Learning
🤔
In Productive Failure Manu Kapur gave me a bit more courage to try things and fail at them. It’s a deep dive into the research on failure and learning, complete with design principles for lessons that incorporate failure. The idea is that since the two are so strongly connected, we shouldn’t leave failure-induced learning to chance but instead embrace it in a thoroughgoing manner. His TEDx talk is a good summary. The book gave me a fuller sense of what learning with a growth mindset could look like. I have loads to learn in my new role at work, so I’ll be using it as a lab for experimenting with this approach.
Health
🙄
I dealt with another health insurance hiccup over my medication. Each time this happens, I learn more about how the medical system works and how to manage it better, and so this year’s problem is getting resolved a lot faster than last year’s, and my stress level is much lower. This year the issue is my pharmacy got bought, so the insurance is having me switch to another one. They also wanted me to switch medications, but I declined.
Spirituality
🧐
I mostly finished assembling a basic outline of discipleship. The step for the following week was to add my pressing questions where they fit into the outline, and then I’d choose a place in the Bible to start studying this topic. Meanwhile I’m listening to The Complete Book of Discipleship, which is very good so far—personable, informative, and challenging.
I assembled a day-long journey through Jesus’ life. I felt the need for a body of spiritual things I could redirect my mind to whenever I wanted to raise the level of my thoughts, and I arrived at the idea of a 16-hour schedule of episodes from the Gospels so I’d always have a specific and meaningful option. That week I made a first pass at the schedule, and the next was for revisions. There are different opinions on the exact order of events, but I’m basing my arrangement on the Broadus Harmony of the Gospels by AT Robertson, since I have it and it has a reasonably clear outline.
People
😌
Saturday I attended an online retirement party for Margaret Webb, the therapist whose seminars trained me in Immanuel Prayer. It’s been a long time since I was involved in her ministry, Alive and Well, but the gathering brought me back to a sense of the community’s depth, and it gave us all a welcome chance to celebrate what a treasure she is. The party was well organized with some sharing from various leaders in the ministry, a trivia game about Margaret’s life, and a short but meaningful connection exercise. Silently we each relived our own positive memory that involved Margaret, and then we took turns sharing the title we’d given the memory. It brought up emotions for me, as Life Model practices normally do.
Wow! I didn’t know Margaret had retired! She trained a therapist I went to for years.
Hope your health hiccup was resolved.
Yep, the meds are practically in my hands. And I kind of think Margaret is only technically retired. 😀 She’ll be an influence wherever she goes.