Pam wrote us recently about her friend Sean who has been a part of her life for some time now and whose family is really struggling at this time. His wife Andrea has had cancer since their youngest child, Saint, was born a year ago. She has been diagnosed with more cancer in her brain/lungs and is in a great deal of pain. She and Sean are fighters though because with God's help, Andrea has been able to stay home with the kids some of the time but now she just got back from the hospital after dealing with an infection which highlights the real problem of financial struggle within their household because of all the hospital visits. 
 
Sean is dealing with a great amount of worry as he doesn't know what the family will do without their mother, but they continue to have faith even in spite of all their cirumstances. They do have family and close friends that help out, but they really just need all the help that they can get at this time. That's why we decided to see how we could help them by making their Monday!

We all have things we want in our lives—to lose those pesky 10 pounds, achieve that promotion, go on a second date with someone we’re interested in, or take that fantasy vacation. We set a goal that is near and dear to our hearts, and repeat it to ourselves in our heads and aloud to others more times than we can count. We’ve written this objective on Post-its, to-do lists, calendars, perhaps even carefully selected an image to place on a vision board, bathroom mirror, or refrigerator to inspire us.

We have shared this goal with our friends and family and declared that this is the year we are going to make it happen. Maybe we even asked one of them to hold us accountable to achieve it. So why do we get in our own way? In order to understand where self-sabotage comes from, we need to learn some key concepts about human behavior and raise our awareness of what might be running interference in the background.

You may be surprised to learn that the propensity to commit self-sabotage is built into our neurobiology and woven into the very fabric of what makes us human. In fact, its roots aren’t so hideous after all. The source of self-sabotage is part of a common ancestral and evolutionary adaptation that has allowed us to persevere as a species in the first place! To understand how self-sabotage is tied to our human existence, we need to take a look at the two simple principles that drive our survival: attaining rewards and avoiding threats.

We are essentially programmed to strive for goals because achieving them makes us feel good. That dopamine rush is an incentive to repeat those behaviors. The trick, especially when it comes to self-sabotage, is that our biochemistry doesn’t necessarily discriminate between the kind of feel-good sensations we experience when we are going toward our goals and the “good” feelings we get when we avoid something that seems threatening. In addition, where animals worry only about physical survival, humans also have to preserve their psychological well-being. In fact, an event that is psychologically threatening can trigger similar fight-or-flight responses as events that are physically threatening.

Attaining rewards and avoiding threats are like two sides of a coin. They aren’t independent systems, and there is a constant interplay in the brain to try to bring the two drives to an equilibrium. When we balance attaining rewards and avoiding threats, all is well; we feel good about ourselves, and we ensure our physical and psychological well-being.

However, when these two desires are out of whack, we are primed to self-sabotage. Specifically, the pursuit of avoiding threats at the expense of attaining rewards takes us away from our desired goals. Self-sabotage occurs when your drive to reduce threats is higher than your drive to attain rewards.

So why do we sometimes overestimate a threat and allow it to stop us from continuing on our path toward our goal? The answer is L.I.F.E. happens. In my research and through my experience in working with clients, I’ve found, time and again, that there are four elements that fuel the conflict between going for what you want and being held back by perceived threats that actually won’t harm you:

Low or Shaky Self-Concept
Internalized Beliefs
Fear of Change or the Unknown
Excessive Need for Control

These four influences represent aspects of your personality and how you relate to the world. You can think of them like an operating system that runs in the background and drives your beliefs and behavior. We typically acquire these L.I.F.E. elements when we are younger, and because they are with us over time, they tend to be outside of our awareness.

It is very helpful to focus on them, so you can more easily see how they inform your decisions, your ideas about yourself, how you behave, how you feel in certain circumstances, and particularly how they can...

If you’ve spent much time in Christian women’s circles, you may have noticed that we have devoted many gatherings to exploring our identity.

Retreats, conferences, and topical Bible studies rush to assure us that we are redeemed and treasured, that our lives have purpose, that our actions carry eternal significance. If we just understood who we are — the message goes — we would turn from our sin patterns and our spiritual low self-esteem and experience the abundant life of which Jesus spoke.

