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Book Review: “True Life: Practical Wisdom from the Book of Ecclesiastes” by Carolyn Mahaney & Nicole Whiteacre
Introduction Have you ever felt like no matter how much you try to organize things, they never turn out quite how you’d like them to? Do you spend your life trying to make special moments happen, only to watch them slip through your grasp? Do you feel like life is an endless cycle of repetitive activities that you must do over, and over, and over again? How can you find joy when things go terribly wrong? True Life: Practical Wisdom from the Book of Ecclesiastes provides you with answers and encouragement from King Solomon himself, who had every earthly pleasure and found no satisfaction in any of it. “Vanity of…
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The Cozy Season
This post was written by my friend, Danielle Roberts. Danielle and I knew each other back in high school, and recently reconnected after discovering that we had attended the same church for a while, just at different services. Danielle is a wife and mom of 4. She helps burntout mom business owners make room for rest through productivity. She is the host of the podcast Created for This and author of the Christian devotional of the same name. She and her family love to travel, be outdoors in beautiful Wisconsin, and curl up with a good book. You can connect with her on Instagram @danielle.m.roberts. By the way, I wrote…
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7 Good Mental Health Habits to Continue in 2023
I love making New Year’s resolutions. (Here’s a list of my past New Year’s resolutions: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022). This year, however, I decided to set the goal of continuing some good mental health habits I started in 2022. The first group of my good mental health habits concerns food. I’ve posted a lot about my struggles with overeating, and I continue to fight against that sin in my life. Overeating, for me, is a spiritual issue. I understand the ideas behind methods such as intuitive eating, intermittent fasting, and diets like keto and paleo. None of this matters, however, if I choose to continue to eat foods I shouldn’t…
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One of My Strangest Anxiety Symptoms
Four years ago, after my daughter was born, I developed postpartum depression and anxiety–PPD/A for short. I had never felt anything like PPD/A before. My heart either raced like a crazy hamster on a wheel or I felt so tired that I could barely perform everyday tasks. I vascillated between the two for a long time, anxiety winning more often than not, until the medicine I had been taking began to help. I stayed on medication, in addition to exercising, changing my diet, and spending extra time with family, for about nine months. I was able to go off of the medication for almost a year and a half, at…
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Intuitive Eating, Intuitive Living, and My God-given Limitations
As I’ve written about here at Teacher by Nature before, overeating is a struggle for me. What I’ve found the most challenging about getting my eating habits under control and honoring to God is the fact that I cannot stop eating. Those who find themselves enslaved to alcohol can simply (yet not easily) stop drinking alcohol. Alcohol is not necessary to human survival. Food, however, is. I cannot stop eating or, more specifically, I cannot stop consuming calories and nutrients. Both are good and necessary for life and the proper functioning of my body. I grew up in a very health-conscious family. My parents taught me the difference between nutritious…