We’re reading David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt as a vehicle to self-improvement. While we can’t control what happens to us we can control how we respond. Goggins is helping us improve how we do that. Below are my reflections from chapters 8 and 9.
After an unplanned hiatus it’s time for week 4 of our reading Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins together. We’re reading it as a vehicle for our improvement. We’re don’t want to waste a great opportunity before us. We’re seizing the initiative to grow and emerge from this shutdown better than we began. Below are my reflections for reading chapters 6 and 7.
One thing appears sure, 2020 will be a year unlike others in recent memory. Events and circumstances continue to change at a break neck speed. Hot cultural topics come and go as quickly as we’ve ever seen.
How do we respond in times like this? What can we do when life comes at us with such amazing speed?
We respond as we do at all other times. We focus on what remains within our control. One thing that forever remains within our hands is what we fill our minds with.
Below is a quick look at books I read in May. They contain ideas and principles that shape how I think about the world and shape how I interact in it. That’s what reading does. I hope you find at least one book below to pick up and fill your mind with. Few things could be so important.
This is week 3 of our reading Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins together. We’re reading it as a vehicle for our improvement. We’re don’t want to waste a great opportunity before us. We’re seizing the initiative to grow and immerge from this shutdown better than we began. Below are my reflections for reading chapters 4 and 5.
My wife and I want to be great parents. We desire to point our son in the right direction and set him up to live a good and wise life. We want to equip him with the skills, habits, and character necessary to navigate this world, but more than anything we want to make Christ attractive to him. While good grades, polite behavior, and sound morals are good, right, and necessary we would trade them all for our son to know and follow Jesus. If at the end of our days, we can look back knowing we did our best to introduce him to the truth of who Jesus is, we will have done our job.
Our job is much more than passing along a religion or strongly held belief. It is to introduce him to the truth. Truth makes sense of reality and tells you how to live. It provides a path forward and way through the darkness. In short, trusting in Christ aligns you with the way things actually are and enables you to live in the path of the wise.
This is week 2 of our reading Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins together. We’re reading it as a vehicle for our improvement. We’re don’t want to waste the great opportunity our times offer. We’re seizing the initiative to grow and immerge from this shutdown better than we began. Below are my reflections for reading chapters 2 and 3.
Throughout January, I chewed upon the Proverbs like never before. As an aid in my study, I grabbed a pair of commentaries by Bruce Waltke. They are creatively titled The Book of Proverbs 1-14, and The Book of Proverbs 15-31 and are part of the NIV Commentary Series. I am grateful to these resources in helping me gain a deeper understanding of the wisdom the Proverbs were meant to impart.
This is week 1 of our reading Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins together. We’re reading it as a vehicle to our own transformation. We want to seize this moment (the great shutdown of 2020) to improve. We don’t want to waste the immense opportunity it affords us–the chance to emerge from our burrows better than we entered them. Below are my reflections from reading the Introduction and Chapter One.
The most desired life outcomes await us on the far side of not just hard, but intentional work. That intentional work comes in the form of effective habits. Habits that define what we do, and more importantly what we don’t do each day.
It’s easy to pay lip service to our living within clearly defined and established habits. It is quite another, and altogether more effective, to walk the path of daily discipline they require.
I don’t want to simply pass the time during this shutdown. May Netflix and chill never pour forth from my lips. May it forever remain anathema. No, I’ve set my sights on emerging from this season better than when it first began.
I want to help you do the same as well. Join me on my quest for self-improvement by reading a book that’s quite timely for us now–Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. It tells the story of David’s life and puts the lessons he learned through intense suffering on a shelf we can reach.
Darkness usually appears to crawl at a consistent steady pace. Now and then, however, its movements accelerate. Swiftly it sweeps across the land–leaving destruction in its wake. The shutdown of vast swaths of the world’s economy brings the worst within our society to the surface. Crime rates rise as unemployment figures skyrocket. Other things like selfishness, pride, fear, anxiety, distrust, and anger also bubble to the surface.
Hardship reveals more than it forms. It peels away the crafted veneer we show the world, leaving us exposed. Day by day, moment by moment, hard times eat away at the face we show the world. In the end, they leave you baring all before strangers and friends alike.
You need not fear this revealing. Fear not. More than anything else hardship teaches you about yourself. It shows you exactly who you are. It leaves you nowhere to hide. Hardship forces you to take stock of your inward life and face up to what you see.
My grandmother would be 90 today. Unfortunately, she passed a few days shy of this milestone. I attempted to read the following reflections at her memorial service this past week, but couldn’t stay on script or keep it together well enough to honor her as I wanted. Below are the words I wrote soon after learning of her death.
This is our final week reading Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins together. We’ve spent the past six-plus weeks combing through Goggins’ story for lessons to apply to our lives. If anything we’ve faced the repeated lesson that while we can’t control everything to happen to us, we can control how we respond. Below are my reflections from chapters 10 and 11.