Happiness

"Many persons have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but though fidelity to a worthy purpose."

Helen Keller

That's a bit different then the general worldview today, isn't it?

Words of Comfort

WORDS OF COMFORT
by Charles R. Swindoll

Read Job 3:1--26

In the early l960s when a Christian suffered from a depression that resulted in Job's kind of thinking and candid admission, you never said so publicly. You wallowed your sorrow. The first book I read on this subject, covering emotional turmoil and mental illness among Christians, was considered heresy by most of my evangelical friends.

The pervasive opinion then was simple: Christians didn't have breakdowns. Furthermore, you certainly didn't say "depressed!" You know what term was used to describe those who struggled with deep depression in the early and mid-sixties? "Nervous." "He's got a nervous problem." Or simply, "She's nervous." And if you ever, God help you, had to be hospitalized due to your "nervous" disorder, there just wasn't a Christian word for it. I repeat, you didn't tell a soul. Shame upon shame that you didn't trust the Lord through your struggle and find Him faithful to help you "get over" your depression.

I remember being told by a seminary prof, who talked to us about assisting families with funerals, that if you did funerals for those who had committed suicide and the deceased was a Christian, we were never to mention that fact. Frankly, it didn't sound right then, and it doesn't sound right today. Shame-based counsel never sounds right because it isn't right! And I didn't know enough to know that Job 3 was in the book back then. Had I known, I would have said, "Hey, what about Job?"

I want to write to you who are reading these lines who may be in the pit, struggling to find your way back. It's possible that things have gotten so dark that you need a competent Christian psychologist (or psychiatrist) to help you find your way. The most intelligent thing you can do is locate one and go. In fact, go as long as you need to go. Make sure that the counselor really does know the Lord Jesus and is truly competent, able to provide the direction you need so you can work your way through your maze of misery. And, I would add, "God bless you for every hour you spend finding your way out of the hole that you have been in. There is hope. Our faithful God will see you through."

Inferiority

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

Eleanor Roosevelt

I got this emailed to me from TriVita and just wanted to share in its entirety, as I think it's valuable stuff...

Keeping Your Memory Sharp

OK, I will admit it if you will – I have forgotten the names of people while talking to them! I have lost my car keys, misplaced my glasses and turned the wrong way on my drive home.

How about you? Does it seem like your memory is playing tricks on you as you age? Well, there are reasons for that and very few of the reasons are related to diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.

How to make a memory
Your memory is an amazing miracle. Each second, your brain processes billions of bits of information from your five senses. You may consciously perceive only a very small percentage of this information because one function of your brain is to filter out unimportant information. The things you remember will usually be advantageous to you, such as remembering your wedding anniversary date as well as where the speed trap is on your drive home.

Memory is divided into two basic groups:

1. Short-term memory
2. Long-term memory

Short-term memories are quickly forgotten when they are no longer important. Practicing or rehearsing can improve your memory by moving more information into the long-term category. For instance, when I am distracted by stress I may not be able to remember where I left my car keys. That information was deleted from my short-term memory. However, if I consciously say, “I am hanging my car keys on the hook,” I am far more likely to remember where they are.

How to keep a memory

Reduce stress
Stress kills your memory. The stress system is designed to ensure survival. It helps us fight off a snarling dog or flee from a menacing bear. As important as that is, humans do more every day than merely survive. If you want to have a good, healthy memory, do all you can to reduce the need for fight or flight stress responses.

Learn something new
As I mentioned earlier, practicing or rehearsing something enhances memory. So does learning something new. You see, memory is facilitated through the billions of neurons and synapses in your brain by patterns: retracing old patterns as well as creating new patterns. The more new things we master, the more connections we create and the better our overall memory will be.

If you want to remember your anniversary, start learning a foreign language. If you want to remember important names, learn how to play a musical instrument. The more you learn – and the more you connect the old with the new – the better your overall memory will be.

How to nourish a memory
Certain nutrients help the memory remain sharp. These nutrients fall into two basic categories: those that create brain structure and those that nourish brain function.

Your brain is made mostly of fat. And the majority of that fat is an Omega-3 fatty acid called DHA. So, to have a healthy brain we need healthy fats like OmegaPrime. Your nerve cells convert some fats into functional nerve proteins called myelin. Formation of myelin requires dietary protein and Vitamin B-12. So, for healthy brain structure and function we need Omega-3 fats, healthy dietary protein and Vitamin B-12.

