke was saying, these ideas are bigger than even religious lines or practices. Throughout this book, so far, I've been promising you that you can know the truth and the truth can make you free. What do I mean by the truth then? I mean, the natural law. The natural law is the truth that's bigger than governments, than history, than society, than religion, than culture.

It is the link that's common to all humankind. It is what we intuitively know. It is the standard we already hold ourselves to other ourselves and others to. It is the law which human beings feel pressing on them, but which they can choose to obey or disobey. Later on, we'll talk about how we know this natural law and how we can understand and live more in harmony with it.

For now, I just wanna ensure that you see that the natural law is the whole elephant, and it is the city map. Once we've been turned onto its reality, we see it working all around us. Just as in the examples Lewis and Spooner gave of average people interacting in everyday situations. When we look inside, we know that there are certain things we feel we ought to do and things we feel we shouldn't do.

This oddness in our nature exists precisely because there is a real right and wrong that exists independent of you and I and society. We know there is a natural law because we know we ought to seek the good, and this means there is a good which we need to gain clarity about and strive to live. In fact, William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England in seven, published in 1775, which was the most influential law book in the United States for over 100 years, explained that it is because of this natural law that we even make human laws at all.

He believed like lock taught the natural law came first. Then we formed societies and tried to write our preexisting ideas of right and wrong into human laws that we could enforce. Blackstone elaborated, quote, this law of nature being coval, meaning of the same age and origin with mankind and dictated by God himself is of course superior in obligation to any other.

It is binding over all the glow. Countries and at all times, no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this and of such a and such of them as are valid, derive all their force and all their authority from this original. This means that there is something inside us that helps us judge whether or not a manmade law is good and whether or not we should obey it.

We'll talk later about how bad laws can become society wide. As many authors have explained it throughout history, it is written on our hearts by the very finger of God. For this reason, depending on how closely a manmade law conforms to the natural law, it is more or less in force in our minds. For example, we know that murder is wrong.

We don't know this because our government said it was wrong. Our government made it against our laws because we already know it is wrong. This is the case with many laws that need almost no persuasion or compulsion to enforce with the general population because we all want them to be laws and we all know them to be right, freedom of speech theft, et cetera.

In fact, there are some things that even though we do not encourage government to enforce them, we still know are wrong, like adultery and lying, et cetera. This matters because as we'll see later, you make little laws for yourself and those you lead all the time. The better you understand the natural law and how it works, the more easily it will be to comply to it yourself and then help others to comply as well.

The more you see the world through this lens, the more expansive your vision becomes of what's possible for you and others in your life. This leads to the ability to overcome your personal challenges and live more at peace with yourself than others. Like Li Sanders, Spooner taught quote, the natural law is the science of peace and the only science of peace, since it is the science which alone can tell us on which con what on what conditions.

Mankind can live in peace with each other as we proceed. I hope you will begin to see this promise is truly achievable. The natural law framework is liberating and thrilling, but don't just take my word for it. And the authors I've quoted so far, here are a few other men and women throughout history that believed in and taught about the natural law framework.

Safa appeal to the universal law and insist on its greater equity and justice. Aristotle urge that the principles of equity are permanent and changeless, and that the universal law does not change either. For it is the law of nature, or as written laws often do change. Zeno, all things are ordered by providence and that the end of life was to live in accordance with this order.

Lucious, he showed the highest good toward which all were aiming showed the way a straight and narrow path, Cicero. True law is right reason in accordance with nature. It is applied universally and is unchanging and everlasting. Marcus Aurelius, what is thy art to be good. And how is this accomplished?

Well, except by general principles, some about the nature of the universe and others about the proper constitution of man St. Augustine. The natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation in the eternal law. St. Thomas Aquinas. Every human law has just so much of the nature of law as it is derived from the law of nature.

George Wilhelm, Friedrich Hagel. The laws of nature are simply what they are and are valid as they are. Emmanuel Kant innate, right? Is that right, which belongs to everyone by nature, independent of all juridical acts of experience. Thomas Hobbes. The laws of nature are qualities that dispose meant to peace and to obedience.

Thomas Reed, the natural law is written by the very finger of God on the hearts of men. Alexander Hamilton, good and wise men in all ages have supposed that the deity has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind prior to any human institution whatsoever.

Abigail Adams to be good, to be good and do good is the whole duty of man Frederick Basted. Each of us certainly gets from nature, from God, the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. Charlotte Mason. My endeavor in this and the following volumes of the series will be to sketch out roughly a method of education, which as resting upon a basis of natural law, may look without presumption to inherit the divine blessing.

Earl Nightingale. The prisons and the streets where the lonely walk are filled with people who try to make new laws just for themselves. We may avoid the laws of man, but there are greater laws that cannot be broken. All of these witnesses and there are thousands more are powerful evidence of the reality of the natural law.

As I studied, it was amazing to see how universally men and women of different times, cultures and religious traditions believed in and discussed the natural law. Of course, my husband and I had seen firsthand its transformative power in our own lives. I had spent years teaching what I knew to others, and it was empowering them to overcome their problems as well.

We had found the truth. And it was making us free. There was just one problem. I was beginning to feel a strong mandate, a call to share this message with as many people as possible. It became one of the greatest desires of my life to help others to fill the clarity and hope that are generated from seeing the world through this framework.

I want everyone to know that they come from a rich tradition, which can lift and enable them to be more than they are, and to overcome life's challenges in new ways. By this time, I had spent over 20 years studying the evidence of natural law from the ancient philosophers, from the Christian theologians, from the Scottish enlightenment thinkers, from the American founders.

I had read all about the decline of the natural law framework with the disillusion of liberal education in the United States from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, and I knew about the attempts of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler to restored at the University of Chicago as they did battle with John Dewey and the progressives.

There was a lot I could explain to people about the history and loss of this framework, and because of my own personal experiences with it and the impact this application was having on me and my students, I couldn't stop thinking about what could happen in the world if more of us were thinking, speaking and living within the truth of the natural law.

I also knew though that there are plenty of high level thinkers, writers, philosophers, politicians, attorneys and professors in our modern day who either disbelieve the concept of the natural law and actually speak against it, or are largely or entirely ignorant of it all together. If I was going to come, if I was going to come out more openly, vocally, and enthusiastically in favor of the natural law, teaching people that it is not only real, not only is it at the objective truth we are missing or ignoring, but it has the power to liberate us in small and big ways.

I was going to have to prove it. In order to do this, I needed one more vital piece of evidence. Up to this point, virtually all of my research had produced evidence for natural law within the Western tradition. Although these evidences were abundant, I needed to be able to show definitively that this is not just a Western phenomenon or construction, that it is truly the nature of reality because people everywhere have felt its veracity, have taught its merits, and have built their cultures on its foundation.

