“Sugar has been a component within western diets since the sixteenth century. While 500 years ago, the average human would be lucky to come across sugar, it is estimated that today the average Westerner consumes 3 lb of sugar a week. Overall, our sugar consumption per year has risen from 5 lb per person, per year in 1700, to 152 lb per person in 2000. Recent research has found evidence that sugar, while not only bad for our waistlines, can have deleterious effects on our brain. Sugar has been found to shrink areas responsible for important functions such as memory and mood regulation, wearing on the hippocampus.”

Positive Psychology and The Body (Open University Press, 2013)

Christ and calamity go together. As Jesus said: “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). When calamity strikes, you need Jesus.

Harold L. Senkbiel

(2020).

Christ and Calamity: Grace and Gratitude in the Darkest Valley (2020). (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020)

Not only does the experience of tragedy give us an exceptional opportunity for growth, but some sort of suffering is also necessary for a person to achieve maximal psychological growth. In his study of self-actualizers, the paragons of mental wellness, the famed humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow noted that ‘the most important learning lessons… were tragedies, deaths, and trauma… which forced change in the life-outlook of the person and consequently in everything that he did.’

 

Thanks (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 256

April 23, 1910, President Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech in Paris, France – “Man In The Arena.” Here is a quote worth applying daily to our lives.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

How will you apply this quote to your living today?