Share Four Somethings: September 2020

It’s kind of hard for me to believe, but last week, the sixth anniversary of this little online space quietly slipped by.

Honestly, it sometimes feels like I’ve only been at this for one or two years. Reality hits, though, when I notice that one of the “Related” links at the bottom of a post leads me to something I wrote in 2014. Where has the time gone?

More about the blog in a minute as I link up with Heather Gerwing to share something loved, something read, something treasured and something ahead.

• Something Loved

With Molly doing remote school in the basement all day, I’ve struggled a bit with establishing my own back-to-school routine. One point of consistency has been listening to a podcast while I’m fixing my breakfast and cleaning up the kitchen.

I know interview podcasts are the latest and greatest thing, but at this point in my life—during this particular season—they are not my favorite. If I’m going to listen to a podcast, I prefer it to be one person talking, and not for an excessively long time.

Which brings me to my new favorite morning routine—tuning in to Unlocking the Bible with Colin Smith on Spotify. Originally from Scotland (with the accent to prove it), Smith is the pastor of the Orchard Evangelical Free Church in suburban Chicago. His teaching is concise, encouraging and relevant to today’s world.

If you’re interested, check out his series on the Psalms of Ascent (one of my favorite sections from one of my favorite books in the Bible). You can listen to recent sermons on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and you can find more comprehensive archives on Unlocking the Bible’s website.

• Something read

I haven’t read any books this month that stopped me in my tracks. I did, however, come across an article in one of Tim Challies’ daily A La Carte posts that made so much sense I feel compelled to share it here.

The piece is titled “Covid and Culture Shock Feel the Same to Your Brain—and Here’s Why.” It was published on a blog collective called “A Life Overseas” and written by Peter Olson, an engineer-turned-missionary serving in Ethiopia.

It offers a fascinating look at how our new Covid reality has rendered many of our mental “autopilots” useless, requiring us to “think slowly” more frequently and eventually leaving us with less capacity for self control and emotional control.

Olson takes us through this process step by step and concludes with some helpful encouragement. Here’s a taste:

“When faced with the limits of your mental capacity,” he writes, “it can be helpful to realize you cannot deliberately make a choice about everything—you will run out of capacity. So it can be very powerful to use some of your limited capacity deciding what you will not decide about.”

If you find yourself mentally exhausted these days, read this article—and then go take a 30-minute nap.

• Something treasured

Molly and I recently finished shredding a big box of documents and correspondence from my dad’s vast collection of paperwork. I had already been through everything in the box once, but as we shredded, I pulled out a few more emails to save.

When I looked through these emails later, I happened to notice that printed on the back of one of them was the rough draft of a devotional my mom gave at a progressive dinner our church had back in 2010. (She was 77 at the time.)

I was there that evening, and while I had forgotten most of what she said, I do remember how warmly the ladies from our church received her message about passion and intentional living. Finding her words after all this time was like hearing her talk all over again, and I can’t tell you how happy that made me.

Here are a few paragraphs from her talk, typed exactly as I found it:

“When we’re intense or intentional, we care a lot about someone or something,” my mom wrote. “We’re not indifferent about someone else’s need. And we don’t begrudge having to be involved to help a friend in whatever way we can. We’re focused & we want to give it all we’ve got & want to do it well & we want to do it with concentration.

“Prayer is a typical example of something we can do intentionally,” she continued.  “Bookstores are full of books written on the subject of prayer, seminars held about Prayer, but what we need to do is PRAY … Talk to God. The more we pray, the more we’ll begin to learn that talking to God about our problem is enough, taking our burdens to the Lord & leaving them there. We have to read the Bible to learn how to live & we have the author of the Bible to listen to us when we pray.”

• Something ahead

Several weeks ago, I noticed that reader comments here at Waxing Gibbous were only showing up on cell phones. Laptop or desktop-using readers can leave comments, but they can’t see them—or my responses—once they hit “post comment.”(If this has happened to you, I’m sorry. Please go to www.loisflowers.com on your phone to read all the comments and see my responses.)

My research revealed that the problem is somewhere in the coding for the blog’s theme (all the files and templates that create the particular look and function of a blog), and that it would be costly to fix for various reasons. As frustrating as this is, it has prompted me to embark on a long-overdue blog refresh.

I’m searching for a minimalist theme and narrowing down my choices for a different tagline. The process of actually switching the blog over to a new theme makes me a bit nervous (OK, a lot nervous), but Randy will be handling all the techie stuff, which is definitely helpful.

I’m not sure when all this will be ready to go live, but stay tuned. Hopefully it will be here sooner rather than later.

• • • 

Now it’s your turn. Tell us your favorite podcast, a good book (or article) you’ve read lately or even any trouble-shooting advice you might have regarding my broken blog. If you’d rather, feel free to share a highlight from the last month that may or may not fall into one of the Four Somethings’ categories.

♥ Lois

P.S. I’m linking up this week with #ShareFourSomethings, Purposeful Faith, #TellHisStory, InstaEncouragements, Recharge Wednesday, Let’s Have Coffee and Grace & Truth.