Well hello everyone. Thanks for coming. I'm very impressed with what you're doing with the women here. It's wonderful. And pray we could all in all our churches have a women's ministry. That if you want to get some ideas make sure you get to know this committee and take it back to your own church. It's great. So I am going to speak from something totally different than I have just been introduced to do. It isn't different. It's just a different place. I'm coming to the subject of the verse that was given. And all roads lead to Rome. You'll get the idea when I tell you. If I bend down and get it I might not be able to get up again. Yes. So pray with me for a minute. Give my words wings lord. May they fly high enough to touch the mighty.  Give my words wings lord. May they fly swift and far winning the race with the words of the worldly wise to the hearts of men. Give my words wings lord. See them nesting down at thy feet. Silence tend to ecstasy. Home at last. Teach us to pray. Teach us to love you with all our heart and mind and strength. We love you lord. Amen. I'd like you to turn to a very well-known Psalm, Psalm 23. And those of you that came to hear something quote sort of new and different tough. And I'm doing this for a reason, actually, because I found myself in my Bible reading coming to very familiar pastures and thinking, I need something new. I know this. If you go to a lot of funerals, you'll know it. And that's shame because it's not for funerals. It's for life. All the days of my life, all the days of my life, all the days of my life, all the way through. And one verse about the valley of the shadow of death. And yes, it's a great one for funerals, but it's a better one for life. And having said that, there are some passages of scripture that all of us will be our favorite or help. And sometimes you come and think like the little sheep that we're going to talk about.  And you go to Malachi or something like that. Try and find it in your Bible. It was on such a day that I had that experience. It wasn't this passage of scripture. It was a passage of scripture from Kings that I had grazed dry. I had written a little book about it. I did a play about it.  I had been ministering somewhere I can't remember where. I can never remember where, actually. Stuart says, I'm like Christopher Columbus who goes out not knowing where he was going. He gets there. He doesn't know where he is. He gets back and doesn't know where he's been. And it was on one of those days. And the plane was delayed and I get back at midnight and Stuart's somewhere else in another town or whatever and I'm home. But I come across a little note that's been left for me and it says, Mrs. Hext is dying and she has asked to see you. Now Mrs. Hext lived right the other side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Probably an hour to get there. And I just stood there and said, I'm done, Lord. I'll ring the pastor I know near there. And I knew that wasn't going to work. And so I turned obediently as I do in such cases. Okay, Lord, you tell me. Let me see where my evening reading is for tonight. And it was again a passage of scripture that I knew inside out. It was the woman with the little pot of oil, to remember.  I'm aware of that.  They'd left everything near Jericho to go to the Bible school. Elijah had gone to heaven in his fiery chariot. How else would he go? Right. And now it was Elijah's turn and Jezebel had been dealt with and it was time for the prophets to come out of hiding and join in little Bible schools again to be trained to be prophets of the Lord. This little family leaves, Jericho comes with the little family and everything is fine.  We ever had a situation in your life or your family's life where everything is just absolutely fine and then out of the blue, something like this. So she goes rushing out of the house and says to Elijah that my husband's just died and we're burying him and all of this and about a month later she goes back to Elijah and she says, the creditor is coming to take my children as slaves. I've sold everything in the house and it's all over and then very accusingly and you know he's served God. In other words, where were you God?  Have you ever been there? I have. How could you leaving everything? Probably a nice little business in Jericho that's where they came from and coming to serve the Lord and be trained as his prophets. Now we have a chance and then he drops dead. What is this? But the bigger thing was she didn't have any money. Everybody had taken all their goods, lived in community and everyone was poor and she was poorer and so the system was that you could give your children to the creditor and in Leviticus it says if that was the case you help the widow by training them in a craft or a business and in the year of Jubilee giving me kids if they're old enough, 12 up, back to the widow so they can take her and be reunited but they'd just forgotten about giving the children back had Israel at this point in Israel's history and so the creditor, though he be an Israelite was coming and saying well if you can't pay me anything give me the kids and not I'll train them and give you them back in seven years to look after you. They're done and the creditor's coming to take my kids and Elisha says what have you got in the house? Nothing. No, come on, what have you got? I've sold it all, I've sold it all, I've sold it all. Think, okay, I've got a little pot of oil, will that do? And they are very little today. If I had thought I was going to do this, which I hadn't I would have brought one to show you from Israel. Just very tiny little oil lamp. And that's all I've got Mr. Elijah so what are we going to do with that? And he said go and get the kids to go and collect all the stuff, all the buckets and baths from the village and bring them into the house and then he said to the widow and then pours out. Crazy, but she sensed a miracle and if I'd been here I would have said come with me you're the miracle man, I'm just a little widow. I mean I'm just a little widow. Your prayers are so powerful. No, our prayers aren't powerful, it's who we pray to. Don't get this idea if I could figure out how to say a marvelous prayer and claim God's whatever. No, it's nothing to do with that. It's who we pray to that makes the difference.  Must be because dad's died, what is all of this about and what she doing standing there? And I don't know how long she stood. I would guess she thought this isn't going to work. They're going to lose faith in the God that they thought was going to do us a miracle.  Often the ridiculous is turned by God into the miraculous and so it happened and she turned it up and the oil flowed and flowed.  And out she went. Elisha, Elisha. And Elisha's great love. Yes, Lord, yes, Lord. Now then that's your bank balance. You can live for the rest of your life off that oil. Let's get on with serving the Lord. So I love the story, but when I ask God for something out of the scriptures that night to tell me either to get myself over to Mrs. Hex's funeral, I came in my reading that I follow to this story and I said, Lord, I could tell you this story and, you know, there's nothing in it. I know it inside out. It's not telling me whether to go to Mrs. Hex's or not. And the spirit said to me, yes it is.  God's grass grows overnight for just the time you come to however familiar a scripture you have. And there it was. She kept pouring. Come on, Jill, pour out. I'm all poured out. As you go, he pours in after obedience. You go. But I'm exhausted.  You don't have all. You don't need all. You just need enough. In America, why do we need all? Jill, I could never do what you do. I need seven hours sleep or eight hours sleep. Or just do it tired. What's the matter with us? What is this? She knew to be perfectly ready physically to serve Jesus. So anyway, I went. When I got there, the whole family was there. Mrs. Hex lived actually into her 90s. She was our first neighbor when we immigrated to America in 1970 with our three kids to the church there. And she in her 70s and her sweet husband came to the Lord. And he had died. That was one of the first funerals we ever did in America at our church. And now here, all these years later in her high 90s, Mrs. Hex was dying. And she had sent that little note if Jill could come. And apparently what she wanted to happen, if Jill did. When I walked in, her daughter was standing there.  