I had studied worldviews and I had read at least part of the religious writings of the major world traditions. I found threads there that I felt aligned with the natural law framework, but I was an outsider looking in. I had also studied and taught what CS Lewis had written about the natural law and other cultures.

I. CS Lewis knew as I did that the denial of natural law rested on the claim that different societies and history have had dramatically different moral systems and believed radically different things. Our classrooms are full of textbooks, professing this exact idea to this claim. Lewis declared simply that this is not true.

He went on to explain that when you compare the moral teaching of ancient cultures, for example, the Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Chinese, Greek, and Roman peoples quote, what will really strike you will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Of course, being one of the best read men of the 20th century.

He went through thousands of books and spent a good amount of time in the encyclopedia of religion and ethics trying to get to the bottom of this issue. He then wrote the Abolition of Man and provided an extensive appendix proving the harmony of worldwide understanding of the natural law throughout time.

This is really compelling evidence to be sure, and I absolutely believe Lewis Andrus his research I. I wanted more than one voice to prove such a critical element of the natural law as the claim that it is universal across cultures, that it is the proper method for understanding reality and truth for all people in all places all the time.

And I wanted a voice from outside the Western worldview. Then I found the Natural Law Institute, the Natural Law Institute. In 1942, Dean Roscoe pound of Harvard Law School gave a speech at Notre Dame titled The Revival of Natural Law. As a Catholic school, Notre Dame felt the mandate for perpetuating the rich American natural law tradition in all its colleges, but especially in its law school.

Inspired by pound's lecture. The university instituted a great books program of reading in its law school, reintroducing its students to a true liberal arts approach to learning the dominant educational approach in the United States since its inception, which in the previous 50 years or so had been quickly losing ground.

The level to which their students were wholly acquainted with the natural law soon became apparent, but the discussions were lively and stimulating. A spark was lit as Edward F. Barrett explained quote, there was an increasing awareness that the ancient teaching has a living perce to present day pro problems.

Public symposiums were instituted where lawyers and judges were invited to join law students in an intensive examination of the meaning of the natural law doctrine and its specific applications. By 1947, the faculty, students, and alumni were anxious to drive deeper into the whole law school curriculum, the natural law doctrine unquote.

From this desire, the Natural Law Institute was born, its first session was convened on December 12th to 13th, 1947, funded by the Alumni Club with over 600 judges, lawyers, and law students from all over the United States in attendance at this event. Archbishop O'Hara most pointedly expressed the long range objective of the institute.

Someone must challenge the false philosophies that have taken hold of our law schools and our courts. If we let it go longer, there will be no liberty to defend. They began this project at Earnest and for the next five years, they met annually in person studying and discussing great works in the natural law tradition, and hearing lectures of world renowned leaders and scholars on the various aspects and applications of the natural law.

In summarizing the ideas and conclusions from that first session, which perfectly aligned with my own research and experience, Barrett stated the following, the natural law is not an ideal. It is a reality. This institute will encourage the widest search for universal standards relevant to the solution of contemporary problems.

The editors of the institute are interested in exploring with all the resources of scholarship and modern science. The full extent of the contribution natural law can make to the solution of today's problems. We believe natural law can be made to serve practical ends. The doctrines and beliefs of the ancient civilizations here represented a continuity and adherence and a devotion to a code of life that is fixed and permanent and stable for, to us all the for to us, all the natural law belongs.

It is our birthright as children of God is that it is our inheritance as Americans or upon the republic. Upon it, the Republic was founded. You can imagine my excitement when I found this institute. Not only was the conference held in person for five years all the way through the 1950s and sixties, the institute continued to collaborate and publish scholarly articles about the nature and application of the natural law.

Most interesting of all for me though. Was the subject matter of the fifth in-person gathering, restating what I've been discussing here. The editor of that year's conference explained that those who promote the natural law philosophy claim that it is written on the hearts of mankind and is therefore not a specifically western or Christian idea, but the possession of all men for all time and everywhere, whether Jew or gentile, black or white, yellow, red, or brown, unquote.

Wanting to test this claim and prove its veracity, the exact proof I had been seeking for years. The institute extended quote, complete academic freedom to its lecturers subjecting the grandeur of the concept of the universality of the natural law to the candid criticism of scholarship. For this purpose, five non-Christian scholars of international reputation were chosen who then dug deep into their own culture, religion, and historical traditions to explore what elements of natural law they could find there, if any.

This was precisely what I had been looking for. This would I hoped be the evidence that demonstrated definitively that the natural law is truly objective and universal, making it the most reliable source of truth available to all of us. The conclusions of the conference were unanimous. The natural law is objective, real, and universal in every case.

The presenters cited evidence from their culture, their history, and their greatest writings and traditions to affirm that there had always been, and currently was a law of nature that governs human behavior. Not only that. The examples and as of aspects of the natural law and principles within it were similar and in some cases identical.

Here are some quotes from the various presenters to show the uniformity of their ideas. The Jewish tradition, rabbi Solomon Freeh, DD President, central Conference of American Rabbis, author, and other credentials. The scattered Jewish communities maintained law and order because the law was accepted as common to them from nature and nature's God.

The sources of true social order are always the same in a sprawling, modern metropolis as in a tiny medieval ghetto During these centuries, the divine natural law meant order and meant culture to the extent that it meant order it immense self-control, control through conscience. Muslim tradition, Khalifa Abdul Hakeem, PhD Director, Institute of Islamic culture, author of Islamic Ideology and other works.

It is one of the most essential elements in the analysis of the concept of natural law, that it is universal and objective is rooted in the nature of things and in the nature of humanity. Religion is essentially a comprehension of the natural law and living in obedience to that law for only thereby shall man be true to himself, and only by being true to himself shall he be true to his God.

And just to the rest of his creatures and his creation. The Koran laid down the principle that right religion is nothing but natural law, rightly understood. Hindu tradition, Ms. Sunder, educational Liaison Officer, embassy of India, office of High, commissioner for India, author and other credentials. Dharma is the Hindu ideal of life.

Call duty by some, by others, righteousness, by still others. The performance of virtues in this sym symposium, Dharma may be called no better than natural law. It is the God given. God-given law of one's own being, and no transgression from dharma or natural law is permissible without serious consequences to the transgressor.

Dharma is right action. It is conformity with the truth of things. Natural law, according to the Hindu, is identical in all faiths and is common to all mankind, unquote. Buddhist tradition, dissects T Suzuki, professor of Japanese culture, professor of Buddhist, philosophy, author, and other credentials. Quote, whatever we may argue about politics or economics.