When the memory is activated it creates heat in the brain. To fuel the memory, quench the heat, and repair the daily wear and tear on your brain, you need antioxidants. Certain antioxidants specifically target brain function. A recent study at Arizona State University demonstrated that the antioxidants found in Optima4 not only helped golfers perform better on the course, but they also significantly improved their memory.

What do you remember?
To recap: Occasional memory lapses usually indicate you are distracted by stress. Rehearsing things you want to remember will help and practicing new things that you have learned will help as well. Because new behaviors create new pathways in your brain, learning something new such as a foreign language or musical instrument can improve your overall memory.

Stress kills your memory. Nutrients such as Omega-3, Vitamin B-12 and brain-specific antioxidants such as those found in Optima4 help rebuild and restore your ability to remember. With all of these tools at your disposal you have access to the power of a healthy memory.

Take Control of Your Health

• Reduce stress
• Increase physical and mental activity
• Learn something new
• Rehearse before an important event
• Practice and review the things you want to remember
• Nourish your memory with
  • OmegaPrime
  • Super Sublingual B-12
  • Optima4

Some Children Must Work Too Hard To Learn

I received this via email from the Home School Legal Defense Association, but it has great information for anyone who struggles in school or with learning...

It is always puzzling to a parent when one of their children doesn’t learn to read or write as quickly as their siblings. Sometimes parents find that giving the child more time to mature works well. Other times the child struggles with the learning process in spite of being given more time.

Maybe you are a parent who has recently taken your child out of the school setting because he was not learning well, despite an Individual Education Plan and special reading and writing classes. Your child is likely suffering from a block in one or more of his “learning gates.” One of the main learning gates is the “writing learning gate,” and consequently is the most common to be blocked by a glitch in learning.

Writing Gate Blocked—When Copying Doesn’t Work

God designed our left brain hemisphere to concentrate on new tasks, such as driving a car, or riding a bike. After concentrated practice, that task is then transferred over the corpus callosum (the brain midline), to the right brain, which is responsible for automaticity of processes. If we imagine the left brain hemisphere as the “thinking (concentrating) brain” and the right hemisphere as the “doing (automatic) brain,” we can see how this transfer allows us to “think and do” at the same time. Then we can think and drive at the same time, or think and ride our bike at the same time.

Generally, when we teach a child how to write, after six months of practice that writing is expected to cross over from the “concentrating brain” to the “automatic brain” so the child can now “think and write” at the same time. For many children, this transfer does not easily occur. Thus, they have to give energy, or a level of concentration, to a task that other children do not have to do...

This often solves the mystery of why many children learn their spelling words easily by writing them in a workbook, or writing them five times each, while other children can write words hundreds of times and still not store the spelling word in their long-term memory. Now we realize that these struggling children have to use their “batteries” just for the writing process, so that the learning process cannot occur. Thus, the method of copying to learn is totally ineffective for these children. We need to help them open up their writing gates.

These children are very commonly thought of as “lazy, sloppy or unmotivated.” We, unknowingly, make them re-copy work that is sloppy, not realizing that they have a bona fide writing block. The majority of the time, when a child who loves to listen to mom read stories, but says that he doesn’t like or even “hates” schoolwork, he is struggling with a blocked writing gate.

Characteristics

Let’s look at some of the symptoms children who have blocked writing gates present to us daily:

• Frequent or occasional reversals in letters or numbers (after age 7)
• Letters made from bottom to top (vertical reversals)
• Writing is very labor intensive
• Copying takes a long time
• Math problems solved mentally to avoid writing them down
• Writing appears sloppy and child is often considered lazy
• Oral recitation of stories is excellent, but writing is minimal
• Capital and small letters mixed in writing
• In math, lining up numbers in multiplication or division is difficult

No child has all of these characteristics, but if your child has several, you may consider this an area he or she is struggling in. If a child has many of the characteristics, or is over age 9 and still writes reversals, they may be labeled with dysgraphia. Many times these children are considered “gifted with a glitch.” They are excellent in verbal expression, but way behind in written expression. Writing paragraphs and longer papers are something that they take great pains to avoid. They give one-word answers whenever possible.

Compensation

When a parent recognizes that their child has a blocked learning gate, and is not just being sloppy or resistant to writing without a reason, then steps can be taken to alleviate some of the writing burden on the child, until the problem can be corrected.

