Are We Ready to Make the Hard Choices?

When someone is smart, we call them “wise as an owl.” But when referring to a person in that manner, we could make an enemy really quick. That is because owls--according to those who work with them--know the owl cannot be trained to do even the simplest of tasks. Unlike parrots, hawks, pigeons, or even our parakeets, who all can be taught to do a variety of amazing feats, owls are what we might lovingly refer to as simple-minded, as in unable to be trained or to learn anything.

Without even knowing, we have often used this common phrase solely based on how the owl species look. It is all in their extremely large eyes compared to the size of their much smaller head. They just look like they are focusing and paying attention to us, so we equate that with intelligence. Especially when they have to turn their entire head to look at something!

Using 100 Percent

There are many, many things we do not know about a lot of things. Most of us can readily admit to that concept, even though there has always been a myth that we only use ten percent of our brains. Actually, numerous scientists have proved otherwise. Recently, John Henley, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, stated, "Evidence would show over a day you use 100 percent of the brain". It is just that at any one time during the day, we may only use ten percent!

Why Should We Care?

Nothing is more distasteful than a person who constantly tries to point out his/her knowledge on every single subject. It seems they lack perhaps not intelligence, but a sense of humility in all things. They seem to have lost the ability to judge their own importance.

We may have experienced this type of person in our last relationship. Nothing we did or said made any difference to him at all. Our values and opinions were unimportant, and we were made to feel small. This may not have just happened in our home; it may have happened at the place where we worked or with friends and even family.

The truth is that cleverness and what we call “smarts” are considered the most attractive in the world. We see it in the news, sitcoms, and movies all the time. It makes for superb entertainment ratings. Now do not misunderstand. We are definitely not talking about authentic education and earning well-deserved degrees with accolades. That is certainly to be rewarded!

The subjects here are the antics and nonsense that go on with someone who is trying to convince others of how much they know. Making sure we understand that they are right and there is no discussion of the matter. They get the last word above all. Those of us who have been through such a petulant relationship, know we have to make the hard choices.

God’s WORD is Our Truth

The only One who truly knows our value is Jesus. He is the Humble One who loves us beyond all imagination. Be assured He was right there when we were being beaten down, cheated on, and tossed out. He got us to where we are now--standing on our own two feet ready to have Him as our only Master.

Know that we are not owls. . .we are God’s W.O.R.D.: Women of Renewed Devotion (c)!

“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say, ‘He traps the wise in the snare of their own cleverness’ ” (1 Corinthians 3:19 NLT).

 

 

 

How Can You Keep Up with Your Hopes and Dreams?

It is certainly not surprising to hear nearly seventy-five percent of American women dye their hair something other than their natural color as compared to just seven percent in 1950 (Clairol 2008 study as reported at Emerita.com, a women’s wellness site). Of course, women in Hollywood tend to lead the trends. We usually expect to see women such as Helen Mirren (age 75) and Blythe Danner (77) display their beautiful locks in their natural state. But even younger ones choose to sport a change like Kate Winslet (46) and Lady Gaga (34). And at 89 years young, Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno is still gorgeous! 

Let’s face it --as we age, our health, and our looks start turning towards a more natural way of life. It becomes apparent to us that maybe, just maybe, we can avoid much of what we thought was necessary for our younger years such as the latest lipstick color (but still a great way to uplift our spirits!), foundation formula, and hair color. It just does not seem as important as it once was.

This is not to say we should not keep ourselves looking our absolute best. Not only watching our diet and participating in exercise but once we choose to turn a shade of gray, we may need to find other colors to wear in our make-up and clothing. Gray, silver, and white tend to “wash out” skin color. A brighter, color-coded clothes closet with various “happy” hues can help solve this problem. Try it out on the next shopping trip and bring some new colors into the dressing room—a fun experiment!

Finding Joy Every Step of the Way

Someone once said (it’s been attributed to many people), “The older I get, the wiser my parents get!” It’s a funny quote that pops up every now and then but points out the truth of our circumstances. As single-again women, we have been through more than we thought we could ever handle. Maybe one reason for our natural locks turning a beautiful silver, but also a reason we are much stronger today than ever!

The joy of living on our own are the changes that cause us to become an entirely new person. We are older, yes. We are wiser, yes. And unless we have re-married, we no longer must worry about taking care of another person right now. If we want to become an all-around better person, we can choose to concentrate on keeping up with our hopes and dreams that were put on a shelf a long time ago! We then start seeing a woman who welcomes the chance to improve her perspective or attitude about life.