The moral laws being more fundamental. We cannot disregard them and live at peace with our neighbors. If we want to live at all, we have to observe them. By all means, we follow the laws called by Buddhist, the karmic relationships. One such law is that good deeds increase happiness. Cosmic, as well as individual offenders punish themselves.

A deed, good or bad, brings its own results. Chinese tradition who she author of, history of Chinese philosophy and other works, ambassador of China, president National Peking University, and other credentials, Wong Yang ing. From four who lived 1472 to 1528, taught that there is in every man the innate and intuitive knowledge, which is the moral conscience of man, which knows right to be right and wrong, to be wrong.

The natural law is what every man's innate and intuitive moral conscience perceived to be. To be the truth and the law, which it is his duty to extend and apply to all things in all events. Moti who lived four 70 to 3 91 BC repeatedly said, the will of God is to love all the people in the world without distinction and to benefit all the people in the world.

Without distinction, how do I know what the will of God is? How do I know that the will of God is to love all people without distinction? Because God fathers all people without distinction and feeds all people without distinction. Universal truth and writer are agreeable to our mind. Just as tasty meals are pleasing to our taste.

For those who work in accordance with the universal laws of nature, there is nothing they cannot accomplish. That's Han Fe 2 33 BC unquote. At the end of the conference, international columnist, author and lecturer, George e Slosky, summarized it this way, quote, we all come to this, that. We, that there is a divine intelligence, that there is a divine law, that there is a rhythm in life that cannot be broken.

That this rhythm, that that perfection of form and manner and substance in nature, if you please come somehow, perhaps far beyond our understanding from the creator who gave us not only the sun and the stars in the moon, but also a law of life that is good and that in that goodness is the.

Greatness of hope and contentment and security for all human beings, of all faiths, of all creeds, of all nations. And in that spirit, in that spirit of goodness, which can be called natural law, we have demonstrated even in our differences that we are all brothers under the fatherhood of God. I hope I have not belabored the point, but it Oh, unquote.

I hope that I have not belabored the point, but it is vital that you be convinced that not only is the natural law not my idea, not only is it not a new idea, and not only is it not a Western idea, it is true at all times in all cultures in the past, in the present and in the future. It is the way of seeing the world and of understanding truth in the correct way, the way that best aligns with reality.

As such, it is the best map we can pattern our own mental maps after, and it is the whole elephant. I. Happily, I've been able to teach this framework of the natural law to tens of thousands of people, and one result I have seen time and again, is that when people come to this, see this framework clearly and embrace it as a way of approaching their lives and problems, they truly begin to blossom.

They repeatedly report that they thinking clears up. They can see through the confusion in their personal lives and the culture, and they no longer feel oppressed and overwhelmed by their challenges. They know there are answers, and as they practice the skills you'll learn in this book, they gain the confidence that they can find and apply those answers.

Listen to how a few women answered these questions. What difference has the natural law framework of seeing the world made in your life? How are you different? How are your circumstances different? Lindsay H. This is the key to a happy life, but it doesn't sound appealing at first. It is much more comfortable to blame others, but that is a recipe for being stuck.

I feel more confident in explaining why I believe something is right or wrong. It has helped me to clarify my values and beliefs. I feel happier and less blown around by winds of popular opinion. Natasha Stringham, life changing. I no longer have to wonder what is true versus false. I can do the work and figure out for myself what is truth.

It's absolutely liberating and exciting. I'm different because whenever I read any book, article, or any piece of information, I know how to discern the truth of the information. I'm different because I'm no longer confused about all the ideas and information out there. I know how to detect the truth, and it's so freeing.

Sarah Horlocker. I am more courageous. I feel like a warrior in the world on the side of light that is destined to win. I can identify laws, lies, propaganda, and misinformation, and it doesn't confuse control or scare me as it used to. Karen Bates. I teach my children with more purpose. I read, watch, observe, and listen, more receptively seeking truth and all around me.

I have created a more healthy self, a more loving home, and a nonprofit that supports others in gaining the truth that will set them free, unquote. Later we'll talk about how understanding and living in harmony with the natural law not only helps us overcome our persistent problems, it produces the brutal beautiful fruits of increased faith, happiness, and personal virtue.

For now, with our newfound knowledge about the nature of reality and truth, let's look closer at how the natural law works and how its truths actually make us free. That's the end of chapter two, so I hope you enjoyed that. Uh, it was a little long, but hopefully you have a better understanding of why I'm so passionate about this.

All of the mountains of evidence that are all around us in history and in our, in our world, in our culture, and in our personal lives, and deep down inside of our hearts as well. I hope that if this information was helpful and valuable to you, you'll pass it along to someone who you think might benefit from it.

In the meantime, thank you so much for joining the podcast. If you liked this chapter, I have a, a free offer for you in the description, or if you go to the mission-driven mom.com, I'd love to give you the first free cha, the first two chapters of my other book, the Mission-Driven Life for Free. So. Click on that link, or go to the mission driven mom.com and scroll down to the bottom and claim your free chapters.

You can have those first two chapters of that book for free and get a sense of why we're doing what we're doing here at the Mission Driven Mom. Why the Natural Law matters so much, why those Seven Laws of Life Mission. Layer on top of this natural law and create the roadmap for us to follow, to be more of who we could be and to begin reaching our potential to discover and fulfill our own unique contribution to the world.

Thank you so much for joining me, and I'll see you next time.

Get another FREE tool for conquering your worries here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/worry-opt-in-for-socials

Join Audrey as she discusses the worries and anxieties we all experience. She demonstrates unhealthy ways we try to cope with our worries that actually make us more anxious! She goes into the short and long term negative consequences to our lives and our health when we allow ourselves to engage in chronic worry. Then she outlines 3 PRINCIPLES you can apply right now in order to arrest your worries in the moment and engage in good solution-focused thinking instead of worrying. With inspiring stories she shares about herself and Catherine Marshall, you'll see these principles in action and know how to better utilize them in your own life. She even ends with another FREE tool you can grab by following the link above! 

"Save us from the sin of worrying, lest stomach ulcers be the badge of our lack of faith." Peter Marshall

"I've been through some terrible things, a few of which actually happened." Mark Twain

Transcript:

 Welcome to the Mission-Driven Mom podcast. This podcast is for moms just like you, who want to learn how to glorify God through finding and embracing true principles, discovering and developing your greatest gifts, and using them to serve your family and community. Welcome back to the podcast. I am Audrey Reba, the author of The Mission-Driven Life, and the founder of the Mission-Driven Mom, and I'm super excited to join you today on this podcast where we get to talk about three steps you can take right now to stop worrying and being anxious, how you can move forward in your life with greater confidence and forward momentum.

