December 6, 2013

Good morning all-

Well it's Friday and the start of High School Basketball season and I'm excited.  I am so happy that my son has one more opportnity to prove to himself and others that God gave him a talent.  Do I think he will go professional?  Probably not.  But through this experience I hope he learns that God is in control, He provides us with gifts and He uses them for His glory.  And through it all, I just pray that he bonds with his team, becomes a role model and goes to God with every success and every failure.

Sports has always been just a game in my mind.  It's more of a hobby than a career.  Lately, my opinion has changed.  I see the correlations of sports analyogies to real life.  I never thought that being an athlete had anything to do with your mental toughness but today I do.  I have watched my son take over the court and I have watched him give up.  He always had the talent but he lost the belief.  I think all of us do that from time to time.  We have a success and we can go for miles; we get challenged and automatically we've failed.  It took me a long time to look at failure as a positive and to be honest I still fight that mindset.

How I achieve mental toughness is by going to Jesus.  I long ago gave up the fact that I was successful in my own right.  My success comes from Jesus.  It always did it just took me time to die to myself and put him in the driver seat.  My failures can be successes.  I bet you never heard that before!  But honestly every time I've failed I went to Jesus and found a solution or overcame the challenge.  Of course it wasn't overnight but out of my failure I found that Jesus became my focus and therefore, my failure brought Him glory.

Every day I am challenged with failure.  I am helping run a small company that has a very emotional management team.  I often find myself dealing with emotion rather than running a company.  Sometimes it feels as if every one is on pins and needles and all at once they fall and so goes the attitude in the office.  We are in the advent season when joy and peace should be on our minds and yesterday all I thought is how to I control this damage.  I can't.  That's the conclusion I came to at 4:15 am this morning.  There is absolutely no way I can control a persons emotional health.  However, I can go to Jesus so this morning I sat on the internet, looked at news stories and all the time my mind was racing with how can I fix this mess?  I could have gotten up and started on this blog but my mind couldn't focus.  So when my oldest got out of bed and came upstairs super early, I realized that I had someone I could talk to about the problem.  His response, "Mom, I'll pray for you."  Wow!  I can't tell you how many times I have said those words to my kids.  That sentence got me out of my inner turmoil and into writing this blog.  I don't need to shoulder all this on me; I need to go to Jesus.

I have often lived by the motto that failure is not an option.  I came from a very hard working, lower income family.  My father worked and my mother stayed at home.  We didn't have a lot but we did have a lot of love.  Never did my parents give up.  However, they weren't really big on going to Jesus with their problems either.  I learned something this morning.  Whenever I wake at 4 am again with thoughts of what to do, I'm just going to Jesus because He's the reason I'm here anyway.  My success comes from Him and He has given me people to guide and mentor and to the best of my ability I will continue to do that.  As far as the other turmoil in my life, I'm giving that to Jesus too, asking Him for the words to speak and praying that He will take my company and make it a great place to work.

I can't make a rainbow every day but I can stick to what I believe.  Just like Hunter, I have to set my mind on the goal.  He will be thinking about his team and the basketball goal; I have to think about the goal Jesus set for us from the beginning.  My mind is a powerful tool.  Mental toughness in the world comes when we look upon Jesus for every need, every success and every failure.  I don't have all the answers and I don't know how today will go but I do know that I've put Jesus right where He should have been from the beginning, guiding me, loving me and instructing me toward Him.

I hope today finds you well and I pray that if your mind is roaming you will take your thoughts and bow down to the king of eternity.  That's all for now, I have to go wake up that teenager and pray over him.  By the end of this evening there will be a winner and a loser.  Either way,  my son needs to know I love him and so does Jesus.  May today be full of Jesus!

No time to spell check or read over.  Find a Scripture that means something to you today and meditate on God's words!!!!