You came. She brought me. In her hand, she was deeply unconscious. But she squeezed my hand. Whenever I have learned as a pastor's wife in 40 years, I've been one and working much in hospice and that place, I have learned never think if they're unconscious, they can't hear you. And so I just stood there and said to her daughter, why did your mom want me to come? And she said, when I'm dying and the whole of my family is there, call for Jill and ask Jill to tell my family what happened in 1970 when you came to meet your neighbors and you led me to Jesus. Tell them. So I did. And I nearly missed it. What would I have missed? The grace of God and that miracle that happened at that deathbed. And I swear I felt her squeeze my hand. Yeah. I'll be there soon. We'll have great time. You can tell me about all your family. So God's cross grows overnight. That's the whole point of this story. And my husband had a phrase as he sent everyone out of our church after Sunday, never put your head on the pillow at night unless your nose has been in the book during the day. And so if I hadn't had that exhortation from my husband and struggled to do it, whatever I felt like at night, I would have missed something that was a huge blessing to me and a lesson. So little sheep, let's go through this psalm and learn some lessons that perhaps a piece of nourishment you'd never seen because we've never grazed that particular verse. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The Lord, we know God's names declare who he is. This is the personal name of God, L-O-R-D, capital L every time you see that. God is not an impersonal God. He didn't throw the universe into space and go off and make mothers and forget about us. His name himself, God in Christ. He said, that's my world. Father, talking to the Son in heaven, that's my world. I want it back. Go get it. And Jesus said, I will. And we know the rest of the story. And so the Lord means that he loved the world. He didn't like the world. He hated the world, but he loved it. He hated what Satan had done so that he looked down and said, I'm sorry I ever made it. There's a verse in Genesis 6 just before the Noah stories where he said, I'm going to wipe them all out and start again. I'm sorry I ever made them. Have you ever read that verse? But Noah, when you go to heaven, find him, that's the reason we're here and we're going to heaven. Otherwise, all of us and another world and another universe. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Thank you, Noah. So the Lord is, we can know he is. Those of us in evangelical worlds have been helped to believe that. We can know he is our personal Lord. We have an evangelistic home friend in England and in the old fashioned way, the little group of believers my husband was brought up with, the Plymouth Brethren, where all the men ministered and they didn't have a pastor. It's a bit like the Mennonites and that sort of group. They only ever hired not a pastor but an evangelist. An evangelist was always hired because the men were doing the ministry and the teaching and everything like that. Usually a children's evangelist and in the summer they put a little tent up in the villages and gather all the children in their place. This was in ancient days. Look at me, I'm very old. I'm 82, I think. Yeah, afraid so. This was years ago in England and I don't know if they still do this and hire an evangelist. It's not a bad idea actually to have one on staff and leading the outreach. He got a call, little village in Scotland from a man right up at the tip of Scotland. England's tiny. It's as big as Tennessee. That's how big my country is. The middle, England. Then there's Ireland and Scotland. Very little bigger. And it was coming in winter to the worst. Six foot of snow stuff. And it was a pastor from a church there, a Presbyterian pastor, and he said we've had some terrible tragedies. You've probably read about them in the paper. And our children are part of that tragedy that's been killed with this storm and all of this. Can you come now? I know it's summer stuff, but we need to gather all the villages at the tip of Scotland for our children's sake and have a children's crusade. And he said, I never even get there. The snow's coming, he said, come, he went. As he's coming into the village, he sees a little shepherd boy, sheep and goats. And he winds the window and he says, can you get somebody to look after them and come? I'm going to talk on the Psalm 23. It's about shepherds and sheep. And the young man managed to come, he's about 13. And he told us this story. He said, I had five days. The Lord is my shepherd. And each time he, the Lord of lords, the God of gods, the king of kings, Lord, and he explained the personal nature of God and how he loves and cares and gave for us because he loves us. The Lord God is, we can know. Have you ever known? And basically, he gave a little gospel presentation of that or used Revelation 3.20, whatever. Jesus is knocking at your heart's door. You invite him in. The Lord is my. And when he said my, he said, if you want that to happen now and you've never really, even though you've been in church, invited the Holy Spirit, Jesus without his body, if you wish, God himself into your heart, then get hold of that finger and pray with me. And he prayed a little prayer. Jesus come into my heart, et cetera. And then the last two days, actually, he dealt with shepherd and explained what that meant, all your life. This is what the shepherd's going to do and this is what you need to do as a good little sheep. And he went home. That night, the snow began and one of the worst blizzards started. And two days later, the pastor rang him and said, thank you for coming. And it was very well orchestrated by God because we just had a terrible snowstorm, as you know. And it started the blizzard in the middle of the night. And you remember the little shepherd boy? He could hear the sheep bleating and he ran out and it was totally dark. He didn't have any way to find them. They were trying to find the sheep and he then couldn't find his way back to the fold. And we found his little frozen body the next morning. But that's not why I've called while it is one reason. There's something really strange we didn't understand but when we found him, he was like this. Oh, said our friend. He's in the heavenly fold. He's home. He's home. Have you done this? Do you know? My daughter would say we worked together, wrote together and travelled together for a bit when she was 21. She's now 50s.  It's dramatic. Mine is so sort of ordinary. I was brought up in a Christian home, you know. And she'd actually, mom, I've struggled because your conversion was so dramatic and I wished I had one like that because you've never come down from finding Jesus and I can't remember when I didn't know him, you know. Christian kids, they struggle with this. Have I, have I? And I remember saying to her as a child of nine when she came to me on this and she said, I don't know, I did, but I don't know. Mom, there's no difference. And I remember taking her by the hand saying, well, make sure. Come on, let's go make sure. And helping her to make sure. Ask your children if they've been brought up in church and Christian home. Are you sure? Do you know? Or are you living in my testimony?  We can know the Lord, the Holy Spirit says, we'll speak to our spirit and tell us things. When you don't know what to pray for as you are, ask the Holy Spirit and then trust the ideas to pray for our His and pray for them. So the Lord is, do you know as you sit here today that He's yours? You don't have a dramatic story. My husband doesn't have a dramatic story. He came to the Lord as a little boy in that wonderful Christian home. And his mother led him to the Lord at four or five. But he said, my conversion was like a bird opening gradually to the sun.  Some plants do grow like that. There's some orchids that, you know, there's nothing and then suddenly boom, boom, boom. Non-lessor or more than the other. The thing is to know the Lord is my shepherd. And He leads me, does He? He leads me out. We are not to spend our time in the fold for the rest of our life. Okay. In and out, in and out, in and out. And in those days, and in these days today in Israel and places like that that still have the ancient shepherds doing what they did when this was written. In those days, they still lead them out. Lead them out.  Eastern shepherds lead their sheep and they know His voice.  Surely the best way is to get behind them and say, move. How are they going to follow you? How are they going to know? They know the shepherd's voice.  