And not let those worries and all that mom guilt stop you. Like they have stopped me in my tracks so many times. If this podcast is helpful to you, if it's giving you good information that you feel blesses your life we would love it if you would pass it along and if you would give us a review. That helps others who come across our podcast to know that it's a value and that they ought to engage and see what they might be able to learn here.

It. Now we know that we all worry, and I do have a gift I'm gonna give you at the end with another tool for how to stop worrying. There's a lot of them that you can learn and get acquainted with in the academy, but today we get to learn three important ones from Dale Carnegie's book, how To Stop Worrying and Start Living, which I love and I've had in my home library for 20 plus years.

These three steps are going to help you know what you can do right now today to turn those worries around. But I wanna start with giving you some context in a bigger picture about what worry is and what worry is doing to you. Mark Twain said something, I read it years ago and I've never forgotten it. I think it's funny, but also so true.

He said. I've been through a lot of terrible things, a few of which actually happened. So that's kind of how life is for us. We worry, and one of the things that we know about, the more that we worry, the more it turns into anxiety and the more we focus on it, the worse it becomes. One of the aspects of worry that I found online was it is a.

A lack of knowledge of and acceptance of reality, which we will talk about a little bit more later, and I think it's really fascinating to understand that. When you focus on the past, what you don't like about the past, that instigates depression, and when you focus on what you might not like about the future, that instigates worry.

So this is where all of this is coming from, is when we are outside of the realm of the actual facts and we're not focusing on all the information. Instead, we're focusing on things that we don't like. When we do that, when these feelings of worry or anxiety start, sometimes we're not even like consciously aware that this is happening.

You know, our child says something that sparks a, oh, they're gonna do this now because they said that, or we have something slightly wrong with our body, and we start to think, oh, no. This is gonna turn into such and such. I know someone whose life is, they're persistently struggling and crippled with health concerns that never come to fruition.

I know other people that worry. I worry about my kids. I. Like crazy and things that are gonna happen that don't usually happen. It's usually not as bad as I think it's gonna be. Every once in a while it has been. I have had circumstances where I followed these three steps that Dale Carnegie taught me, and it's actually bowed me, well, I'll tell you about one of those in just a minute, but I wanna start with Amy Morin.

She's got a book that I love that we use in the academy and in it she talks about. How we try to keep everything under control. She says, trying to control everything usually starts out as a way to manage anxiety. If you know you have everything under control, what's there to worry about? And rather than focusing on managing your anxiety, you try controlling your environment.

And this goes back to a Stephen Covey quote, and I'll mention this a couple times in this podcast. He said. When we need change in our lives and when we don't like how things are going, we can focus on the one thing over which we have complete control, and that is ourselves. What we do when we experience anxiety so often is we try to control conditions.

We try to control the environment, and we try to control other people. We do this through. Having conversations or putting consequences in place, or getting angry or pouty or going into self pity. We do this a lot of ways, but they're all about control, and we think that if we have more control, then it will abate or somehow lessen the anxiety and worry that we feel, but it actually makes it a lot worse.

Because it's not the truth. We don't actually have control over the things that we're trying to control, and therefore, by trying to control them more, we increase the anxiety more. She has a list of things in here that I wanna go over with you quickly, because sometimes I think we don't realize all the ways in which we're trying to control and all, but two or three of these, I put a check mark next to, for myself.

A little self-evaluation because I do these too. I understand how difficult it is, and frankly, if I didn't have the tools that I teach in the academy, I would be toast. Because it has been, especially the last few years, have been incredibly rough. I'm just telling you, we need these tools and when I tell you these three steps or principles that Carnegie teaches, they might seem counterintuitive to you, but they really do work.

Okay? Here's some of the things you can think about whether or not you're trying to have control. You spend a lot of time and energy trying to prevent anything bad from happening. You invest energy into wishing other people would change. That's. So me, when faced with a tough situation, you can, you think you can single-handedly fix everything you believe.

The outcome of any situation is entirely based on how much effort you choose to exert. You assume that good luck has nothing to do with success. Instead, it's completely up to you to determine your future. Other people sometimes accuse you of being a control freak. You struggle to delegate tasks to other people because you don't think they'll do the job right.

Even when you recognize you aren't able to completely control a situation, you struggle to let it go. You fail. If you fail at something, you believe you're solely responsible. You don't feel comfortable asking for help. You think people who don't reach their goals are completely responsible for their situation.

You struggle with teamwork because you doubt the abilities of other people on the team, and you have difficulty establishing meaningful relationships because you don't trust people. If one or more of those sounds familiar, you probably struggle with control and that struggle with control may be tied to a need to decrease.

Negative emotions and negative thoughts about yourself and others that are producing anxiety and worry and guilt. She says we can't possibly make all of our circumstances and all the people in our lives fit into the way we think things should be. When you learn to let go of the details you can't control, the amount of time and energy you'll be able to devote to the things you can control, will give you the ability to accomplish incredible feats.

So we know what we don't wanna do. We don't want to do that list of things that Amy's given us to try to manage emotions we don't like. What I wanna do for just a minute too is make you aware of how urgent it is that you change things for yourself. There are so many things I can mention here. Damaged and harmed relationships, missed opportunities, chances for growth that we don't see.

There's so many negative consequences. In our lives when we let our thoughts and emotions be hijacked by worry because it is a choice, but there's also very physical ramifications. You are literally doing damage, sometimes permanent damage to your body through allowing yourself to engage in worry that turns into anxiety.

Your nervous system goes into a fight or flight mode. It releases adrenaline and cortisol, which leads to a racing heart and extra. Extra work on your heart and complications. You have muscle tension, which turns into pain in your shoulders and your back, which can also lead to longer term chiropractic issues, and you develop headaches and migraines.

You're more irritable, short tempered. You have a hard time relaxing and in your cognitive abilities. You. It impairs your concentration, your memory, and your decision making. I don't know if you've realized this or ever made the connection, but what's really happening to you when you're worrying is that you're not thinking, I.

One of the things that Dale Carnegie relates is that one of the worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate, like I was just talking about with the cognitive handicaps that we create for ourselves. And he said in one story that he related. That he hadn't been thinking he'd only been worrying.

And I'll talk in just a minute about how those are two very different things. Worrying is not thinking and thinking is not worrying. When we worry and we get negative and we go down a rabbit trail about future. Outcomes we can't control. We are being very problem centered. We are taking facts and information and distorting them outside of the realm of reality and turning them into a story that doesn't necessarily equate with them.

There are many ways to interpret the past, and there are many ways to tell stories about the future that are in line with facts and outcomes that we like, but especially that are in our control. Cardiovascular. It increases our heart rate and our blood pressure and leads to heart palpitations, which put extra strain on your heart and cause it to have complications later in life.