Recently I attended a women’s conference at which this message predictably took center stage. One after another, all three keynote speakers took us to Psalm 139:14, urging us to see ourselves the way God sees us, as fearfully and wonderfully made. It could have been just about any women’s event, with just about any typical speaker. Christian women ask Psalm 139:14 to soothe us when our body image falters, or when we just don’t feel that smart, valuable, or capable. We ask it to bolster us when our limits weigh us down. But based on how frequently I hear it offered, I suspect the message may not be “sticking to our ribs” very well.

Why is that?

I believe it is because we have misdiagnosed our primary problem. As long as we keep the emphasis on us instead of on a higher vision, we will take small comfort from discussions of identity — and we will see little lasting change. Our primary problem as Christian women is not that we lack self-worth, not that we lack a sense of significance or purpose. It’s that we lack awe.

Awe and Wonder

On a recent visit to San Francisco, my husband and I had the chance to hike Muir Woods. Walking its paths, we halted, slack-jawed, to gaze up at 250-foot redwoods that had stood since the signing of the Magna Carta. Towering and ancient, they reminded us of our smallness.

Muir Woods was a place to be awestruck. But not necessarily for everyone. I can still see the eight-year-old playing a video game while his parents took in the view. I’m not judging mom and dad — I’ve been on vacation with young children myself — but the irony of the image was compelling.

“Our primary problem as Christian women is not that we lack self-worth. It’s that we lack awe.”TweetShare on Facebook
Research shows that when humans experience awe — wonderment at redwoods or rainbows, Rembrandt or Rachmaninoff — we become less individualistic, less self-focused, less materialistic, more connected to those around us. In marveling at something greater than ourselves, we become more able to reach out to others.

At first, this seems counterintuitive, but on closer examination, it begins to sound a lot like the greatest commandments: Love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength (marvel at Someone greater than yourself), and love your neighbor (reach out to others).

Awe helps us worry less about self-worth by turning our eyes first toward God, then toward others. It also helps establish our self-worth in the best possible way: we understand both our insignificance within creation and our significance to our Creator. But just like a child on an iPad at the foot of an 800-year-old redwood, we can miss majesty when it is right in front of us.

True Self-Awareness

We have done it habitually with Psalm 139:14. It’s easy to hear it as a “pink verse” when a woman is reading it aloud to a room full of women. It is harder to hear it that way when we consider who wrote it. Imagine King David writing it to give himself a pep talk about his appearance or his self-worth. No, Psalm 139:14 is not written to help us feel significant. We have only to zoom out and consider the entire psalm to see this. Without question, the subject of Psalm 139 is not us. Rather than a reflection on me, fearfully and wonderfully made, it is an extended and exquisite celebration of God, fearful and wonderful.

Awe yields...

You could get paid $3,310 to participate in a Saint Louis University flu study. The catch, you will be infected with the influenza virus and quarantined for at least 10 days under controlled conditions at Saint Louis University.

Volunteers will receive a nasal spray containing a strain of seasonal influenza virus. The study builds on recent work by scientists in the NIAID Laboratory of Infectious Diseases to develop a model of influenza disease.

To participate, you have to be healthy and between 18 and 49 years old. They are looking for up to 80 people for the study. For more information call 314-977-6333 or visit here:

https://www.slu.edu/medicine/internal-medicine/infectious-disease/vaccine-development/

We recently got an email from a woman talking to us about what we've discussed on the show over the last few weeks which was toxic relationships and how to set boundaries. However, while we were reading it, she made the point that she didn't think setting boundaries was a very Christian thing to do so we brought in our Psychiatrist friend, Dr. David Henderson to share his thoughts on the matter.

Venmo is the simple, fun money app for sending cash quickly between friends and shopping at your favorite online stores. Share your new buys, split purchases with Venmo friends to avoid awkward IOUs, and catch up on what your friends are doing on the feed.

So, you’ve got a job interview coming up and you need some tips on how to nail it. The good news is, just by landing on this page today, you’re already a step ahead of the competition.

While other candidates will do downright ridiculous things, like ask where the nearest bar is or step away from the interview to ask their spouse if the salary is high enough, you’ll blow hiring managers away with your class and sophistication.

