SCRIPTURE: “When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, ‘At home even the hired servants have food enough to spare, and here I am dying of hunger!” (LUKE 15:17 NLT)
QUOTE: “There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.” -Archibald MacLeish
NOTE:
Post traumatic growth is a psychological concept which suggests that traumatic times can result in positive outcomes. Perhaps you’ve learned a new skill (how to teach a child, how to knit, how to help in the kitchen or do chores. Perhaps you’ve gained a new window on yourself—what you can handle, how much you can endure and what matters to you most. Perhaps you took on a project at work outside your normal responsibilities. Perhaps you’ve gained greater empathy for those around you. The brain is plastic, not elastic. When it is stretched, it doesn’t go back to the way things were, it develops to a new level and dimension—and you can begin 2023 from this new, expanded place. The things you learn are especially valuable to take forward and tap into for the future.
ILLUSTRATION:
Be more flexible. This should apply to how you interact with people and even how you approach certain situations. You soon realize that there are so many routes to get you to where you need to be and it’s important to be flexible and start to think outside of the box when you need to get things done. Seeing different approaches to problem solving by a diverse set of people truly does open your eyes to how many different ways there are to tackle the same problem/question with some methods that you’d never have even considered actually ending up being way more efficient than others.
REFLECTION:
How often do you learn from past experiences?
TWO YEAR BIBLE READING: Genesis 27 – 28. Psalm 18