So how do we hear the shepherd's voice? This is the shepherd's voice, okay? And you have to know how to hang your heart over the word of God. And you have to find the way you have a method of not sticking to your favorite passages and you get through the whole Bible. And in our day and age, there are many, many ways of help for you to do that. Find the way you learn, not the way somebody else does. Have a look. I'm afraid the Christian bookstores accept yours well done. Keep your Christian bookstore going. All the rest are gone in the country. And I can't remember when the last time was I came to a meeting and the church actually had a Christian bookstore. We had the largest Christian bookstore in Wisconsin when our church was middle aged and older now. And it was a drinking, eating place for the whole. And then we added a study center where people could come and study and we did a library, like a seminary library. And people came from all over. Catholic priests came. Everybody came that wanted to just come to that quite beautiful building that we made, Christian library. So provide ways to help people know how. You've got to know how. And I was very helped with that. I came to Christ from absolutely nothing at Cambridge. Child of the Second World War. I had many, many questions about God. How could it have been that evil nearly took us over the edge into oblivion? How could that be that evil nearly won the world? And how could it be that the good guys won and what's behind it, et cetera, et cetera? And then when I went up to Cambridge I met Christians for the very first time. And they told me how it was. And it was totally new to me. And there in hospital actually, I got sick. I was in hospital, Admiral's Hospital. The nurse who was sick in the next bed to me in that hospital led me to the Lord. And she led me thoroughly, totally irrevocably to Christ. I was fortunate to have a seminary at Cambridge. C.S. Lewis had just got saved at Oxford. He came to Cambridge in my last year. But I never heard him in person. But his influence had begun four or five years before that to intervarsity in all the universities, including Harvard and Yale. By then it was just not as easy to get all this out. Then there wasn't the internet. But people were listening to a man who had been an atheist and then an agnostic, then a deist. And then on Glorious Day on British History Channel where he would speak about medieval history, which is what he was, a medieval prof, medieval history. One day he said, he used to be an atheist. I didn't believe there was a God. And then I thought I'd have to know everything there was to know, to know there wasn't a God and I don't. So I'm an agnostic. I don't know if there's a God. And he'd throw it into his lectures. And then the third lecture I believe it was, I was told. And of course there's books written about it now. He said, I'm a professor of medieval history and that's why actually I am an agnostic. I was an atheist because do you want to know what the church was doing in medieval times? And of course the church in Europe was at its lowest before the Reformation. And so he said, who would be a Christian with that going on in the church?  And then he would come back a time or two and say, you know I used to be an agnostic but now I'm a deist. I believe there's a God but I believe he's unknowable.  I am now a convinced Christian. And England listening, writing in. Questions, not about medieval history anymore and the history channel. What do you mean Professor Lewis? You mean about heaven and hell? And they began writing these things down. And it was standing in the lunch line in my college. Homerton College, Cambridge. Somebody put it in my hand. I was messing up and telling silly stories. I turned around and there was this scribble thing to this day. I'll know in heaven who had scribbled that down and put it in my hand. And it was the answers to Lewis. Surely you don't believe in heaven and hell. Which is now in his book Weight of Glory if you're a Lewis collector. And I took that to my room and read it and told the women, I think last night this, I knelt down and I didn't kneel down. I didn't address it to God. I didn't know about him at that point. And I, like Lewis, I had been bombed all my life and had bad war experiences. And though I did believe in God, I didn't like him very much in his words. And suddenly has this man answering my two big questions. Who is God? Is God? And if he is, who is he?  Is he indifferent? Is he laughing at us? Saying, get on with it. You did this. Is it true?  And they introduced me to the shepherd or Jenny introduced me to the shepherd. And then she gave me this and she said, now eat it for the rest of your life basically. And I said, how do I do that? And she began to show me. And I began to follow the shepherd this little with my wool just recently washed white. And I was certainly the little black sheep. And she showed me how to take the resting, lying down in the green pastures.  We served the Lord with a youth mission for 11 years before we came to America. And it was in the English Lake District in a big castle. I've spent my life in castles, actually. And I remember we were trying to make money to survive as a ministry to German, ex-German youth, ex-Nazi youth. That's how it started, an English mission to ex-Nazi youth after the war. And then we added Europeans and then lastly we added British. And when we went to run that mission so major could go all over the world and plant it in 26 countries where it is now, they bought a stupid thing to do. They bought four dozen sheep so that we could make a bit of money to survive the mission. Nobody knew what to do with them.  And so Psalm 23 became pretty, pretty important to us. So what do we do with these sheep? And how do we become good shepherds and all of that? And so I learned about Moe Shepherd in practical ways for 11 years at Cape and Ray Missionary Fellowship there. And I realized that you had to make sure that there was enough grass in the field before you opened the gate and let them in a new field. Green pastures. I had to understand with the hundreds of teenagers we would have in the summer in camp how to take them to a grassy field and how to help them feed and learn by doing, basically. And the still waters which really speak of refreshing. How do you help people to refresh themselves in the Spirit of God, in the Word of God? Do you know how to do that? Do you know how to do it yourself? You can't refresh somebody else unless you're being refreshed yourself and you know how to drink deeply. You know how to keep fresh. And I don't need to explain that to you. You know what I mean. You get stale. Then drink. The Shepherd will show you. Shepherd, I don't understand what you mean. How do I get refreshed? Through the Word, by the Spirit. You know, this is the thing. This is the secret. Look at Psalm 119. You say that's the longest Psalm and it keeps saying the same thing. No, it doesn't. Every verse is different. It's about the same thing. It's about the Word of God. It's the longest thing in the Bible. It goes on and on and on. And Stuart and I, between us, taught, I think it was 12 weeks on Psalm, between us, Psalm 119. And it describes the Word of God. It's like a sword. It's like water. It's like a fire. And then beautiful little similes and pictures. And then you find a place in the Bible where, yeah, you're right. That happened.  I don't know what God wants me to do. I hear it all over the world. Well, ask him. Well, I have, but nothing's come. How do I hear the voice of God, Jill? I get asked all over the world on every continent. That's what people want to know. How do you hear it? Is it a voice in your head? I am gifted with creativity. I don't trust the voices in my head. I have no idea. I have ideas every day. All my best friends run from me at church when they see me coming. I've had an idea because they know it's work. It's true, isn't it, Jackie? I'm full. It's one of my gifts and one of my burdens is creativity and ideas and all of that stuff. But I don't know where they come from. It's obvious where some of them do, and it's obvious even if they sound scriptural, how did the devil tempt Jesus with Scripture? Jesus heard a voice in his head using Scripture three times, but it was Scripture out of context. And Jesus answered with Scripture in context. It doesn't mean that. It means this. It doesn't mean that. It means this three times. So I don't even trust a voice in my head sounding scriptural. This is what you've got to trust. This is what you've got to trust. And the shepherd will lead you to green pastures if you say, let me start the great adventure, opening my heart over this book and saying, speak to me, Lord. And then do the homework you need to do to get it right, to get the context right. Who is he talking to? What did it mean in that day to these people? And then after a long time, what does it mean to me? Most women I talk to say, no, what does it mean to me? That's it. And you can't do that until you have correctly understood the passage that you're speaking to. Green pastures, still waters. But Jill, what about the dark valleys? Is the shepherd there? It's not totally