Your digestive system, stress and worry and anxiety cause nausea, diarrhea, stomach pain, loss of appetite, ulcers, and long-term stomach issues. Respiratory is again leading to increased rapid heart rate, which is bad for the heart, but also rapid breathing, which ushers in anxiety attacks. The likelihood of those and the likelihood of problems with asthma, the tendency to worry and anxiety also.

Causes us to have poor sleep habits, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, less enjoyment of life and addiction. There are so many consequences in all areas of our lives for not arresting this habit. And it is just a habit. It's just a cognitive neuro pathway that you have entrenched in your brain and taught yourself to go down a certain track.

There's a train, it's on the track. That's the way that it goes. And it can be the case that you do this so often that you think that it's part of who you are. You think that it can't be changed, or it feels normal and natural, or it feels comfortable, and those are all the things that we don't want.

We don't want negativity, chronic negativity, misinterpretation of facts and poor thinking habits to ruin your health, to damage your relationships, to lower your confidence, and have all of these negative outcomes. This is within your control. That doesn't mean you're not gonna have bad days, it doesn't mean that things aren't gonna come up, but you can use tools.

The tools I'll teach you today, a tool I'm gonna give you at the end. And if. If you're when and if you're ready, tools in the academy that you can put in that toolbox and pull out whenever these things come up for you, which I do constantly, thank goodness for all of those tools I have in my toolbox. Now, the difference between good and bad thinking or proper thinking and worrying thinking is that good thinking deals with causes and effects, and it leads to logical, constructive planning.

There are hard, cold facts out there, some of which we don't like, and good thinking puts them in the proper perspective. It admits them. It lets them in the room. It admits them into the conversation, and then it focuses on using those facts to find solutions within the realm of our locus of control.

Bad thinking throws those out. It takes the facts and it turns them into a negative story, and it leads to tension and nervous breakdown. Worrying is not thinking. What's happening to you in your brain is that you have some sense of that things are out of your control and that feels uncomfortable, and that things might not work out in the way that you hope that they will be, and that's very uncomfortable, and often it's because.

We are worried about a decrease in status. And I know that sounds selfish, but it's really true. We all do have an ego and we have a status that we believe that we're at, and certain conditions and certain choices and certain events could lead to a lowering in our status, and we don't want that. We'll do anything for that not to happen.

And so in order to deal with these possible outcomes. We worry and try to take control or we worry and fall into self pity. The opposite of the taking control of everybody is to detach from the things that you can control. So when we go to one or the other extreme, and these three steps from Carnegie are gonna teach us how to stay centered in the middle.

But the one extreme is I'm gonna try to control everyone and everything, including myself. Like I'm gonna get up earlier and I'm gonna brush my teeth better and I'm gonna. Wear better outfits, and I'm gonna have better apps on my phone for planning my day. I'm gonna do all these things. I'm gonna control everything, or I'm gonna control everybody, or I'm gonna control the circumstances, or I'm gonna let go of everything.

I'm gonna wallow in self pity. I'm gonna make myself into a victim and disempower myself because I don't think I can control everybody, so I'm not gonna control anybody. And even though it might seem like going crazy with all of this, I'm gonna control, control, control myself. That isn't actually the way that we take ownership, and we'll talk about that in just a minute.

So what we wanna do is neither of those, we don't wanna give up all of the things that we could do. We wanna do the things that we could do that might make a difference while letting go of outcomes we can't control, and people and things, the economy and the president, and all of those things that are completely out of our control.

So here's these three steps. I'm gonna go over with you and I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna tell you the three steps, and then I'm gonna tell you a story about Catherine Marshall and a story about myself that will demonstrate these three steps in action, or we can call them principles because they work for us all the time, if we'll do them, if we'll do them properly.

The first one is to sit down and journal about the worst case scenario. Now this isn't gonna be izing. That's not what we're gonna do. And the reason that we wanna actually journal is because when we journal, especially when we hand write things down, we take thoughts. Our thoughts run way faster than our hand can move.

So when we are worrying and anxious, what's often happen happening is that all kinds of ideas and possible outcomes and negative things are just bouncing around in our brain, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. And we think so quickly that we're just moving from one to the other, from one to the other so fast.

And when we stop and think. Yeah, we have to slow that down. And when we take the time to go to a quiet place in journal, we remove all distractions and we slow our thinking down and we force ourselves to put all these random, disconnected ideas and worries and, anxieties and whatever. We have to put them into sentences and into paragraphs.

We have to turn them into. Flesh and bones, we have to work them through. And sometimes just the process of journaling about what is the worst case scenario. We start to realize this has happened to me before. I'm really kind of being ridiculous here. I really am turning this, I'm blowing this way outta proportion.

There's, this isn't nearly as bad as I have been making it out to be. 'cause I just didn't sit down and walk myself through it. The other thing that happens. Is that we don't want to, what I mean by izing it is we don't wanna put down the worst case scenario as something so statistically unrealistic that it just really would never, ever happen in a million years.

Now, maybe you need to look up some statistics and you need to talk to someone else. If you are really absolutely 100% convinced that someone is going to sneak into your house tonight and kill you in your bed. That's not going to happen. That's statistically impossible to have happen, so we're not gonna turn it into things that are just.

Never going to happen. Your child losing their faith or your health declining as you age or you not getting in the commission, you're so hoping will come in. Those are real things that really might happen. Those are worst case scenarios that you might have to deal with. So you're gonna sit down and you're gonna journal, so you're gonna slow down and you're gonna just make the decision to think and not worry.

And you're gonna write down the very worst thing that you could possibly, realistically think that could happen. And then the next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna reconcile yourself to this worst thing that could happen. This is you taking the time to sit in your reality and to recognize that this worst thing might happen because it's clearly out of your control.

If it were genuinely 100%. In your control. Like let's say it was something like, I'm worried that I'm not gonna go for a walk. Well, that's 100% in your control, and there's a whole bunch of ways that you could make that happen. You could just walk out the door and do it, and then you would be on a walk and then it would've happened.

But often we're worried because there are some elements of whatever this thing is that we're longing and aching for, that we do know are probably out of our control. And we have to reconcile ourselves to reality, the reality that we're sitting in right now as we write down the facts and the reality of what could possibly happen.

And then basically after that, everything that is less than that worst case scenario is just good news. And we don't do this from a negative. I'll give you some examples that will help you. See what I mean by this. We don't do this from the standpoint of life is awful, bad things are gonna always happen to me.

Certainly this is gonna happen, but we reconcile ourselves to it, and you would think that that would bring a lot of depression and despair. That's the reason we don't do this. We don't do this because somewhere deep inside of us as all of these. Fears and anxieties roll around in our brains. We are trying to avoid them.

