The Narrow Path

Binge drinking teenagers are still at risk of absent-mindedness and forgetfulness days later, a study says.

I want to say right off the bat that I do not find anything inherently wrong with drinking. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that drinking is against God. The Bible does mention drunkenness as something to be avoided and gives plenty of reasons why… and I’m sure most of us know those reasons, so I won’t go into them. I myself do not drink now, due to a decision my wife and I made while we were still dating. We made poor decisions while drinking, and said things that we regretted later, or wish we had said while sober, so that it had more impact etc. We decided it was much better to stop drinking, so that we could trust each other and ourselves much more fully.

Now if you, the reader did used to drink, then do you remember the dumbs? or the stupids? The day after, my mind just did not work correctly, even if I only had a little to drink. Being a programmer, I think I noticed it a lot more than most other people, due to the nature of my work. It always seemed like the drinking made a difference on my logic. I just couldn’t make certain connections that I would normally be able to think through, several steps ahead of the game. I always felt this wall in my brain that I just could not bust through.. a limit to my logic, to my thinking. Some people felt it, others did not.. and it always seemed to be in the logic area of thinking.

This report was just released and I thought I would share it with my readers. I knew it wasn’t in my imagination, but it was really hard to explain to people, especially those that did not have a job that forced them to use a lot of logic…in most everyday activities I did not feel it too much. I could feel a cloud, but that was about it. It would go away a day later, but man it was annoying while it was there. This article shows that binge drinking.. or drinking A LOT, to the point of drunkenness and even worse to the blackout point, it’s not temporary, it’s actually permanent in developing brains, and I wonder also how permanent it might be in adult brains.

The spirit is a hardy thing, yet can be fragile also. The more we damage our brains the more likely we can be influenced in the negative (the reason I only include negative here, is because it’s so easy for us to do negative, yet so difficult to do good, so it’s easier for us to follow the negative influences). The devil can more easily influence us if our mind is not all there…one of the reasons why it’s so easy to do stupid things while drunk. If he can permanently damage our logical side… it would be that much more difficult to make good decisions in our lives, we would be run by emotions, instead of a nice balance of emotions and logic.

About a month ago, our church began to offer a “Get Out of Debt” weekly seminar.  My wife and I decided that even though we do pretty good with our finances that there are probably a lot of things that we could learn still. So we signed up and paid the $100 and prayed that it would be $100 well spent.

Im here to tell you… it’s definitely worth it!  The seminar is by a guy named Dave Ramsey.. some of you will recognize his name, and others, like my wife and I, have never heard of him before.  We are currently involved with his “Financial Peace University” series and last night’s lesson was on “Getting Rid of Debt”.  We got swept up in the presentation, ok well not swept up.. we have been on this path for a long time, and blended.. yes blended up our credit cards and are going to rely on God as our emergency fund, instead of the lenders.

We are not very far in debt thankfully. I did say that we were pretty good with our finances, but we are in debt and we would love to get out.  We did make the mistake of not having insurance when we became pregnant, so we’ll have debt there when the time comes, but we are following the outlines and are taking the steps necessary to begin the process of becoming debt free and to have financial freedom.  And.. as Dave Ramsey says, “We are going to live like no one else now, so that we can live like no one else later”.  Which when 70% of the US is broke and living paycheck to paycheck.. “normal” is not exactly what we are going for here

Check out his website and if you’re interested, we can’t say enough about the sessions, search for a group in your area and go for it!

The Prayer
St. Francis of Assisi

Lord, make
us instruments of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let us sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, union;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, Grant that we may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

I wrote this up since my Pastor asked me to give my testimony to the church one sabbath, and I know there has been some of you that have asked me about it.. so here you go. Obviously it’s only a tiny part, but anyways.. without further ado…

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For other resources that your Church might like to use, please click on the movie.

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