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Mid-Year Check Up! · Mental Health and the Mission of the Church

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Looks like it might be working.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to proceed as if it is.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Been having some technical difficulties.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you're able to go from the normal page this would be on and find this new one.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I could tell you what the final landing spot's going to be, but uh whatever.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to get this fixed and got some different people trying to help me.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll see what we can do.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Man, man, man.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: You ever done a mid-year checkup?
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do you ever do you kind of um track your movement progress uh or lack thereof?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um my wife and I tend to do that.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're not real what I would call goal setters, in the sense of you know, smart, you know, specific, measurable, uh attainable, I think, um, whatever.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we do we are kind of goal setters, but uh but we're not that um precise, you might say.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: But we do like to track the general trajectory.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the trajectory is like the the path, uh, movement over time would would kind of be a definition of it.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But um I can't remember which of the philosophers said that the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined life is not worth living, and and what they mean is um if you're not gonna occasionally stop and kind of detach and look back at yourself in your life as if you were looking at someone else, in other words, if you're not gonna examine it, if you're not gonna track its uh movement, uh then probably you're not gonna get where you want to go and you may not like where you end up.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um so you know, I like to do that, and um, you know, even in the middle of all this craziness, in fact, maybe it might even be more important to do it in the middle of all this craziness because it gives you a sense of uh returning to what you have some control over.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that uh all of these craziness going on, the the coronavirus, the uh the race uh racism struggles happening right now.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um all of it's very unsettling, the economic stuff going on.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's an election year, and and what a lot of it does is it um it just makes us feel very vulnerable, out of control, um, very unable to um kind of feel like we're in charge of anything.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: But you really are.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you're in charge of a lot of things.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're responsible, able to choose your response, responsible, able to choose your response to virtually anything.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: So every once in a while, and again, this is it's June, it's not quite the middle of the year, but um I was just thinking sometime earlier this week, um, I was gonna put a post up, and I'll probably put it up later today.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, kind of on this whole concept of a mid-year checkup.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And um it's kind of just looking at like what were you thinking when the year started?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like I have a I I keep a journal, and uh and this is my this is my page.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you can read it because it might be backwards, I'm not sure.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: But uh my learnings from 2019 love is everything, stop judging, close the gap between knowing and doing.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and all of those had great meaning for me last year.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh, you know, surprisingly, there's not that much difference this year.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so again, I'm not sure if you can read this, but um the thoughts I had as I was starting the year back on January 6th, less is more, and that's really still about closing the gap between knowing and doing, and then love, love, love, still the uh just that thought that it's all about love, a warrior mindset.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And all I meant by that was I was just tired of whining, I was tired of just like letting things knock me down, and I would instead of getting back up and punching in the whatever it was in the face, I would just sit there and whine a little bit.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last one is uh mindfulness meditation, and um so my point is uh I like to just stop every once in a while and say, okay, what last time I really said, God, what is this next stretch of time about?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, those are the thoughts I felt like rose up out of my heart, you know, closing the gap.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what I mean by that is um I love what I do, I love what I get to do.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um it uh there's just a lot of it.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh there's times when uh how many of you know that that uh you know you can get caught up in good stuff and it can mesh up as bad as getting caught up in bad stuff.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So um just been working on that and trying to say yes to the right things and no to the right things, and uh coronavirus sure has helped with that, to be honest with you.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then the whole love thing, I'm I I I tell you, I was blown away by a scripture, 1 Timothy 1.5.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And 1 Timothy 1.5 says this the goal of our instruction is love, the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I love to look up words, and that word goal, uh, one translation says the end of our instruction.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: The goal of our instruction, that word is teleas, t-l-i-os, might not be pronouncing it right, and it means the outcome toward which everything is aimed and moving, the outcome toward which everything is aimed or moving.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that scripture says the outcome toward which everything in your life is aimed, the outcome everything in your life's aimed at, and the outcome everything in your life's moving toward is love.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about love.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I would probably say it a little differently than some people, I would say it's about receiving first John 4.19.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: We love him because he first loved us.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think part of the reason, if not the reason, most of us have a hard time loving others, is we've not slowed down long enough to learn how to receive love.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, from God first.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, we talked recently about the fact that that's why he created you so that he could love you.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: So um, so you know, that whole idea less is more, love is everything.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I mentioned a minute ago the whole uh warrior mindset, um, just the whole idea that um life's hard, man.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's no two ways about it.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Life's hard.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the greatest blockages between us and our best future are inside of us, not outside.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: I would comfortably say that the majority of what we struggle with, we didn't choose.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a result of uh the culture, the family we were born into, the uh socioeconomic class we were born into, none of which we had a choice in, uh, early life experiences.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um and my point being, um, you know, and I don't mean this ugly, but I find that if I'm not careful, I can kind of get into a form of whining and just say, oh, you know, why why this, why that, why the other?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and I can't control this, that, or the other.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: But what I can control is my thoughts, my responses to people and situations.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not saying it's easy, I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying it's possible.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so what we're talking about today is just kind of a mid-year gut check.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like how you know, have the courage to sit down and almost like you put your own life on the desk in front of you, and then you said to yourself, How am I doing?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: How am I doing now?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, not by other people's expectations.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: How am I doing by the last time God and I sat down and talked about what I should be working on, what I should be moving toward.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: How am I doing in the areas that in the recent past I felt uh were important enough to try to make progress in?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: So uh have the courage to do that, guys, because it's good for you every once in a while.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, it hurts sometimes, but it's good for you.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I just pray that you'll do that, but I also pray that you'll do it through a filter of grace and understanding.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh love you guys and sorry about the technical difficulties.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you can get to this somewhere, and um, I will post it on the right site at uh some point in the near, probably later today.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: All right, love you guys.