We're like not willing to approach them and actually look at them closely because we're afraid that that would just break us, but it won't break you. It actually will bring you peace. And it sounds strange, but it's actually true. And then the third step that you're gonna take is that you're gonna calmly devote yourself to trying to improve upon that worst case scenario.

So you can prepare yourself for it in a myriad of ways. How do I wanna show up if this worst case scenario happens? What's the person I wanna be? What are the things that I wanna do and stay? What are the actions I wanna take that I can be proud of after the fact? What could I do to lessen the possibility of that happen happening?

Because sometimes, in trying to take control, not only do we increase our anxiety, but sometimes we make the situation worse. So we're going to try to make it better than it might have been. Okay. So I'm gonna tell you two stories. One is by Catherine Marshall, who wrote the book, Christie, which I absolutely adores one of my all time favorite books.

We do it, read it in the Academy. She also wrote a book, I think it's her first book. It's a man called, it's called a Man called Peter was her husband, who was the clergy for the Supreme Court. No, for. The Senate, and he died suddenly of a heart attack when he was pretty young in his forties, and she wrote a book about him.

But in this book, she tells a story of her own struggle. So she was under a lot of stress and pressure. Things were really tough for her, and she developed tuberculosis. It could be a death sentence, but often it was. People recovered from it. And so the doctor said, your case isn't too terrible. We think you'll recover, but you've got to go to bed and not do anything at all until you're better.

And she said how long is that gonna be? And he says, well, probably three or four months, maybe a little bit longer. Shouldn't be too bad. So she cries and she's afraid, and she doesn't want to have tuberculosis. This is a big. Obstacle that she has to face, but she follows doctor's orders. She cries about it and it's hard, but she follows the doctor's orders.

And in March of 1943, she goes to bed with tuberculosis. And in September of 19 44, 18 months later, they do another x-ray of her lungs, and there's been no change. So here she is. She's the mother of a small boy. She has a million responsibilities. She's active, she's young. She was vibrant and healthy before this.

She's been in bed for 18 months with no end in sight. So she says This was a time of great soul searching. And she comes to the conclusion, having thought it through, that the spiritual world was governed by laws. Laws just as immutable as the law of gravity. And if that was true, which of course at the mission driven mom, we absolutely believe that's true.

Then God knows those laws and he could heal her through those laws. And when she read through the gospels, she noticed that Jesus never refused a single person. He didn't say, no, I won't heal you. He healed everybody he came in contact with. And so that being the case, she then asked herself, why then could I not ask this same Jesus to cure me?

I felt however unworthy to ask such a thing. So painfully in an agony of mind and spirit, I began thinking back over my life, recalling all too vividly, all my transgressions and omissions. Through many days. I put down on paper all of the things of which I was ashamed. So she wrote letters to people asking for their forgiveness for things that she had done to them that they might not even have noticed.

And she really just basically cleaned her life up spiritually. Now, this is not something I'm telling you you need to do. Just because you're worrying doesn't mean you need to try and fix all of the pro, all of the things you've ever done wrong. But this is what she felt she needed to do, and it led to something really awesome.

So once she felt spiritually clean, she claimed God's promise of forgiveness and cleansing. And she felt sure that she had done everything that she could and that now God was going to heal her. But then in September she had a new x-ray. So now she's been in bed another year. No, no, no. It wasn't September.

It was a few months later. Sorry. September was when she had the x-ray. Now a few months have gone by. She has another x-ray. No change. So she's pretty discouraged. She said. I was puzzled and hurt. The barometer of my faith fell sharply. It appeared that God had failed me. I was desperate at my ropes end. So it appeared to her that her prayers hadn't been answered.

And a little bit later she was pondering all of this and struggling and wondering what in the world to do. And she picked up a pamphlet. And this pamphlet told the story of a former missionary who was bedridden for eight years with her ailment. And during all those long years, she kept asking God, why?

Why do you have me in bed permanently sick when I could be out there doing mission work for you? But then this woman said. Catherine said about this woman when she really evaluated herself. There was rebellion in her heart and the drums of Mutiny rolled every now and then. The burden of her prayers was that God should make her well in order, that she might return to the mission field, but nothing happened.

Finally worn out with failure of these prayers and a desperate sort of resignation within her. She prayed. All right. Lord, I give in. If I am to be sick for the rest of my life, I bow to thy will. I want thee even more than I want health for. It is. It is for thee to decide. Thus, leaving herself entirely in God's hands.

She began to feel a peace. She had known at no time during her illness. In two weeks, she was out of bed completely. So what Catherine realizes. She says is this, I had never, for one moment stopped rebelling against tuberculosis or against the invalidism. It had induced, I had claimed health as my right, and I had not faced reality.

The right way then must be the only way left that of submission and surrender to the situation as it was. So going back to these steps or principles of facing our worries, when we write down the worst case scenario for both of these women, the worst case scenario was they were going to be in bed for the rest of their lives.

I mean, that is an unbelievable thing to worry and have anxiety about what? None of us wants that. Nobody wants that. And yet in both cases, they couldn't face the reality that that might happen. And so when they finally sat down with themselves and stopped worrying and fighting and rebelling against the circumstances they found themselves in.

And they got serious about facing the reality that there were certain things that were out of their control and that they might be faced with a life of being an invalid. They gave it to God and said, I can't control it. I'm gonna leave it up to you. Catherine did the same thing that this woman had done.

She said, Lord, I've done everything I've known how to do and it hasn't been good enough. I'm desperately weary of the struggle to persuade you to give me what I want. I'm beaten, whipped, and through if you want me to be an invalid for the rest of my life. All right. Here I am. Do anything you like with me and my life.

And if you'll remember in the Mission-Driven Life book, we talk about the three principles of loving God and one of them is to be willing, willing to go along with what his plans are, willing to let him be the plan maker and willing to hand over our hardest. Struggles and trials to him and willing to obey those things.

He says that we must obey. In this instance, it's accepting the reality of the circumstances that we're in and letting go of everything that we can't control and leaving it up to him. And for Catherine, just as it had happened for this other woman, she says, there was no trace of graciousness about the gift of my life and will nothing victorious, nothing expectant.

I had no faith left as I understood faith nevertheless. A strange deep peace settled into my heart. Now, in both of the instances with these women, their complete surrender, their complete acceptance of the worst case scenario led to deep abiding peace, which in turn increased their faith, which created increased hope.

Isn't that fascinating? And then in both instances, they came to the point where they started to feel inspired to do something, to take some kind of action because we know that faith is a principle of action and power. And so we must take action in order to exercise that faith. When we do things, that's faith, that's why God commands us.