The progress we are looking for involves learning how to form plans for our own happiness while at the same time being careful not to follow just any unproven recipe or a supposed solution someone may offer to us. We are now wiser than we’ve ever been and so we must use our good sense and take everything “with a grain of different.”

It may help to meet with a life coach or counselor to figure out the best direction to go before jumping into things. Experience teaches us that our lives are quite different now and so might our paths, hopes, and dreams. It’s an exciting journey to find out what we can do. Whatever didn’t work in the past, may not work in our present. So, let’s be open to new and wonderful ways of thinking, concepts, and passions. Wow! We are on our way!

A Good Book to Read

We may never have realized that God Himself points us down the correct path for our best life. And it will certainly be different for each one of us. In Psalm 139 of the Bible, it says He knows everything about us. Of course, He does because God created us perfectly (He does not make mistakes), He knows when we travel, stand up, sit down, rest, what we are going to say, and even our thoughts.

From the time we are born until way past when our hair turns white, God has us in His hands ready to make sure we are blessed when we follow Him in all we do. He is our Guide, Helper, and the Author of every single moment of our lives as recorded in His divine book! Imagine that: 

The Book of ___ (enter your name) ___by The Creator of the Universe.

“I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you” (Isaiah 46:4 NLT).

 

Are Your Hopes and Dreams Different Now?

Gray Hare (hair)

It’s certainly not surprising to hear nearly eighty percent of women dye their hair something other than their natural color (Clairol 2008 study as reported at Emerita.com, a women’s wellness site). And, of course, women in Hollywood tend to lead the trends. Can we even remember what actress Diane Keaton (74) looked like before her beautiful gray locks? Or actress Jamie Lee Curtis (61) who sported an “icy white” shade at the 2019 Golden Globes? Country singer Emmylou Harris (72) has looked great in white for more than eight years. Singer and actress Rita Moreno is ninety years old and still looks better in light gray!

As we age, our health, and our looks start turning towards a more natural way of life. It becomes apparent to us that maybe, just maybe, we can avoid much of what we thought was necessary for our younger years such as the latest lipstick color (but still a great way to uplift our spirits!), foundation formula, and hair color. It just doesn’t seem as important as it once was.

This is not to say we shouldn’t keep ourselves looking our very best. Not only watching our diet and participating in exercise but once we choose to turn a shade of gray, we may need to find other colors to wear in our make-up and clothing. Gray, silver, and white tend to “wash out” skin color. A brighter, color-coded clothes closet with various “happy” hues can help solve this problem. Try it out on the next shopping trip and bring some new colors into the dressing room—a fun experiment!

Wise Beyond Our Years

Someone once said (it’s been attributed to many people), “The older I get, the wiser my parents get!” It’s a funny quote that pops up every now and then but points out the truth of our circumstances. As single-again women, we have been through more than we thought we could ever handle. Maybe one reason for our natural locks turning a beautiful silver, but also a reason we are much stronger today than ever!

The joy of being on our own are the changes that cause us to become an entirely new person. We are older, yes. We are wiser, yes. And unless we have re-married, we no longer must worry about taking care of another person right now. We can concentrate on how to become a whole and a better person. A woman who welcomes the chance to improve her perspective or attitude about life.

Graying Our Words

The progress we are looking for involves learning how to form plans for our own happiness while at the same time being careful not to follow just any unproven recipe or a supposed solution someone may offer to us. As stated earlier, we are now wiser than we’ve ever been and so we must use our good sense and take everything “with a grain of different.”

It may help to meet with a life coach or counselor to figure out the best direction to go before jumping into things. Experience teaches us that our lives are quite different now and so might our paths, hopes, and dreams. It’s an exciting journey to find out what we can do. Whatever didn’t work in the past, may not work in our present. So, let’s be open to new and wonderful ways of thinking, concepts, and passions. Wow! We are on our way!

A Good Book to Read

We may never have realized that God Himself points us down the correct path for our best life. And it will certainly be different for each one of us. In Psalm 139 of the Bible, it says He knows everything about us. Because God created us perfectly, He knows when we travel, stand up, sit down, rest, what we are going to say, and even our thoughts.

From the time we are born until our hair turns white, God has us in His hands ready to make sure we are blessed when we follow Him in all we do. He is our Guide and Helper and every single moment of our lives is recorded in His divine book! Imagine that: The Book of __ (enter your name) ___.

            

“I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you” (Isaiah 46:4 NLT).