dark. The valley of the shadow of death isn't totally dark. It's the shadow of death. And where there's a shadow, there's always light. It is never totally dark. However dark the situation, however terrible the situation you're going through, however ghastly it might be, he is there, the shepherd with you. And he will either help you to endure it or help you to escape. That's up to him. And you'll never know till you're in the valley. But he will be there. His presence will be enough. His presence will be enough to do the right thing in the dark valley. Let me take one quick illustration. When we were working at this castle, we had Bible school for 18 to 21 year olds in the before college in the winter and then camps and outreach to disadvantaged advantage street kids in the summer. And we were out in the street kid thing, which was my thing I love to do. It shows you that I really had a conversion. I was a little rich snob when I found Christ. And if I'd seen a gang of kids coming towards me, I would have certainly walked over the other side of the road to get out of their way. Now I found my feet turning and going and interacting with them. That's conversion. And so did I do it saying, Yay, I love this. I want to be persecuted. Yes. Oh, yeah, there's a gang. You know, let's go talk to them. And yeah, they've got razor blades and they've got all this stuff. It doesn't work like that. And it certainly doesn't from a very fearful. I was born fearful. I think the war and the bombs had something to do with that. I was very fearful. And my eldest child's first words were, Oh, dear. Word he heard that, I wonder, was only him and me at that point. So worried, stressed, and I've never got over fear. But I learned my lesson to follow the shepherd into the dark valley. And I want to tell you, it's very unpleasant. But after obedience, you'll find the courage you need waiting. If you stand there and say, which I used to, give me courage, or if you expect me to get in that place, then the least you can do is to give me, but what is courage? I stood there thinking, is it a oomph or a push? No, courage has to do with your will. And if it's the right thing to do, do it without the courage. Feeling, okay. The feeling will be waiting after obedience when you get yourself in there. And even then, it won't be, oh, it won't be all feeling, but it will be enough feeling. It is a question of saying to your feet, move, leaving your emotions outside, getting yourself in. I can do that. And remember God's saying to me, Jill, will you do it without the courage for me? Will you do it frightened out of your mind for me? I could do that. But I'd stood outside those places waiting for God to give me feeling, and it never happened. And I remember that particular night after the courage. No feeling, but I took my will by the hand and Will and I went in and left my emotions outside. And there's a great big, it was Beatles' era, it was Rolling Stones' era, nobody knew who they'd be, there were a thousand kids bashing their heads against the concrete and trying to reach them. It was the start of the Beatles' era. And chaos in there.  Are you from the social services of the police? And I said, no, I'm a teacher in the area. I'm just concerned about these kids. And then I heard myself say, take me to the manager. And I said, Lord, why do I want to go to the manager? Seemed the thing to say. But I had enough to do that. Well, he needs enough. But this is America. No, unless I have everything, I won't do it, right? No, enough. And so I met Alan and he said, what do you want? And I thought I'd make sure he didn't let me do it. And I said, what happens when this den stops on the platform? Nothing happens. And I heard myself say, can I have the platform for five minutes? And I prayed, oh, let him say no. And he said no. And I thought, good, can I go home, Lord? He said, until. What do you want it for? So I thought, I'd really make him sure to say no. And I said, I want to tell him as a God, there's a God in heaven, Jesus to take them there, power to get off drugs. I've been life turned around. And he said, young woman, I was in my 20s at the time. If you can explain that to me, you can have my platform. I said, I've waited all my life. I've run a place like this. I've never been to church. But I've had these questions. It took seven weeks that Alan came to Jesus. And Bible school students would go in and we'd have five minutes, five times when they had a break on the platform. And it was enough.  And so you do it frightened. You're willing to do it frightened for Jesus? You'll have enough. Just do it frightened. And this isn't this dramatic stuff. We have a divorce in our family. I have a daughter-in-law who left my son in his first church and took our four kids and disappeared. And I need as much courage when I come face to face with her. Then I need to go into that place. And enough fear that I'll do or say or react in the wrong way, or the right way. And so this is ordinary, ordinary stuff. So all the way home. All the way home, all the way home. I'll tell you that this is a magazine for women just between us. You can look it up yourself and take advantage of it. It's for women who love and serve Jesus like you, lay people, and pastors' wives and missionary wives. And it's full of stories which I've told this one in this magazine. That's why I just remembered it to tell you about it. India. One of the hardest things I ever went through in our world once around the world pretty well the last 17 years a year. Hard places, no glamour. Third world, fourth world. There's a fourth world now. Third world, one cup of rice per day per person. Fourth world, no cup of rice per day per person. And it's in those places the visions and dreams are being given. I am Jesus. This is my book. Someone will come and tell you. That's it. Same dream. Millions of people are having in those areas. And nobody's going. Somebody will come and tell us. Jesus came. We've got to get ourselves out there. I don't care who we are. How's your missions program in your church? Short-term missions. Long-term missions. Go in prayer. Learn to be formidable on your knees for Jesus. And tell them who Jesus is. Well, Stuart and I had a very dramatic and very, very difficult Indian tour. And it was when the Hindus began to kill the Muslims.  That conflict and the Christians got caught in the middle. And we were in a seminary, an Indian seminary with 800 young 18 to 21-year-olds training to walk into those villages and take Christ to very, very dangerous, difficult situations. And there was a town nearby called Larissa. And it all broke out there where their parents were, most of those young people. And they sent police around the seminary to keep us safe. And the thing just spiraled out of. They didn't know if their mom and dad were dead, if they'd been killed, because they turned on the Christians in the end, both of those groups. And we had had two weeks there teaching, as it was. Very innovating work with the Dalits, the Untouchables for about a month. And I was done. It had been a very, very difficult, very hard trip. And then this happened, the end. And the people said, well, let's pray all morning or all night, and then Jill and Stuart join the teachers and let's teach. We're not just going to sit here and wait to see what happens. And it was five days before the police came and said to us, I think we can get you out tomorrow. And I was so glad and grateful.  He's the life of Peter. Peter, will you follow me? Peter, do you love me? Peter, will you die for me? And wonderful last talk.  I'm out of here. I'm so glad, Lord. I just want to go home. And I don't get visions, but sometimes pictures come to mind. And suddenly there was a picture in the way I put it. The conversation began sitting on the steps of my soul in the deep place where nobody goes. I said, what do you see? And I said, a wall with a cross against it. Is that your cross, Jill? Yes. Are you done? Yes. It's on my bit. Bless their hearts. And I want to go home. And then I say I don't have a voice in my head. One of the clearest God voices. Who do you expect to carry it home for you? I didn't know. On my way home, I gathered my talk with the Lord in a poem. Let me read it to you. Shake and drain, discourage sickly, tired and troubled and depressed. Glad the time of serving over. Now I could go home and rest. Hot and humid was the weather. Sad and needy was our crowd. Feeling I had done my duty and the time of rest allowed. Soon I could return to family. Yes, tomorrow I'd be gone. Sitting in the last meeting, I tuned in to what went on. Listened to my husband's preaching. It was a great last talk. All about the call of Jesus. All about our life's faith walk. Stuart opened up the scriptures. Talked of Jesus, pain and loss. How he who was our great sin bearer bore our guilt upon his cross. What a great word for the students. Hope they'd listened. They were young. Their lives before them. Now their turn to do their part. Time for prayers of dedication. I was tired so late at night.  