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...