The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space.. I believe it was just last week for the first time in history to women did a and completed a spacewalk on the International Space Station all by themselves.

NASA posted this picture of one of the female astronauts sitting by a window in the International Space Station and looking out at Earth this beautiful, breathtaking, pristine blue globe just hanging in the sky with creamy white clouds swirled around it. It's breathtaking! When you look at the history of that term, the Overview Effect was first coined by a space writer named Frank White in 1987. It's described as a feeling of awe for our own planet, our home planet, and a sense of responsibility for taking care of it. They see Earth from space, they see it from a distance, and they're filled with this love for it.

This got me thinking about my journey with the Bible. You know, once I really started to study it and I understood that even though it's 66 books, it's one book even though there are over 40 different authors. There's one author, the Holy Spirit, even though it's many, many stories, that's one story of the God of the Universe who entered into His creation, made a son, gave the son a bride and they fell, they broke the creation.

So the rest of the Bible tells us the story of this incredible God who keeps making contact with his people and giving them hope. Finally, he re-enters his creation, this time as a baby, and his one and only Son dies for the broken people who keep rejecting Him. This God gives his son a bride, the church is the bride of Christ and knowing the overview of Scripture gives me this sense of awe. Because as I get closer, and I study it more, not from a distance, but up close, I start to see the beauty and the majesty of Christ and the magnificence of his plan. It is stunning!

I would encourage you to do that. I don't know where you are in life, but I would encourage you to think of the overview and then draw close. David said the Heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of His hands and I think that the closer you get to the Scriptures, the closer you'll get to Christ, and the more you will fall in love with him.

Kids are getting cellphones at a younger and younger age. And they're not the Nokia's many of us received as kids, which were only capable of texting and playing Snake, they're smartphones. Like many parents, Nick Herbert, a dad in the United Kingdom, had a hard time getting his son Ben to text back after he bought him a smartphone. 

That's why Herbert decided to take things into his own hand, and create the RespondASAP app that will lock a child's phone until they reply.

Kanye West has released a gospel/hip hop album titled, "Jesus Is King" and he is traveling across the country sharing his story while sharing the gospel, and the only ones complaining are Christians. Isn't that interesting?

On one hand, I understand because I believe it is okay to look at someone and wonder if their faith is sincere. In fact, in the time of the Puritans when someone made a proclamation of faith, they prayed the prayer, then they got baptized, they often would be asked, "Am I saved?" Their response was always the same, "We'll see." They they would wait to see because they wanted to see what kind of life this person led.


However, I think if we as humans possibly believe that we have the capacity to see inside somebody's soul, I think we've gone too far. We just do not have that power.

Kanye appeared on Jimmy Kimmel recently and one of his answers really stood out to me because it might have been one of the best answers to this question. He was asked, "Would you consider yourself to be a Christian music artist now? You know what he said? "I'm a Christian everything." Wow! 

Do you want to know why that is so powerful? He is right because if you are a Christian first, then Christianity bleeds over into everything you do. So yes, I work in Christian radio. I'm a Christian morning show host but I was a Christian morning show host before I worked in Christian radio.

Later on, Kanye expressed in detail what he had to say about sharing his faith and this is what he said:

"Now that I'm in service to Christ, my job is to spread the gospel to let people know what Jesus has done for me. You know, I've spread it out a lot of things. There was a time I was letting you know what high fashion had done for me. I was letting you know all these things. But now I'm letting you know what Jesus has done for me and in that I'm no longer a slave. I'm a son, now Son of God, I'm free. And when you're not serving God, you're serving everyone else. You're serving your ego, you're serving your bank account, you're serving your legacy, you're serving your wife and kids, you're serving your management or the people that you're managing. So we're praying on it in God's time for me to be able to work only for the church." - Kanye West

After seeing that, I think the proper response is prayer. That someone with a platform of this magnitude with the influence that he has, that this would be sincere. Does our faith rest on whether or not Kanye is a sincere Christian? Nope. Our faith rests on the work of the Cross which is already done. Today, we can pray for his sincerity and for people along his journey to continue to disciple him on his faith journey.