Episode 75 - Spiritual Basics - #1

As a physician I talk about starting with the essentials - sleep , hydrate and eat well - same goes for spiritual wellness - 

Transcript

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This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. Hello and welcome back to Shine. I'm your host, Nicole Florence, and hopefully you all had a wonderful long weekend as yesterday was Memorial Day. Um yep, so I took a day off, if y'all don't mind, but took a day off from podcasting, but of course not from the essentials, right? The essentials of the word, uh, prayer and being grateful. And I was thinking about that because, you know, as a physician, we, you know, try to encourage, you know, healthy things for our patients to maintain themselves under times of duress or times of just trying to posture themselves into wellness. And a lot of times we just start with just the essentials, right? We'll start with, hey, you need your rest, get some sleep, you need to hydrate, drink water, and you need to eat healthy, right? We'll start there. And I'm not even going into yes, you know, physical activity, whole foods, blah blah blah. But sometimes you have to start with the absolute basics and meet people where they're at. And I was thinking about that, just spiritual wellness, that sometimes we have to start with the basics, especially if we're in a place of being challenged or uprooted. Um, the basics that I like to stick with are prayer daily, or it can just be quiet time with God, whatever you want to call it, knowing your word, and being grateful. Those three things on a daily basis will get you the absolute basics of spiritual wellness. So even if you are in a time of wilderness, um being in the desert, um, going through, you know, some challenging times, which we all have, will have, have had, however you want to say it, I know that sticking to those three fundamental things on a daily basis will keep me anchored, will keep me in a place of peace and comfort amidst the chaos. You know, people will say to me, Nikki, how do you do it? And I'm very forthcoming. I I can't do it on my own. Um I do it with God, hands down, before they even get the sentence out of their mouth. I am very forthcoming that when there are challenges, the only way that I can make it through is with God. Because I know in my most vulnerable time, in my time of weakness, in my time of absolute exhaustion. I call it holistic exhaustion, right? Physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. That is when I truly know that I need him. And only him, and only he is going to really get me through when I don't see a way to get there. So leaning in on these basic fundamentals every single day reminds me of that, brings me to a closer relationship with God, but even more so, a realization that I cannot do things with my own strength. So let's start with just simple prayer, and we've talked about this before. You know, what does that look like? I'm not a good prayer. I still say that I need practice on a daily basis. Um, but a lot of it is just acknowledging the fact in my prayers that everything I am, everything that I have comes from him, from the most essential breath that I breathe every moment, um, from the most essential food and shelter and provisions that I have, uh, but the protection of things that I do not see, but most of all his faithful love, his never-ending mercy, and the blessings of his grace. And sometimes my prayer is just that. Sometimes my prayer is the simple quiet time of I don't know what to say, but I know that you know my heart. And where I used to pray, why, why, why, right? Why, Lord, why, Lord? Why am you know I'm going through this? Why is my loved one going through this? Why, why, why? And then I would pray, when, when is it gonna be over? When is it gonna be over over? So I I don't, I no longer pray for the answer to the why, I no longer pray for the answer to the when. But what I do pray is I know that I am one day closer to the purpose, I'm one day closer to the goodness of what will come out of whatever this day brings, and I'm one day closer to your glory. So pray. Tomorrow we'll talk about knowing the word, which we've touched on before, but of course I have a story for you. And of course, how do we truly walk in gratitude as we concentrate on the spiritual essentials, spiritual wellness essentials to uh get us through uh some of these challenging times as as well as help us uh be thankful and praise the good the good times as well. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.