He can command us to have faith because faith is action. He can't always, he can't always command us to, feel a certain way, but he can command us to do certain things. So we have faith by doing. And so she figures out what she can do and she slowly heals and mends. It's not instantaneous like this other woman, but it is over a period of several months, she, I think it took about a year for her to be back in health.

I wanna tell you about my own experience in writing down the worst case scenario, accepting reality and engaging in thinking instead of worrying. I'm writing my next book, how Truth Makes You Free. And in writing this book, I told this story in relationship to accepting those things to what it means to be made free.

In terms of accepting the things that we can't control. And so that's how I'm talking about it in, in this book. I'm gonna read to you what I wrote, 'cause I think I said it the very best I can. Although I, like you went through many difficult experiences in my life that were out of my control, like moving every two years when I was growing up.

Like my father's sudden death when I was 16, like falling in the hospital after giving birth and permanently damaging my hip. It. I learned the lesson in this instance, like we're talking about in this podcast of accepting those things. I can't control accepting the worst case scenario. I learned the lesson most poignantly when I was struggling with my husband's addiction.

As I've mentioned before on this podcast and in this book, I knew about his problems almost from the beginning of our relationship, and we both naively thought marriage would fix it. Actually, it became much worse the first several years we were married, year after year. I either ignored it or told myself that he was going to overcome it, yet he didn't, and the pain persisted.

After over a decade of this, I was again blindsided with another betrayal. I yelled and wept and basically went through the course of emotions I always felt when he acted out. But then when I had gained better control over myself, I began to really think This time I didn't rush to find solutions or make amends with Blaine.

This time I sat with myself for several days and pondered the situation I was in. I finally realized that I should stop lying to myself about my reality. I saw that this problem had been around for most of Blaine's life, and I was kidding myself if I continued to believe that things were going to suddenly get better.

In fact, I finally, for the first time, faced the truth that he might remain an addict his whole life. We might never find a solution. Amazingly, I did not say these things to myself out of discouragement or despair. I hadn't given up. I wouldn't stop trying to find answers. What I was finally doing was looking at my life more honestly and looking at my options clearly.

I knew I could divorce my husband, but I also knew that divorce wouldn't change the fact that he was the father of my children, that we would still need to interact constantly, that they would still have an addict for a dad, and that many of the problems I would I was facing would not change because of divorce.

I also knew that Blaine loved me. That he was trying and that I had made a marriage commitment to him for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. I also knew that despite his struggles, he had many admirable qualities that I could respect and focus on. After all the pondering and introspection, I finally came to a moment where I fully accepted my reality and the things I couldn't change.

I chose to keep loving my husband. I chose to stay with him, and I chose to be married to an addict for the rest of my life. Then something happened that I didn't expect. I thought this acceptance might bring discouragement, but just the opposite happened when I completely accepted my circumstances for the first time, I felt completely free for the first time.

Of course, there was still that hope inside of me that we could find the solution to his addiction and he could gain sobriety, but my staying with him did not hinge on his behavior. I was no longer a victim of my marriage. My new found freedom empowered me to stop complaining and start looking for what this solution could teach me.

I focused on the one thing over which I have control me, and when I was honest, I knew that I had a lot of work to do in cleaning up my own character and learning to be a better mother and wife. I knew in order to manage the situation properly, I would have to get a lot better at a lot of things like boundaries and forgiveness and communication.

Happily, I could finally see that the possibilities for my own growth in this trial were endless. And now, years later, I have become more than I would've been without this challenge in my life. So I too on, not this occasion, but especially on this occasion, experienced the power of these three principles of managing the worries and anxieties in our lives.

We can sit down, we can slow down, we can talk our way through it. We can journal through the problem. We can look honestly at the very worst thing that we can see happening. We can come to terms with it, and then we can get busy working on the thing we can control. And that is us trying to devoting ourselves and trying to make the best of a situation that we might not like.

That we might not be able to control or even change. Peter Marshall, Catherine Marshall's husband that she wrote this book about, said a really famous prayer, and in this prayer he said, save us from the sin of worrying lest stomach ulcers be the badge of our lack of faith. So this is really such a powerful three step process.

For doing something about those things that are keeping us up at night, that are causing our stomach ulcers, that are bringing us unhappiness and that are ultimately things we can't control or change because they revolve around the choices of a lot of other people. So I encourage you to use these three principles.

Right now today to start thinking about something that you keep chronically worrying about that is making you unhappy and causing you to be irritable and have stomach pain and all of those things that none of us want. And to get serious about using these three tools or principles or steps that can help you to overcome your worry.

And I wanna give you one more gift. There's another tool that we learn in the academy. That can really help you with your worries and anxieties. I've got a link in the description of this podcast. You can also go to mission driven mom.com, and at the top of the page you'll see if you're ready to conquer the worry and the mom guilt, then opt in for that simple tool.

I'll teach it to you. You can learn it really quickly. It's something you can master in 10 minutes, and you can use it day after day after day, and I promise if you'll utilize it, it really will empower you to take these worries and turn them on their head, see them in a brand new way, and turn your worries into forward momentum that really is a possibility for you because this thing that you're worrying about.

You worry about it because you care about it so deeply, otherwise you wouldn't worry and you care about it because you're a woman of principle and character who has noble values that you hold dear and things aren't going according to plan. And so you are worried. I get it. That's me too. I'm right in that camp with you.

But use these tools and when you're ready, come to the academy and fill up your toolbox with many more tools that we don't have time in this podcast to go over. That will help you with anything that you're worrying anxious about. And I hope again that this podcast has been beneficial for you and that if so, you will pass it along and give us a review to help us grow and reach more like-minded moms who want to be on the mission path with us.

Thank you so much for listening through for joining me today. I hope that you'll come back and share with me all the ways that this tool set is helping you to overcome your worries. I'd love to hear your success stories. I hope you have a wonderful day, and I will see you next time.

“I'm 100% certain that Becky is called to Africa. And I am called to her.” ~Tom Rogers

Meet Becky Rogers, mother of 10, music major, and violin teacher. Although she used to live a typical American family life, through her vigilance in the 7 Laws of Life Mission, she prepared herself and eventually heard the call to become a passionate advocate for African women. She now lives full-time in Ghana. Since arriving three years ago, she and her husband have founded Family Literacy Centers in several African countries and are finishing up the first Family Restoration Center in Ghana.  

This week join Becky Rogers and Audrey Rindlisbacher as they explore Becky's journey. Learn about her childhood, her self-education and self-discovery, and the steps that led to her call to Africa. Be inspired by the courage and faith she and her husband exercised to get there. Best of all, listen to the miracles that are taking place as a result of the relationship she so vigilantly built with God. 

Listener's Guide:

Use the time stamps below to skip to any part of the podcast. 