• Reduce the amount of writing a child needs to do during the day. Do more answers for chapter questions orally. Limit the amount of writing in workbooks.
• Reduce or eliminate copying for 3-6 months. Save the child’s “battery energy” for writing paragraphs, or a paper once a week.
• Use another method of learning spelling words that does not include writing multiple times. Resources include Sequential Spelling or Right Brain Spelling.
• Teach the child keyboarding for some writing projects (However, most children who have dysgraphia, or a writing glitch, also find keyboarding quite labor-intensive also.)

Correction

There are various methods that can be used to take the stress out of a child’s writing system, and make the whole writing process more fluent. Here are a few:

• NILD has a private therapy program that incorporates “Rhythmic Writing” to help reduce the stress in the writing system.
• “The Source for Dyslexia and Dysgraphia,” from LinguiSystems contains ideas on how to correct writing problems.
• The “Brain Integration Therapy Manual” by Dianne Craft, contains a daily “Writing Eight Exercise,” that opens the child’s writing gate and eliminates reversals.
• “Handwriting Without Tears” is a writing program that works well after a child has a strong midline.

Conclusion

A child can have a learning glitch, or block in a learning gate, that causes him to struggle everyday with schoolwork, without the parents’ knowledge. Using some simple checklists, the parent can identify this problem and design the school day to be less frustrating. More importantly, the parent can avail herself of all the wonderful corrective techniques, so that the child does not need to struggle with the burden of having to work so hard at writing, or with a dysgraphia. God has wonderful answers for us. He leads us in so many ways, and we are ever grateful!

For more information on the Four Learning Gates, and how they can be affecting your child’s daily learning, visit the HSLDA Struggling Learners website. This site is designed to help parents both identify and correct many of the everyday learning challenges that children experience. Of particular interest is the “Smart Kids Who Hate to Write” article on that website.

Life Is Difficult

Read Job 1:1--12

Life is difficult. That blunt, three-word statement is an accurate appraisal of our existence on this earth. When the writer of the biblical book named Job picked up his stylus to write his story, he could have begun with a similar-sounding and equally blunt sentence, "Life is unfair."

No one could argue the point that life is punctuated with hardship, heartaches, and headaches. Most of us have learned to face the reality that life is difficult. But unfair? Something kicks in, deep within most of us, making it almost intolerable for us to accept and cope with what's unfair. Our drive for justice overrides our patience with pain.

Life is not just difficult, it's downright unfair. Welcome to Job's world.

Job was a man of unparalleled and genuine piety. He was also a man of well-deserved prosperity. He was a godly gentleman, extremely wealthy, a fine husband, and a faithful father. In a quick and brutal sweep of back-to-back calamities, Job was reduced to a twisted mass of brokenness and grief. The extraordinary accumulation of disasters that hit him would have been enough to finish off any one of us today.

Job is left bankrupt, homeless, helpless, and childless. He's left standing beside the ten fresh graves of his now-dead children in a windswept valley. His wife is heaving deep sobs of grief as she kneels beside him, having just heard him say, "Whether our God gives to us or takes everything from us, we will follow Him." She leans over and secretly whispers, "Why don't you just curse God and die?"

His misery turns to mystery with God's silence. If the words of his so-called friends are hard to hear, the silence of God becomes downright intolerable. Not until the thirty-eighth chapter of the book does God finally break the silence, however long that took. Even if it were just a few months, try to imagine. You've become the object of your alleged friends' accusations, and the heavens are brass as you plead for answers from the Almighty, who remains mysteriously mute. Nothing comes to you by way of comfort. It's all so unfair; you've done nothing to deserve such anguish.

Pause and ponder their grief---and remember that Job had done nothing to deserve such unbearable pain. If it had been you, how would you have responded?

Day by Day, Charles Swindoll, July 2005, Thomas Nelson, inc., Nashville, Tennessee. All rights reserved. Purchase "Day by Day" here.

World Alzheimer’s Day

Did you know?

• World Alzheimer’s day is commemorated every year on September 21.
• 6 out of 10 Alzheimer's patients wander away from home. Of those, 70% will wander more than once.
• It is estimated that more than 5 million people have Alzheimer's or another form of dementia.

Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive, degenerative condition, is characterized by worsening symptoms which, in advanced stages, include confusion, memory loss, disorientation, dementia and the inability to communicate. People with these advanced symptoms often require continuing supervision to prevent them from harming themselves or wandering away from home. Advanced symptoms may be mistaken for drunkenness or mental illness.

This was sent to me by MedicAlert, and they had some amazing stories of how their bracelets have helped keep individuals with Alzheimer's safe. Worth checking out...