Saw a cross alone discarded, lain at rest against a wall. Who'd lain down such holy symbol? Who'd abandoned life's faith call? Then a voice so dear, familiar, asked a question pierced me through. Who did I expect to lift it, carry it to heaven's door? Jesus, Jesus, please forgive me. Carry it there, your cross for me.  Help me carry mine for thee. I'm no hero, special woman, just a lady old and gray. But my cross, Lord, I will carry home, Lord, home, Lord, all the way. Spoke his voice so quiet but clearly then. All the way home, Jill. All the way home. All the way home. All the way home. All the way home. All the way home. Pray with me. Oh, dear shepherd, all the way home. Four or five times in this Psalm. All the way home. All the way home. All the way home. Thank you, Jesus.  We haven't forgotten we just forget where we put our cross down sometimes. We haven't abandoned life's faith call. We just wanted out. Forgive us. And I pray that this little visit and this little place on this little swinging planet, for all of us in this room, perhaps would be a time in this quietness when we hear you ask the question, is that your cross remind us, you called us to follow you all the way home. And one day no more tears, no more cancer, no more divorce, no more abuse, no more, no more, no more, but not yet, not yet. You have left us here for one reason in this terrible, stricken, sinful world. Frightening world to be your disciples, Lord. And to tell a world that doesn't want to know what they need to know.  Jesus said someone would come. Oh, Lord, what's the book? Forgive us, Lord, and help us start here in this place in America, for the mission field is between our own two feet at any given time.  And so I with my sisters here would say again, Lord, forgive us and help us whatever it takes, whatever it means to follow you all the way home. Lord, I pray for your power, your strength and a renewal in our heart. As we go back perhaps to graze green pastures again, fresh grass waiting for us the next time we have our time with you. Fresh prayers that need praying. Fresh tasks we need to say, yes, Lord, whether we're frightened, whether we're young, whether we're old, yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes.


Well, what do you say we get started? All right, let's do it. Let's stop playing around. So first of all, let me just say this is being recorded, and this will be made available on Drupal.tv. So I just want to make sure everybody is aware of that. Next, I'll say thank you to everyone for attending. This is, I think, kind of the first one of these types of webinars that we've done. The community working group has done. So I'm looking forward to doing this one and more in the future. So I will introduce a quick introduction to Dr. Michelle Drapkin, who is one of the community working groups' brand new subject matter experts. Her area is mental health. She, well, she'll tell you all about her credentials in a second. I mentioned already that JD Flynn, a member of our community, is the other mental health subject matter expert. And just as a quick overview, community working group subject matter experts are there to basically help the community working group when we have issues that we suspect might involve mental health issues. So we do not pretend to be the source of knowledge of much of anything for that matter. And we have been building out this team of subject matter experts that we can tap when necessary. The other side of our recent expansion is community health team, which Amy June is part of, Amy June Heinlein. And they are tasked with things like this, helping us find more proactive ways of promoting community health. So with that, I will stop talking and introduce Dr. Drapkin. Thank you. I'm super excited to be here. I'll tell you a little bit more about myself, but even just the opportunity to get dressed, I put on some real clothes.  So we are in such a weird, unusual, unprecedented situation. And so it's really thinking about, how do we maintain our well-being in general? And in particular, within the context of COVID-19 and being isolated, most if not many of us are isolated in our homes. So I'm calling in from the corner of a room in my house where I spend most of my time, which is unusual. I do often get out of the house. And I have an office in my town. But so let me tell you a little bit about myself just to give you context of who I am and what I'm bringing into the table to be able to help you and how I might be able to relate. So I have my PhD in clinical psychology. I've spent time in traditional academic settings. I was on faculty at University of Pennsylvania. I'm also a licensed clinical psychologist, both in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and soon New York. And so I practice what I preach. I just don't study it or research it. And I've also spent time in industry as a behavioral scientist both at Johnson & Johnson and then more recently at a health tech startup out of Silicon Valley. And so although I am very new to the Drupal community, I have a good sense of the tech world and how fast-paced it could be and how challenging it can be. And so I have a sense of potentially what you might be struggling with, but I'm not gonna make any assumptions. I'm also a fellow human. And so I often talk about humans helping humans. And part of why I say that is because we are all in this soup together. And so this is a term we use in my industry to really talk about that we're all in this together. This is such a unique time where I am experiencing very similar stressors that you also are experiencing. And so a lot of my conversations with my patients, so I do run a private practice in addition to the consulting I do. And a lot of those conversations are about like how this is a struggle. How are you managing to get groceries? How are you managing to relate to the people in your household? Where are you getting takeout from who has curbside pickup? I live in Matacha, New Jersey, right outside of New York City, so a direct commute. And so our town and our area has been hit pretty hard by this. And so it's all of this. And this is global, right? So this is one of those truly unique times where we are all in this soup together. And part of why I'm excited to be here is so we can all think through this together about really how to support our wellbeing and really manage ourselves. And these are tools and strategies that you can use going forward. So I will try and pause as often as possible. And JD, please keep me honest, feel free to interrupt me if there's something that's coming up. But I'd like this to be as interactive as possible in our setting and our format so that this really can help meet your needs. And the needs of other people who might watch this at recording time. So I wanted to start just by talking about like what wellbeing is and thinking about the various buckets of wellbeing. And I found this great graphic, which I thought really kind of hits on the various buckets. So why don't you just take a look at it for a second? And I'll talk through pieces of it, but I don't want to lecture at you for too long, but just thinking about how are you doing? When I often say, hey, like take your temperature, right? And which has a whole different connotation in this current setting, but like literally thinking about when you wake up in the morning, how are you doing? And thinking across these various buckets of wellbeing, where are you at with your job? Many of us have been impacted with our work and whether we're impacted currently or we're worried about the future. There's a lot of fear and uncertainty. I certainly can relate to that with my current setting, also my husband. And it's just, it's one of those things where you're just, it's not as stable as it was. Your emotional wellbeing, I hear a lot about social wellbeing. How are you connecting with others both inside your household and outside of your household? And it's just being social is so much more complicated.  