Coty Terry

I think I have a problem. I struggle with being bored. Not just with nothing to do, but when I’m doing something that bores me, I want to swiftly move on to something more interesting. Even when I’m reading I book I want to read, if I reach a part that’s not that interesting, I want to skip and move to where the guy meets the girl already. What is wrong with me?  I know I’m not alone. We live in a world now with instant gratification. If an ad pops up, we can skip. If a video’s too long, we can move onto the shorts. If a movie is putting us to sleep, we can navigate to Netflix’s home page to find the next big hit. No more road trips staring out the window. Instead our daydreaming now consists of scrolling on Instagram. No more making up stories in the backyard. Now we just pretend we’re in the backyard behind our VR headsets.  Okay, I don’t know if all of that’s true. I’m sure kids still play outside and we have meaningful conversations in the car, but you get my point. It’s ...

Choices. So many choices. I often stress about making the right one, and it’s wearing me out. Have you ever shopped at Walmart and been immediately overwhelmed because you don’t know which way to turn first, to the produce or the toothpaste, left or right, or even if to buy the name-brand tomato sauce or the generic, and if name, which name, and if generic, organic or regular? There are so many decisions to be made in Walmart because there are so many options, so many temptations. You know you should go with the healthier side of rice, but having chips as a side sounds really tasty. It’s a battle between taste buds and digestion, money for gas and higher quality food, more time in the evening and a unprocessed, raw whole chicken.  It could just be me that goes through this when I step into Walmart or, possibly, any big grocery store, but the real problem is that I deal with this on the daily with anything, constantly trying to make the right decision. Should I take my phone with me...

God has been really showing me my fears lately. The newest one is being ridiculed for my eating habits and/or disrespecting others for bringing my own food. I’ve been on a health journey the last several years, trying to heal my digestive issues and, lately, also my acne (I found out acne can come from internal issues as well). When I was praying to God for help on this, I felt like He told me key points to follow, one of which is to eat whole foods.  So I’ve been trying my best: milling my own flour from whole grains and baking, using dehydrated whole cane sugar (sucanat) instead of processed sugar, eating brown rice instead of rice, making sauces and dressings and desserts and food from scratch instead of trusting in the store’s ingredients. And I’ll tell yall, I have felt and seen a difference. My skin is smoother and my stomach no longer hurts. To put it bluntly: I can poop regularly and I’m not as gassy. I also used to get stomach pains that I haven’t been experiencing. My cra...

Lately I’ve had a wake-up call: that I’ve been clinging to my husband and it wasn’t actually the right thing to do. It wasn’t normal and was instead rooted in hurt and fear. God reminded me to start meditating on “Jesus loves me” in every moment that I was struggling or when my husband was venting his feelings to me to be open and honest or when I felt alone or when I got nervous of the future, etc. I would meditate on that truth throughout the day, continuing to do whatever I was doing. And while I meditated, I noticed a shift in my mindset, that I wasn’t hurt thinking about Joshua doing something without me, or needing a nap when I wanted to hang, or hanging out with his family when I wasn’t there. I noticed I was calmer and not as afraid, that I was more secure in myself and just doing things on my own, hanging with the Lord, possibly how I used to be before marriage, when I didn’t have someone’s attention I thought I had to continue to seek. Because God allowed me to see the differ...

November 14, 2020 We were leaving my hometown after a weekend with my family. Joshua came to meet both my parents and my siblings for the first time, so it was a big weekend for him. They seemed to like him, were smiling a lot and being completely themselves, not trying to put up a front just to impress him.  He seemed to like them, answered all their questions and made himself comfortable in the house, not trying to put up a front just to impress them.  They seemed to like each other, but I definitely had to check in with all of them to make sure, starting with him as soon as we called each other on our way back to our respective cities.  But first thing’s first: gas. Neither of us wanted to get stranded during our 3-hour drives home because we ran out of gas.  I led him to the closest gas station to my childhood home (though I forgot how to get there and almost got us lost on a 4-minute drive), and we parked our cars close to each other. Before getting out of my ca...

I’ve been a little chaotic the past few weeks adjusting after Joshua’s surgery. The flow is different and I’ve had to do more than I used to, but God has been using this opportunity to remind me to use my planner. When I have a long to-do list of things I really want to get done but haven’t planned out how or if any needs to be pushed to a different day, I get overwhelmed and try to do them all. Then I want to quit when I realize each thing took longer than I was hoping they would in my head. That’s how I’d been living the past, maybe, couple months - or at least weeks - before Joshua’s surgery, thinking I had a decent handle on my schedule that I no longer needed to plan. Boy, was I wrong.  I keep going through this cycle of planning for a few weeks and then quitting when I think about how much time it takes to plan and I convince myself I can just keep track in my head. I never do well at keeping track in my head. I either forget things or assume something that takes 30 minutes r...