“I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and do good while they live.” – Ecclesiastes 3:14
Be happy and do good. What would your life look like if you were thriving in happiness? Personally? Professionally? In every area of your life?
Be happy. Do good. You’ll be doubly-blessed by happiness and goodness in your heart and be a double-blessing to others as you shine with happiness and goodness in this world that needs light, love and hope!
Is social media good for us? Social media can be life-giving or life-depleting. It depends on how we use it and what we hope to gain from it or give to people through it.
Do you log on or check in to your social media account and find that after you’ve invested five minutes, the time turns into an hour. You haven’t gotten anything else done. And you don’t feel better, but worse? A little less happy, hopeful and excited about your day or your life when you compare it to others?
Studies show that social media can be life-giving or life-depleting. Yet for most people, it’s a double-edged sword that increases our woundedness and deepens despair rather than ministering to it and mending it.
Social media does not equate with sociability. Social media is rife with social distractions. We must learn how to be less distracted and more impactful in our lives! More intentional. More inspired! Let’s pursue life, moments and connections that are “realer than real” – the ones that come person to person, engaging in life together in person, not merely on screen. Life that you can see, sense, touch, taste, smell, breath in, feel and experience is part of the wonderful fullness of life! So don’t let social media distract you from truly living!
Here are some ideas for Living Inspired:
Plan time today during lunch or after work to:
Share a face-to-face meal with a loved one or close friend
Go on a walk in nature with a loved one or encouraging friend
Spend quality time with your pets! They are unconditional love!
Find a place in your home or outside to take “1 minute of gratitude” and think about everything you’re thankful for – and everyone!
Even investing 1 minute in your well-being can help to bring you more inspired and fulfilling life than many minutes that are invested in a non-life-giving way on social media.
Is social media distracting or impacting? What do you think? Write me and share your thoughts here! I’d love to hear from you! – Mandy
This week, thousands upon thousands of Cubans are taking to the streets making an outcry for “libertad”. Freedom. In today’s world, various ideas of what it means to have freedom are being pathologically spewed from all kinds of ‘woke’ hostilities – from ethnic tension to sex/gender identity and onward. Yet the Cubans really know what it means to have and lose their freedom -beyond all the hype, rhetoric and proverbial “wokeness” of today’s media streams. Since 1959, they have experienced what I call “The Cost of Communism”.
Much like an insidious disease that slowly and quietly ravages a tender, innocent plant, communism has slowly taken over, infiltrated, and ravaged the freedom and ability to pursue the joys of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the Cuban people which capitalist economies help flourish.
I visited Cuba under the Castro regime. I brought a delegation there to study entrepreneurship in Cuba. While there, I experienced what it was like to have my freedom and rights taken away. I was detained, interrogated, followed, and barely able to leave the country because of my geopolitical interest. I witnessed throngs of young people rounded up into a military truck and arrested for “prostitution” because they were offering to guide tourists around Cuba in exchange for money to buy shampoo and other necessities. Why? Because in Cuba, people are barely able to survive. The government controls them under communism by limiting their access to food, resources and communication. Less than 5% of the population pursued entrepreneurship, not as private enterprise, but as personally-run business.
The ability to attain and maintain a livelihood is essential to catapult people and nations from a life of poverty a life of prosperity. This is as true for victims of dictatorships as it is for victims of domestic violence, human trafficking, and other predatory relationships. In all of these cases, a predator threatens, extorts and demeans them for the sake of oppressive, empty and vain power and control. Hopefully Cuba’s outcry will ultimately serve to help them find a road to true freedom and free enterprise.
Cuba’s outcry matters for all of us because when a nation’s government becomes more powerful than its people, democracy cannot flourish. It slowly and quietly gains a chokehold on our freedom, ultimately taking our voice away. We cannot let that happen. We must pursue freedom, life and liberty for all while also safeguarding our own basic, God-given, inalienable rights.
Mandy Seymour has a B.A in International Studies with a concentration in Latin America from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. She holds a certification in Entrepreneurship Essentials from Harvard Business School (online). Mandy specializes in prevention and awareness of predatory relationships and life beyond abuse. She is author of The Gift: A Deeper Understanding of Love.
Do you long for more peace and love in your life? So do I! Here’s a Mandy Message for you today on seeing more sanctuary in your life. In it, I share challenges and insight on how to live inspired in the midst of life’s challenges. We can live inspired in every area of our lives. It’s a process and a journey. Live inspired!
Are you ready to live inspired? What would your life look like if you could overcome challenges and acquire more peace, love and joy – personally and professionally? Let’s take the journey together! To live inspired is to truly live!
Explore your heart. What would our lives look like if we did this more? We are created with depth, purpose, beauty and intentionality. What would our lives look like if we were to truly live? Live life to the fullest? Be fully alive? Explore your heart. There is beauty, goodness and grace waiting for you there. Live inspired!
Lovie of Seymour SanctuaryLulu of Seymour SanctuaryLola of Seymour Sanctuary
Lovie, Lulu and Lola live at Seymour Sanctuary. They are a few days old. Chickens are wonderful! They each have their own personalities and vocalizations.
Lovie is a white silkie. Lulu is a bantam. Lola is an Easter Eggers. We brought them home from D & D Feed the week before Easter.
In 6 months, they will be ready to lay delicious, farm fresh eggs. Lola, our Easter Egger will lay blue eggs!
Whatever the question, love is the answer. Pure, true, clear love. How do you know when love is truly love? Not just desire or wanting or lust? Or something else?
Here is the answer:
1 Corinthians 13 New International Version 13 If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
True love is found in Jesus Christ. He is love incarnate. Trust Him. Know Him. Seek His love and to love as He loves. Love is the answer. All love comes from Him. Love is the answer!