And then physical, which is something, I'll talk about also today is really thinking about like how are we taking care of our bodies? It's been since the beginning of the pandemic, it's been one of my biggest concerns. So not just health of worrying about maintaining yourself from getting or contracting the virus or if you get it, how do you take care of yourself? But even just moving around your home and really just moving, which is so it would be really easy for me to sit in this corner for probably 10 hours at a time. And I just don't do it because I know that not being physically active is gonna really impact my emotional wellbeing and it's just gonna be a ripple effect. So think about these wellbeing buckets as we go through some of our content today and thinking about where are you doing really well? And where might be there some opportunity to really take an assessment and think about, well, how do I really lean into that? So here's our plan for today. If I'm gonna take you on a tour of what I'm sort of calling a coping skills buffet. I might have been a little over ambitious, but what I really wanted you to be able to walk away from today with is a couple of coping skills that feel like a good fit for you. And so we're going through a buffet. So it's like you're walking down if you can imagine back to the time you used to walk down a buffet and you're kind of picking in different pieces and maybe taking one spoon of this, one spoon of that.  And part of what I'm gonna try and do today is give you a little bit of taste of all of these different coping skills and then give you the resources to be able to go back for second helpings and a full meal if that's what you really want because there's lots of opportunities to do that. And so this really is gonna take us on a broad brush tour of various coping skills and strategies. And I'll say this probably multiple times, but I am definitely open to you reaching out afterwards if you want any additional resources. I have some in the deck, but if there's anything you need help with, please let me know and I'll connect you with the appropriate resources, books, websites, all that great stuff. But I actually wanted, so JD, before I do this, I just wanna check to see if there's anything that I'm missing in our Q and A or chat box. No questions right now. Fantastic. So if everyone is willing, I'm gonna ask you as someone who's been on many webinars. I often find myself navigating, I may have the webinar in a tab and I'm navigating over to something else and then maybe I'm on my phone and oh my gosh, I'm certainly not one-minded, right? I'm definitely not present for the content. And if you're willing, I'm gonna ask you to really turn your phone upside down. You don't even have to navigate away from whatever tab you're on because I'm gonna ask you to close your eyes in a second if you're willing and join me in a little bit of a mindfulness visualization exercise that I think will really help set us up for a really effective webinar here to really start to kind of think about the framework that we'll talk about. And so I'd like to give you kind of a little bit of an experiential exercise to engage us and it means being present and one-minded. And I promise it's only about three to five minutes and that there's probably not a life or death situation that's gonna happen during that time, probably, can't make any guarantees. But so if you're willing, I'm gonna ask you to go ahead and get yourself seated in a comfortable position. You may be calling in from bed, so go ahead and get relaxed in bed wherever you are. Just go ahead and make sure you're in a comfortable position that you feel like you can stay in for a few minutes. And if you're open to it, go ahead and drop your eyes closed.  And as you breathe, I'm gonna ask you to start visualizing yourself beside a gently flowing stream. And notice in this stream, and this could be one that you've been to, one that you could really bring up in your mind's eye. And notice that there are some leaves that are floating along the surface of the water. For the next few moments, I'm gonna ask you to take each thought, each feeling, each sensation that enters your mind and place it on a leaf and let it float by. Do this with each thought, each feeling, each sensation, whether pleasurable, painful or neutral, even if you have joyous or enthusiastic thoughts or feelings, place each of them on a leaf and let it float by. If your thoughts momentarily stop, continue to watch the stream. Sooner or later, your thoughts will start up again. Allow the stream to flow at its own pace. Don't try and speed it up or rush your thoughts or feelings or sensations along. You are not trying to get rid of the leaves by rushing them along. You're not trying to get rid of your thoughts or your feelings or your sensations. You're allowing them to come and to go at their own pace. If your mind says, this is dumb, I'm bored, or I'm not doing this right, place those thoughts or feelings on leaves too and let them pass. If the leaf gets stuck, allow it to hang around until it's ready to float by. If the thought comes up again, watch it float up by another time. If a difficult or painful feeling arises, simply acknowledge it. Sit yourself, I noticed myself having a feeling of boredom, impatience, frustration, worry, fear. Place those thoughts or feelings on leaves and allow them to float along. From time to time, your thoughts or feelings or sensations may hook you and distract you from being fully present in this exercise or in any exercise or any of our daily goings on. That's completely normal.  Then ask you again to take a couple deep breaths, breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. Just notice your body. Notice where you're seated, feeling yourself connected to the ground, feeling whatever supporting your body. And then the next few seconds, I'm gonna ask you to open your eyes and rejoin our webinar and we'll continue with the rest of our content. I'm wondering if in the chat box, if you can just note what that was like for you. I don't know how many of you are meditators or often do some kind of mindfulness exercise. And this is really different. This is kind of what we call, and some of you may have done that before, so I'm just wondering what your experience was like, what you noticed if you're willing to share. And while we're doing this, just take a moment and think about how you might apply something like this too, right? To really think about how can I bring this to life? In my day, when can I do something like this? What did I notice about my thoughts or feelings? What did I notice about my ability to observe those? And just really the space for how this might come to life. And then we'll talk more about the functionality of it. So this is a piece. So Jady, I don't know if you're seeing anything in the chat box that you wanna... I've got a couple of messages. One, that it was quite a relief, I guess is the word to try it again. One, attendee, we often do that at school right before we start a class or test and it really feels good to de-stress. And another one just sent in. I found the visualization was great for my focus, one feeling at a time, allowing me to let them go. Awesome. Thank you. And just keep thinking about that as we go through. And part of why I bring this up is we often, our brains are so like fantastic, right? They are, when you think about computers and everything we do now with AI or machine learning, that it's really, when we think about how hard that is to get computers to think as quickly as we do, our minds, tons come to our minds. And this is, it's just a great reminder to yourself. Don't believe everything you think. And a mantra I often use with my patients is just because you think it doesn't make it true. And that, it's one of those things of when we get stressed and we have anxiety, our mind is often hanging out in the future, worried about something that's coming up that we probably can't control and we'll talk about that in a second or it hangs out in the past of things that have happened to us. And so an exercise like this helps us look at our thoughts and our feelings and our sensations, being able to almost like hold them in our hands as opposed to having them in front of our face like this where we really can't see from our thoughts. And so it's putting them down and just letting them be. And it's such a simple exercise to really just let them be. If you like this exercise, by the way, you can just Google these on a stream and you'll find tons of YouTube where someone will essentially read you what I just read you or there's also an activity you can do like thoughts on a cloud, thoughts or feelings on a cloud where it's just the idea is just to take your thoughts and make them separate from yourself. And we call this cognitive diffusion because often we're very fused with our thoughts. So just remembering that don't believe everything you think. So we're gonna talk more about the power of present moment awareness. And I love whoever put in the chat box that before you take a test, even if you have a teacher or professor who's leading you through this, it's fantastic. I think that more