1:15      Becky's Childhood

3:58     Family Culture and Priorities

6:26      Investing in Children

7:05     Religion and Music

9:09      Work Ethic and Discipline

10:31    Beginning a Family and Going Large

15:54    The Perfect Storm for Homeschooling

19:17    What to Teach

25:13    What Does God Need Me to Know?

33:17    Moving Towards Africa

46:55    "We could Always Move to Africa!"

50:12    Leaving the USA and God Links

54:42    Arrival in Ghana

1:00:39   Her Husband and the Greatest Blessing

1:02:14  The Story Refelcts the Outcome of Spiritual Preparation

1:06:09  The Projects in Ghana

1:18:01   The Objective of the Family Restoration Center

1:22:32   Safety and the Dog

1:25:55   How This Has Influenced Becky's Children

Quotes from this episode:

“If we moved to Ghana we would have to learn to live so radically differently that we would actually have time to be a family.” ~Tom Rogers

“We got an impression every day of two things to do and we didn't get the next piece until we did them.” ~Becky Rogers

“One day I prayed, "I'm totally good in the space of not knowing but if there is anything that is OK for us to know then that would also be cool.” ~Becky Rogers

“Sometimes the mercy is the not knowing.” ~Becky Rogers

“I'm 100% certain that Becky is called to Africa. And I am called to her.” ~Tom Rogers

“We are wholly dependent on the paycheck from God.” ~Becky rogers

Links from this episode:

FMF Family Literacy Center

Family Restoration Introduction

"'Blessed be the God in heaven who has brought us over this vast and furious ocean,' he prayed, 'You have delivered us from the perils and miseries at sea and set our feet on firm and stable ground--our proper place to dwell. For this we thank You and bless You.'" So many versions of the First Thanksgiving are told today! With Thanksgiving coming soon, we thought we'd bypass others' opinions and go right to the original source. To do this we learned all about the central figure that made it all possible - William Bradford. As a major driving force behind the escape to Holland, the decision to seek religious freedom in the New World, finding financial backers for their venture, determining the exact location for their colony, building peaceful relations with the local Indians and keeping everyone alive for the first 3 years, Bradford played THE biggest role in making the Plymouth Plantation a key part in America's eventual success.  In this podcast, you'll hear about the tremendous number of losses he experienced as a young boy, his phenomenal education and spiritual preparation, his personal sacrifices, and the exceptional leadership he provided as Plymouth's governor for 36 years. Make sure to share this story with all you love so they can appreciate with heartfelt gratitude this Thanksgiving the rich heritage they've been given. Listener's Guide: Use the time stamps below to skip to any part of the podcast.  0:43  Update on hard copies of The Mission Driven Life book, Podcasts, and Cottage Meetings 6:00  William Bradford's early years 9:40  Bradford's education 11:55  King James' reforms and Puritanism  14:35  Bradford tries out Puritanism 16:30  Bradford's attempts to escape 18:54  Conditions in Holland 21:28  The decision to move to the New World and the search for investors 25:35  Merchant Adventurers change the deal and they sail to America 29:55  The Mayflower Compact and the first prayer 35:00  Samoset and Squanto arrive and help the Puritans 38:00  Plymouth colony and Massasoit sign a peace treaty, the "First Thanksgiving" 40:11  Merchant Adventurers make things harder 42:40  Principles Bradford honored and led with Quotes from this episode: *All quotes from William Bradford, Plymouth's Rock by Janet and Geoff Benge and Of Plymouth Plantation: The Pilgrims in America by William Bradford "Williams was a good student and soon mastered reading, writing, and arithmetic. Most of all, he enjoyed reading, in particular, one book his tutor loaned him, Foxe's Book of Martyrs." "Tears ran down the faces of the Separatist men as they looked back in horror, realizing that their wives and children and their fellow Separatist men were being left behind and they were helpless to do anything about it." "It was challenging to feed and clothe everyone...everyone had to work hard to raise the money needed to survive. Even the children, some as young as four years old, had to work...The truth was, if a family could not make enough money, they were in danger of starving to death...A number of people lived in cramped quarters, where disease was a constant threat. Several children had died, including the Brewsters' new baby. Many families worked with linen, and over the years, tiny, wiry flax fibers had lodged in their lungs, making it hard to breathe." Mayflower Compact: "In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britaine, France and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc. having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honour of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northerne parts o...

I can't believe I'd never heard of this author before now! She was as popular as Pearl S. Buck, Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton, at times even outselling them! Every one of her novels made it onto the bestsellers lists across the nation and received raving reviews from critics.

YET, after 20+ years of hunting good books, I just recently learned of this author, her amazing books, her huge influence, her outstanding character, and her inspiring life.

Join me as we walk through the life and writings of one of America's greatest authors: Bess Streeter Aldrich!

Get Your FREE "Truth Seekers Starter Kit": https://www.audreyrindlisbacher.com/

"I feel the sustaining presence of the Savior and a deep sense of calm." ~Sharidean Flint

One year ago, my sister was healthy and happy —as a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, friend, neighbor, and community leader. If you were part of our community then you probably watched or listened to an interview I did with her about her childhood, motherhood, and path to becoming the first woman mayor of Hyde Park city. We discussed her challenges, hardships, and the difficulties she’d overcome in her life. I also made sure to highlight how she lived the 7 Laws of Life Mission and the way in which they prepared her to become an amazing source of love and inspiration to those around her. Since our interview, Sharidean had continued to do all the good of which she was capable, serving others in her fun-loving way. Then, at the end of January, intense migraines began. Within two weeks she had brain surgery and was diagnosed with glioblastoma. Almost from the moment she was diagnosed I felt that I needed to share with you what I saw, heard, and experienced, so that, along with her family, friends, and community, you could be lifted by the legacy she has left.

This podcast is the rest of her story.

(P.S. When I went in to create the image for the podcast, I was going to post a picture of us together or of her with her family. But then I visited her Facebook page and noticed that I hadn't seen her newest profile picture. I've used that picture here. The image and words are what she created -- a powerful, faithful message which demonstrates all she stood for.)

Listener's Guide:

Use the time stamps below to skip to any part of the podcast. 

1:20 - MDM Updates

6:30 - Sharidean Update

15:39 - Sharidean's fear is replaced with profound peace

29:30 - Love between Sharidean & her husband Kevin

31:13 - Outpouring of love from the community 

38:47 - Sharidean's letter to the city

Quotes from this episode:

"She went through a lot of really hard things in her life. And she used those hard things to drive her faith deeper." ~Audrey Rindlisbacher

"I feel the sustaining presence of the Savior and a deep sense of calm. I feel His love and your love." ~Sharidean Flint

Links from this episode: