Day 150 - Endurance
📖Daily Reading
Isaiah 20-29
🎥 Video
Join me on my morning walk as we rise and shine together by walking through the Bible daily and learn a practical applicable coaching nugget from the ultimate life coach - our creator (whatever that means to you). No judgement zone here, all are welcome, we are all on a spiritual journey because we are after all spiritual beings having a human experience.
📝 Reflection
Isaiah 21; 11-12
This message come to me concerning Edom (Dumah*silence or stillness): Someone from Edom keeps calling to me,
“Watchman, how much longer until morning? When will the night be over?” The watchman replaces, “Morning is coming, but night will soon return. If you wish to ask again, then come back and ask.”
There is something satisfying about big round numbers - 150. I have endured and stayed faithful and consistent to my devotion to read and meditate on the Bible and get moving outside with the sunrise time of day. For 1 5 0 days ✨ *and I am not even halfway done, but I have built up endurance to not only know that I can and will finish and endure the full year of 365 days and maybe beyond, but I am excited and happy about it even though it is not always fun, easy and I don’t feel ‘shiny’ everyday! It is about the bigger picture, the hope on the horizon, the strength I know I am building.
One of my favorite quotes I am relying on currently is “it doesn’t get easier, you just get stronger 💪”. This is the power of endurance. Within in the broader concept of endurance we have even further choice - we can choose to make this a positive experience or negative. So much has been written on this topic. Viktor Frankl in “Man’s search for Meaning”, Edith Eger “The Choice” and “The Gift, Laura Hillenbrand “Unbroken” are just a few that I have personally read in the last few years. Paul in the New Testament talks a lot about this as well and his frequent use of running and athletics as analogies to the life of faith.
In the midst of the prophesies laid out in Isaiah’s chapters 10-24 that I read today which was was about the judgment, violence, and destruction that was coming was this small exception of the watchman and the cycle of morning and night. So interesting. Life itself is a repeating cycle of hours of consciousness and being awake and hours asleep on a continuous 24 hour loop that we endure. Some of us endure better than others. What makes the difference for someone that has a positive attitude to life even in the ‘dark’ times vs those that don’t and those that succumb to the darkness?
These are the questions that many a philosopher has spent their entire lives pondering over the thousands of years. But at the end of the day we each have to answer this question for ourselves and find an answer that helps us not only endure or survive but thrive. It is the difference between living and LIVING and feeling fully alive, engaged, excited to wake up, staying optimistic even in the face of seeming hopelessness and darkness. We do have the choice, but not all of us know, are awake to or realize this. A life of survival or a life of thrival, it is our choice.
In survival mode many of us turn to unhealthy habits in order to help us endure, or so we think. This strategy works until it doesn’t - if you know then you know. Then you can choose to realize that you have a choice in your experience and decide to take personal responsibility and turn the ‘ship’ around. Do you choose to endure the journey from your ‘pain’ island to your ‘pleasure’ island through the dangerous, shark infested, crashing waves and storms or do you learn somehow to endure the pain.
Sometimes we have no choice of leaving our particular pain island but we can always- always- always choose our thoughts and thereby we can leave our pain island from within. This takes a lot of strength, faith, hope, acceptance and surrender to keep a candle burning(morning) within even when your are enduring darkness (night), without succumbing to the darkness.
I can feel my brain doing push-ups everyday as I am going through this process, it is not getting easier, I am getting stronger. My faith is getting stronger and I am standing more firmly in it everyday and my hope is growing brighter everyday. Life is an amazing adventure and I am so grateful to God everyday; even on the days that I feel terrible, my relationships are struggling, the world seems to be crumbling, when doors seem to be closing, time running out- another morning is always coming. God’s mercies are new everyday.
I have not always felt or lived this way. I used to cause, compound and prolong my own suffering because I was always looking for relief and an escape hatch to ‘help’ me endure. I didn’t have a positive ‘thrival’ endurance mindset, I had a ‘survival’ mindset. This isn’t my fault, I had a lot of trauma and needed to survive as a child and young person, but once I realized it it did become my responsibility and my choice and you can too!
My mindset is now set in the thriving perspective, a desire to thrive not just survive, but this doesn’t by any means I have ‘achieved’ anything. I have a long way to go. I have also realized and surrendered to the reality that this isn’t something you can ‘achieve’, it is a way of life, a lifestyle and you build it brick by brick, habit by habit and then maintaining, repairing, renovating etc.. It sure does add purpose, meaning and adventure to my life, I invite you to be curious about your own endurance approach to life. Are you surviving or thriving? They are as different as night and day. A mind and heart that is thriving makes the darkness not seem so dark or so long.
*515 days, in year two I am now organizing this into daily emails 🎉
✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt
Are you just surviving? It is your birthright to THRIVE!
📖Tomorrows Reading
Isaiah 30-33
Coaching Opportunity
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If you have stuck with me this far, then you are not reading this by accident, I believe God has a plan for you and is calling you forward!😉🤩
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