Drained? Try These 5 Empowering Actions

Tamara shares 5 empowering actions to take when you're feeling drained, exhausted, worn out, and just feel you can't go on. Drained? Take These 5 Empowering ActionsToday I want to talk about something that I feel is so needed in the world today. I don't know about you, but I look around and I see a lot of discouraged, drained, exhausted, and worn out people. This has been a physically, emotionally, and mentally challenging year. It's been challenging because of the changes. I have seen so many people who are depleted and I have felt that way myself. And so because of that, I thought, Tamara, you need to talk about this. God Changed My Object LessonI have to go back to April of this year when I was feeling the need to teach this "feeling drained" concept to my children. They'd been home from school for a month and they just found out school was canceled for the rest of the year. So they were feeling frustrated and bummed out. How do we replenish that inner supply of strength when we're feeling down? How do we do it? So going back to this lesson that I was trying to teach my kids: I started trying to think about how I could teach refilling our souls with an object lesson. In my brain, I was picturing taking a water pitcher and filling it one cup at a time as I talked about each of the things you can do to fill yourself up. And as I was thinking and praying about that concept, God said, "That is not how it works Tamara." Ha! I love it when when God tells you--Nope, that's not quite it. Anyways, the good news is, He gave me a visual picture of what would work better than that object lesson. The Real Object LessonAnd so let me tell you what I did. I ended up getting a big empty plastic juice bottle. I rinsed it out and I took a big drill bit and I drilled a hole in the bottom of it. And then I screwed the hose to our house outside into the bottom of it. Then I turned the water on and the water filled this bottle up until it was overflowing. https://tamarakanderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/water-overflowing-bottle.jpg () So God taught me and I taught my children that when we are tapped into the correct power source, we have enough inside that we can fill ourselves and then share and give to others. I love the symbol of Christ being living water. But really, I think what we're tapping into His light. Our Spiritual Umbilical CordAnd I've come to visualize it as kind of a spiritual umbilical cord which ties us to God because I believe that every person born on this earth is a child of God. We read about that in the Scriptures. As the Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, observed, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." And spiritually, we are tied to God. We are His children, and He can connect with us. And He can fill us with whatever it is that we need. So let's get on to these five empowering actions we can each take to tap into that spiritual umbilical cord. 5 Empowering Actions to Tap into GodAction #1-Choose to Flip the SwitchSo the first thing that we need to do is we need to realize that we are the ones that control how much light or how much living water comes into us. It's our choice. Joshua in the Old Testament said, "Choose you this day whom ye will serve; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).You'll see all over in the Scriptures, invitations for us to choose to turn our power source on. Here is an example: “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you” (James 4:8).We Take the First StepSo God is saying, if you come to me, I will give this to you. He always lets us take the first step. The spiritual umbilical cord is there attached to us. It's ready to nourish us--to fill us with God's light, love, and strength beyond our own when we don't feel we can go on. But first He needs us to flip the switch needs us to turn the light on. The plug is in the outlet. But we need to be willing to flip the...