Learning & Living: Finding Calm In The Storm

Hello, good morning, good evening, or good day, wherever and whenever this post finds you! It has been a busy, busy week. I made a quick trip to Las Cruces. I managed to finish the book by Casey Means, MD, and Calley Means, which revealed many of the metabolic health issues plaguing Americans today and how many of the health issues, both physical and mental, are all a result of poor metabolic health and the foods that we eat. As someone who has been trying to focus on my health and ensure that I eat food that will be good for my long-term health, it was an incredibly insightful book that challenged me to continue to refine the types of foods I eat. Realizing the catastrophic effects of sugar on the body, I also decided to try and further narrow down my sugar and eventually eliminate sugar intake.

There were so many takeaways from this book that I can’t begin listing them here. So, if you are someone who has struggled with any mental or physical health issues, I would highly recommend checking out this book as it aims at informing people how they can take their long-term health into their own hands and fix the root issues that are making them sick. Understanding how the food we eat can and does affect someone’s health and changing our diets can help ensure the risks of Alzheimer’s, PCOS, depression, and so many other health issues that today’s Americans struggle with.

From there, I decided to dig into the 1950s and 1960s government history and specifically how the CIA was established and used the research of Nazi scientists to try and create mind-control drugs as they saw an urgent need to discover this technology as they believed that the Soviets had already figured it out. From this reasoning, the CIA began to expand its operations and created things like “Project MK-Ultra,” which is a collection of different projects that sought to harness both chemical and psychological weapons to control field agents while also finding ways to break the minds of captured agents and get them to reveal their nations secrets. Through this project, the American people became unwitting test subjects for many of these efforts. As the CIA had minimal oversight or restriction, their efforts became increasingly deranged, and it was reported that not even the head of the CIA knew what every project was. As this organization grew, it became a multithreaded hydra of power; seemingly, nothing was off limits for them.

It was during these early days that the CIA began to experiment with LSD as they were convinced that this Nazi drug was what they were looking for, a mind-control drug. So, they began to use it and funded its use in various sectors. Some universities were given massive grants to use it in “research” projects. Through this, professors would begin to expose their students to this drug, all in hopes of discovering this mind-control drug or what they sometimes called a “truth serum.” Other CIA operations had agents create safe houses where they would recruit prostitutes to entice and drug unwitting clients through a mixture of sexual pleasure and an LSD trip; the CIA would sit behind two-way mirrors and observe the prostitutes work and train them how to get these clients to divulge all their secrets.

These were a few of the active operations that the CIA employed during this time; others included buying off journalists to change narratives that favored their goals, or they would simply install agents as alleged journalists and then create stories to fit their narrative. Looking at today’s political climate, it’s hard not to wonder where and how this is happening today. If these were the tactics they were willing to employ back then, what new forms of psychological warfare are they willing to or actively utilizing today? These were some of the questions I was left with as I read these books. These are a few more books in this genre on my reading list that I hope to dig into over the coming weeks. Who knows, by the end, I may end up sounding like a full-blown “conspiracy theorist.”

With all of these ideas whirling around, life also got more chaotic. We were finally able to sell a house my Mom, and I had been trying to sell for a few years, only to have the buyers of my Moms’s motel back out the next day and tell us they were quitting and going to abandon the motel. This forced my Mom and I to make a rushed visit to Wellington to figure out how to get this motel operational again, as we had received reports that these people had run the motel into the ground and failed to take care of it. And so, with hunting season around the corner, we had no choice but to try and get this place back on track and operational. So, Friday was spent cleaning and figuring out a solution to keep the motel from going under. It was a long and rather stressful day, and eventually, my mom and I made it back home at midnight with a semblance of a plan in place.

So here I sit on Saturday morning, with a dozen thoughts swirling around in my head about what to do next and how best to proceed. With all these questions and potential solutions, I found two reminders standing out in my mind that I will share with you today. The first is rather short and simple, and it comes with a question that is meant to help someone in a situation with a thousand variables to manage problems and get a successful outcome. The question is this; “How do you eat an elephant?” It's both a simple and silly visual, but it works for me. The answer obviously is “One bite at a time.” I think I often complicate an issue or get overwhelmed by the scope of the problem and so get lost. But it suddenly becomes far more manageable when I slow down and just break the problem down to one bite-sized piece at a time. The best and easiest solution is figuring out the goal and moving forward from there. Yesterday, despite it being overwhelming at times, it was simple: get the rooms clean; that is all. There were still a thousand other problems to sort out, but we had to start there; if the rooms weren’t clean, we would have no customers. The crunch for us being that hunting season would begin Tuesday. But the constant reminder was, for me, one bite at a time.

The second and far more important orienting factor to this problem was to see how faithful God was in real-time. We had been trying to sell this house in Wellington for years, and by God’s divine providence, He allowed us to finally sell it a day before the motel was abandoned. Because of this, we had the financial means to manage the bills without losing the property. Now, we could still lose it; things could go south at any moment. But seeing God so evidently working things out and providing us with the means we needed at JUST the right time moment. There is still a wall of problems and issues that have to be sorted out, but in the chaos, finding a way to slow down enough to see how God is working has been the best way I have found the ability to reorient myself and avoid being overwhelmed.

By God's grace and love, we are still floating, and He is working in the midst of this mess. I share these details so that someone else can also be encouraged in the midst of whatever mess they may find themselves in that God is good, and He DOES work all things for those who love Him. He is faithful, and He does not abandon us in the midst of the storms of life. I want to share this so that others can see in real-time the goodness of God. He does not promise us that the road will be easy, nor does He say that there won’t be more issues, but He does promise that He will be faithful and that He will not leave or forsake us. So I hope whoever and wherever this finds you, you too can be encouraged that God is at work and that He is working for your good. Hang on in the midst of the storm, and if you keep your eyes open, you will see Him work miracles. Don’t stare into the waves of problems buffeting you, but instead, look to the horizon, and you will see Him walking on the water, calming each wave as His once-pierced feet touch the waves.