Thank goodness we are finally done with Eat That Frog! That took forever!
I am not going to be doing a review per se of this book, but I'm currently reading it for #75Hard and have hits some good points I want to talk about.
Lucado writes about a real crime where thieves broke into a department store, "Instead of stealing anything, they changed the cost of everything. Price tags were swapped. Values were exchanged. These clever pranksters took the tag off a $395.00 camera and stuck it on a $5.00 box of stationery. The $5.95 sticker on a paperback book was removed and placed on an outboard mother. They repriced everything in the store!" pg 14
Here is why he shares that story, "...four hours no one noticed that all the values had been swapped.
Hard to believe? It shouldn't be--we see the same thing happening every day. We are deluged by a distorted value system. We see the most valuable things in our lives peddled for pennies and we see the cheapest smut go for millions." pg 14
"Our values are messed up. Someone broke into the store and exchanged all the price tags. Thrills are going for top dollar and the value of human beings is at an all-time low." pg 15
I think of how rampant the message has spread about the need for self-care. Like it is another thing you HAVE to do. Like it is more important than anything else you can do and you know it isn't true. Things are out of balance in your life and it feels like everything is coming unhinged... and a nice clay mask will fix all of that... or ELSE!
You know what I mean? Yeah, there might be better examples of our value systems gone awry, but that's the one stuck in my craw right now. You know the grammar police are gonna getcha, but the beware the self care police because they are even scarier.
For those of you who are familiar with my spiritual journey, I will forever be a student, I have spent many years studying Tibetan Buddhism and have strove for non-attachment. Recently I did a self guided St. Ignatius retreat and I learned so much more about this practice of detachment.
Let me share St. Ignatius words with you,
"...as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. The same holds for all other things."
I think we forget that if it can be purchased, it has no value. I scrimped and save in high school for a leather letterman style jacket. It was $350. I wrote a check for it and was short by a couple bucks and then cried and panicked and scrimped more because I received a letter from the bank telling me that bouncing checks was a crime and I was going to jail if I didn't pay them back immediately plus the bank fees for $60. $60 is a whole lot when you are a teen.
Anyhow, that jacket was then stolen from me about 2 years later. And it was a relief. I had placed too large of a value on it. Extremely distorted value and at 18 years old I didn't know how to undo it.
That was a purchased item. St. Ignatius expands this thinking to states of being as well. Having a cold doesn't have to be better or worse than health, it can just be.
A popular saying is that you can't pour from an empty cup. You aren't a cup. And you don't have to be empty, you can be filled with the inexhaustible Spirit.
Just be. Without judgment. Without value. How freeing would that be?
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