and more we're seeing more mindfulness and meditation make its way into education, which I think is fantastic because that's a great way to learn it. And we're also seeing it tons in corporate America, right? Where they're like, when I was at Johnson and Johnson there was a meditation room that you can sign out and there are groups doing meditation. I do think there's something different about the leaves on a stream and some of it is and the idea of the looking at your thoughts and looking at your feelings and your sensations are separate from you as opposed to just focusing on the breath. And one thing I wanna make sure we talk about, right? Is that if you do meditation, I think that's great. And the function is a little bit differently from what we're gonna be talking about, right? It's not just the breathing and some people think about it as relaxation. It has that function for sure. I think of that as like a nice little side effect. Really the power of present moment is in this intentional awareness, really being aware in the moment and seeing what's going on. And noticing when our attention is pulled away from us and when it's back. So as it means a way of example, even when I was doing that, I was very present and focused with you all. And I could hear the home office is across the street. I wish it was across the street. It's across the hall. And I can hear my husband's on a conference call. And I noticed the thought of man, I wish he would have closed the door. I could hear my eight year old running up and down because this is the life we're in, right? Where there's lots of things at home that are pulling for our attention. And so I just noticed that, I even noticed the feeling I was having and then bringing myself back into the moment to be here present with you all. I'm going to share with you, this is kind of when I was putting together this presentation, this is kind of like my best of, my favorites. If I were gonna make sort of a playlist, this is like the coping skills, my top favorite playlist. And I don't know how many of you follow the awkward Yeti. I love this cartoonist. I think he does such a great job. And I particularly love his cartoons where he pivots the brain against the heart.  I don't know how many of you are having that thought on a regular basis. I certainly find myself all the time thinking about the future. Wondering about the future. Worrying about the future. What's the summer gonna look like? What's the fall gonna look like? Are kids going back to school in person? Are colleges gonna reopen? When is life gonna go back to normal? And you can just feel yourself tense when you might even feel it in your chest. And so Hart says, you know what, just hold one moment at a time with me. And so a lot of times it's just be here now.  Just be present and stay in the moment. The reality is in most times, the moment that we're in is not so terrible. So the moment I'm sitting in, if I close my eyes and I could hear birds chirping, the windows open, I get to be here with you guys on a Friday.  And so it's just, I'm being here in this moment, right? Just right here, right now. So just hold this moment. Just sit, know you're sitting and just be here now. And so this is another cartoon I've seen on the internet for years and I love it because it really brings to life the idea of, you know, is your mind full? Are you actually being mindful? And really being present and enjoying the moment. So just like I heard the birds chirping, right? And just, but then bringing myself back to where I want my attention to be right now. So again, thinking about how you might apply this in your life, how you might bring this to life, how you can be really present and aware and really leveraging the power of present moment awareness. And we're bringing this here today because it really does help our well-being. You know, our emotional well-being, sometimes even our social well-being we'll talk a little bit about communication today. Just we'll touch on it. But even being present when you're talking with someone, present on a webinar, when you're talking with your significant other. You know, I find myself, I'm guilty of it.   And I actually wasn't present.  So I love, I love this whole cartoon. So Diddy, I'm just going to stop and see if there's anything we need to attend to in the chat or Q and A before I move forward. There are no new questions. All right, fantastic. Thank you. Feel free to interrupt me, but I'll also stop just to make sure I don't get on some train. So what I wanted to acknowledge and validate here is that what we're experiencing is actually quite different. So I, my training is in cognitive behavioral therapy and a lot of, and so what you'll always get for me is the most evidence-based research supported practices. And for sure, if you have an anxiety or stress, one of the things we often tell you to do is exposure therapy. And so I love this cartoon.  My therapist says I should do more things that scare me. Which is true. So if I were working with you before COVID-19 and you were afraid of something, you and I would work together to approach that anxiety and that fear so that we could eventually train your brain that anxiety and stress is uncomfortable and it's not dangerous. And so, you know, right before COVID-19, I was working with one of my patients on driving phobia. She was afraid to drive. And so we developed a hierarchy. We did more things that scared her. She had homework and eventually she was driving. In fact, you know, now that we're still working together on, you know, maintaining her well-being and dealing with COVID-19 related stress and interesting situations, she's still driving to keep up, to kind of do those things that scare her to make sure she doesn't revert to being afraid.  Sure, go let someone who has it and is positive cough in your face. Like absolutely, you're afraid to go face your fears. That's ridiculous because there is legitimate fear here. There is a legitimate risk and a safety concern. And so we handle stress and anxiety very different in this current setting than we would in other ones. And this is a piece of thinking about like before COVID-19, there were all these things that you might worry about. And then there was a subset of things that actually could happen because our mind loves to like worry about tons of stuff that's actually not even possible or likely.  And so we would waste a lot of our energy and time worrying. The thing that's challenging now is that that yellow dot of things that do happen has actually expanded quite a bit. And there's a lot of uncertainty though, right? Between the things that can happen and the things that do happen. And there's a lot of confusion. And so this is different, right? And so that's why I just want you to take a moment to be gentle with yourself, gentle with others, that this is completely uncharted territory. I mean, I get we're in week, I think we're in week 10, at least where I sit, right? I realize this is a global community and we're all kind of at different pieces of our experience with COVID-19. But we're still testing and learning. This is uncharted territory where we're all stuck at home and we're doing things that just feel very unnatural, right? Like I went for a run this morning, it feels very unnatural to me to run past someone and to avoid them, right? To literally like get off the path so that I don't. In fact, I'm a super hyper social person. I'm one of those extroverted people who are used to being around people all the time. I'm the kind of person who would run usually and be like, hey, good morning, like high five, like that, look at us out here doing this. And it actually, I had that thought this morning and I was like, oh, I can't even be within 10 feet of someone, let alone high five them. And so that lack of communication or social connection is really tough. And so this is one of the things I'm gonna start to encourage you to do in using your mindful awareness, right? So again, leveraging that present moment awareness, thinking about where your mind is at, really focusing on things that you can influence and ones that are in your control. And to give you a sense within the COVID-19 context, there's, so if you think about, so this is another piece of art that came up in the COVID-19 setting, right? If you look on the outside, things that you can't control, so things that you can let go and kind of move down the stream and they may come at you, right? It's not, we can't stop them from coming, these thoughts or these urges, but I can't control how much toilet paper is at the store. I can't control whether or not I can get bread flour. You know, I can't control how long this is gonna last. I really can't. All I can control is my own attitude. I can manage my own social distancing. I can control how I live into my values, which we'll talk about in a second. And again, thinking back to that, those buckets of wellbeing, I can control where I'm focusing my attention and how much attention I'm giving to each bucket to keep them full. I can control to a certain degree how much fun things we get to do at home. And with a child at home, I'm always working hard in that domain, just trying to keep her busy, but I can't control how much other people's social distance. I can't control what other people are doing or their motives. I can only control what I'm doing. And so it's really using that mindful awareness to think about, well, where is my mind? And am I ruminating or worrying about what other people are doing? And I can only control myself. So living in New Jersey, we're entering a holiday weekend.   