How Can We Change What’s Not Working?

Stop and slow down

There are times when life gets going so fast—like a runaway train--that we rarely take the time to turn our heads for a moment and see where we came from and where we are going. Just one common example is the cell phone. According to bankmycell.com, there are now more mobile devices (9.32 billion!) in the world than there are people (7.74 billion). And even more amazing, not every single person owns a cell phone. So, obviously, many people have more than one device. Unbelievable.   

According to one tracker, it’s easy to understand, “You don’t need a home to have one, and you don’t need a network that touches every building. It’s easier to plop a cell phone tower in a neighborhood than plug in every single building.” This makes sense, but cell phones have made us spin faster and faster until we almost get dizzy and fall over.  

Every now and then, though, it’s a good idea to slow down, look back, and do a friendly examination of ourselves. Especially with the mind-blowing situation we just survived. It took every bit of toughness, strength, and resilience we had in our bodies to get right here and right now. If we don’t want to repeat all that, it’s to our own advantage to review every now and then how much we have achieved. We do it in our jobs once a year, so why not in our personal lives too?

Wide-Eyed Wishing

There are two ways to contrast how we are doing--what didn’t work before and what is working after.

  

Many of us were perhaps too young when we rushed down the aisle the first time. We didn’t take our time to get to know the one we said, “I do!” to, nor even to make permanent life-plans that involved both of us. We, most likely, lacked the experience needed to deal with and avoid repeated scenes that caused us damage and destruction. Honestly, we really had no idea what we were doing; it was very much like wide-eyed wishing. Eventually, because of our innocence, we lost ourselves in a pool of nothingness. We lived a “half-life” never developing our own talents and abilities. Thankfully, we eventually gained insight and found the strength to make better decisions.   

The Next Wise Choice

Grow and Gather

Learning from past circumstances, we have been able to choose new goals and habits that uplift our “fully-developed lives.” Our hearts spill over with joy just creating a whole new way to live. Enthusiasm goes a long way. Sure, not every single day goes smoothly, no one said it would. This is real life. It gets hard sometimes for all of us. We are not alone in this truth. The key is how we respond to all the messiness. We each must decide what that looks like for our own lives not for our friend’s life, not for our sister’s, brother’s, or mother’s life, but what positive thing we do when life gets us down. It’s all about making the next wise choice. The confidence we now have (and it will increase every day), can help us survive at least the next 24 hours! Go. Grow. Gather. Repeat.  

Word Reflections

Wiser words have never been spoken than in the first nine chapters of the Book of Proverbs. We use those as a guide to weigh how our lives are going and where we can go next. If we haven’t quite reached the pinnacle where our lives can bloom, studying and meditating on these words of God will make it very clear what the next step is in front of us.  

If we are beginning to find satisfaction with our journey, sustaining true wisdom for the “long haul” can be discovered through these chapters in Proverbs. They will direct us in knowing God better and what He sees for our future. It is His heart for our hearts!

“As a face is reflected in water, so the heart reflects the real person” (Proverbs 27:19 NLT).

How to Grow and Spread Your Wings

A new pair of shoes

A little boy about 10 years old was standing before a shoe store on the roadway, barefooted, peering through the window, and shivering with cold. A lady approached the boy and said, “My little fellow, why are you looking so earnestly in that window?” “I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes,” was the boy’s reply.

The lady took him by the hand and went into the store and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. She then asked if he could give her a basin of water and a towel. He quickly brought them to her. She took the little fellow to the back part of the store and, removing her gloves, knelt down, washed his little feet, and dried them with a towel.

By this time the clerk had returned with the socks. Placing a pair upon the boy’s feet, she purchased him a pair of shoes. She tied up the remaining pairs of socks and gave them to him. She patted him on the head and said, “No doubt, my little fellow, you feel more comfortable now?”

As she turned to go, the astonished lad caught her by the hand, and looking up in her face, with tears in his eyes, answered the question with these words: “Are you God’s wife?” (Author unknown. A story as told in mirthandmotivation.com).

Turning Corners

So many times, we tend to ignore what is right before us. Especially now when we have just gone through a devastating period in our lives, our problems seem insurmountable and we see nothing else in our path. Each day is difficult. Each hour is excruciating. Each minute is painful.  

These types of feelings are natural and expected especially when our circumstances are brand new to us and it hasn’t been very long at all since we became single-again women (divorced, widowed, single mom). At this point, don’t let anyone tell you not to feel the sorrow and distress. There is a certain time period where we all go through the stages of grief.

Spread your wings and fly!

Eventually at some point, we will turn a corner and begin to feel better with each passing day as we put one foot in front of the other. This is when our eyes open a little wider and we can lift our heads. We might even surprise ourselves simply by smiling—at ourselves and others too.

Now is the opportunity to figure out what to do with our lives. How to live differently because, obviously, we are different. Unfortunately, many women try and continue to make everything remain exactly as it was; this is usually a very bad idea that holds us back from growing and spreading our wings!           

Hanging Out with Friends

“Life is 10% what happens and 90% of how you react to it.” (Charles Swindoll, pastor, and author).

Just like the “wise” woman in the (likely fictional) story above, we might try and not dwell on ourselves so much that we forget what is happening in the lives of other people. Of course, the story does not indicate if the woman was single or not, but it seems to us that she was at the very least, generous, kind, and unselfish.    

One of the changes we may have already experienced as a single-again woman is that our circle of “friends” seems to have evolved into several new relationships. We find ourselves gravitating towards other women going through the same scenario. That’s a great sign!

Why? Because we are learning how to spread our wings and have become interested in finding out how others have successfully changed their lives for the better. We are “hanging out” with those who can provide insight, intuition, and intelligence about something we know little about.

Arms Wide Open

The greatest insight we can possess is to recognize that we have a Heavenly Father who loves us above and beyond what we can imagine. He is unlike any earthly father we have ever known.

He cares deeply what we have experienced and what happened to us before and after the change in our marital status. He is waiting for us each to turn to Him with all our sorrows, grief, heartache, and pain. His arms are wide open! Run to Him now!                 

“Become wise by walking with the wise; hang out with fools and watch your life fall to pieces” (Prov 13:20 MSG).

What’s Working for You?

There are times when life gets going so fast that we rarely make the time to turn our heads for a moment and see where we came from and where we are going. Just one common example is the cell phone. There actually are nearly as many cell phones in the world (6.8 billion) as there are people in the world (7 billion)! That is more than the total number of landlines ever used.

According to one tracker, it’s easy to understand, “You don’t need a home to have one, and you don’t need a network that touches every building. It’s easier to plop a cell phone tower in a neighborhood than plug in every single building.” This makes sense, but cell phones have made us spin faster and faster until we almost get dizzy and fall over.  

Every now and then, though, it’s a good idea to slow down, look back, and do a friendly examination of ourselves. Especially with the mind-blowing situation we just survived. It took every bit of toughness, strength, and resilience we had in our bodies to get right here and right now. If we don’t want to repeat all that, it’s to our own advantage to review every now and then how much we have achieved. We do it in our jobs once a year, so why not in our personal lives too?

There are two ways to contrast how we are doing--what didn’t work before and what is working after:

  

Wide-Eyed Wishing

Many of us were perhaps too young when we married the first time. We didn’t take our time to get to know the one we said “I do!” to, nor even to make life-plans that involved both of us. We, most likely, lacked the experience we needed to deal with and avoid repeated scenes that caused us damage and destruction. Honestly, we really had no idea what we were doing. Eventually, because of our innocence, we lost ourselves in a pool of nothingness. We lived a “half-life” never developing our own talents and abilities. Thankfully, we eventually gained insight and found the strength we needed to make better decisions.   

Wiser Women

Learning from past circumstances, we have been able to choose new goals and habits that uplift our “fully-developed lives.” Our hearts spill over with joy just creating a whole new way to live. Enthusiasm goes a long way. Sure, not every single day goes smoothly, no one said it would. This is real life. It gets hard sometimes for all of us. We are not alone in this truth. The key is how we respond to all the messiness. We each have to decide what that looks like for our own lives. Not for our friend’s life, not for our sister’s, brother’s, or mother’s life, but what positive thing we do when life gets us down. It’s all about making the wise choice. The thing is with all the confidence we now have (and it will increase every day), we know we can survive at least the next 24 hours!

Joy for Your Journey

Wiser words have never been spoken than in the first nine chapters of the Book of Proverbs. We use those as a guide to weigh how our lives are going. If we haven’t quite reached the point where we want our lives to be, studying and meditating on these words of God will make it very clear what we need to do.

If we are beginning to find satisfaction with our journey, sustaining true wisdom for the “long haul” can be discovered through these chapters in Proverbs. They will direct us in knowing God better and what He sees for our future. It is His heart for our heart!

“As a face is reflected in water, so the heart reflects the real person” Proverbs 27:19 NLT.