And there's really nothing I can control about that. All I can control is what I choose to do. And so again, be thinking about how this can apply to you, how this might relate to some of what you have going on in your own world and where you are exerting your energy and efforts and really thinking about is it worth it? And focusing on is it worth it? Is it consistent with my values? Is it gonna get me to my end goal? And then leveraging yourself and moving yourself back to what you can control, what matters, moving in directions that are important to you. And so just really thinking about that. There is a note about limiting your social media or turning off the news. And I do think about really protecting yourself against social toxins or we're really good about protecting ourselves. We wear our masks. I always have hand sanitizer with me. I'm very careful about social distancing. And it's equally important to be careful about the social toxins, the anxiety, the things that I might come into contact with on social media or on the news. And so I frankly don't watch a ton of news. I try and keep up on the most important pieces of data that and I try and listen to scientists who I think are actually valid and reliable so that I'm understanding exactly what's going on and not some spin that's been put on it. Dr. Drapkin, we have one question if right now's a good time. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So the question is, how do you know if you're making progress with respect to something that scares you? Might be doing something, or more of something that scares me and still feeling scared, but how do I know I'm on the right path? Oh, so that's a great question. And there's not an easy answer, but let me give you or let me answer that that the best way my head will let me right now, which is my short answer is to measure it, right? And to kind of like track it, right? So if I'm doing something that scares me, so for example, let me give you the paradigm with the driving, right? We create something called the subjective units of the stress scale. It's really as simple as just saying from zero to 100, where is my stress at? For me in particular. And so when I'm driving with my patient, I'm always asking her, okay, where's your subject? And we're kind of tracking that it's going down. The interesting thing is people often predict that a situation is going to be more anxiety producing than it is. And so it's really, so that's part of why we encourage you to face your fears, right? Because so even, I mean, if we use an example of the current context, right? And so I think about sometimes going to the grocery store is pretty stressful. It's just, it's stressful on a couple of different levels. Like the first couple of times I went, I don't even know like what I'm doing, right? Like I'm not sure. I think the first, first time I went, people weren't even wearing masks yet. So we were quarantining, but we weren't wearing masks yet. And so the second time I went, but I was like, I'm not sure I'm wearing the mask, right? Like there was all this social anxiety almost about how do I behave in the grocery store? But each time I go, it's not nearly as bad. And it wasn't even as bad after I got there. I was like, oh, you know, it's actually, this makes sense. They make it, they make, it makes sense for you. And so every time you go, you're kind of like, just, you know, again, it's like, I think about like taking your heart rate or taking your temperature. It's the same idea of just assessing yourself. We used to think that you needed to see a decrease in that anxiety to really believe that it's working. But our latest research really thinks that, well, if you, it's really what you're learning, right? So after every one of those instances of approaching the fear thing, what did I learn about that while I was doing it? Or what was my experience like? And maybe I was worried about it going in and then it wasn't so bad. Or what did I learn about how I could cope with it and manage it effectively? You know, obviously it's a little bit more complicated than that, but I think those are the two pieces of really just, again, taking your own temperature, checking in with yourself before, during, after you're doing something that's fearful or afraid or brings any kind of anxiety. And then also at the end of it, what did you take away? What did you learn about that experience? It's no different than almost anytime I give one of these workshops, I'm doing almost exactly that, right? I'm thinking about how did I do during it? I might even watch the video to kind of like think about what I can improve. And then next time, hopefully I'll be more on point, you know, be able to come to it with a different lens and continue to improve. So it's like the same idea with fear and anxiety, it's really approaching, learning, and then applying that going forward. Hopefully that was helpful. I just wanted to take a moment to sort of acknowledge that we often have this illusion of control. So if I say to you, don't think of a pink elephant, don't think of COVID-19, don't think of the pink elephant riding COVID-19. Any of those things, the minute I say that, you have this amazing ability in your brain with the language that now you are thinking of a pink elephant, even if it wasn't on the screen, you would have had one in your mind. And I'm not even sure what a pink elephant looks like riding COVID-19, but like I sort of just pictured it in my head on top of like the words COVID-19, you might have pictured it on top of the virus. It's amazing what our minds can do, but if we say, stop it, don't think about that, it actually forces us to think about it more strongly. And so there's this illusion of control that we can stop thinking and we can force these things not to come into our frame of reference. It just, you can't. That's what I love about the leaves on a stream is that thoughts, feelings and sensations can exist and move and we don't push them away. The minute we try and push them away, they actually come forward even stronger. And so think about a beach ball that you might push below the water. You push it below, you push it below. The minute you let it go or let go of that control, it pops up in your face, right? And that is the illusion of control. And so just be gentle with yourself that we really can't stop ourselves from thinking or having feelings. We can't stop these from coming. It's just changing our relationship with those thoughts, feelings and sensations when they do come. And that is where the control and the power is to really change and impact our wellbeing. I felt like this presentation wouldn't be complete without just a mention of compassion and self-compassion, which is a little bit of even what I just talked about, right? It's just being gentle on yourself, recognizing that when you're, recognize when you're stressed, recognizing and being mindful, again, that present moment awareness, being kind to yourself and really feeling like you're connected to other people, doing that in ways that you can. You are not alone. We are all in this soup together. We are not perfect. Many of us are very like self-critical perfectionists. We're trying to perfectly manage and during COVID-19, maintain our high level of work ethic, take care of our families and our homes. It is really tough. So I may implore you to be gentle with yourself, practice some self-compassion. There's a lot of literature out there on self-compassion. Kristen Neff, NEFS is one of the leaders in this area and you can definitely look up and even do some mindfulness meditations on self-compassion. Just be kind to yourself. Oftentimes we are our harshest critic and we are most judgmental with ourselves and so this is really just taking a moment, recognizing the soup that we're in and how tough it is and just be, right? This is, again, just be. There's also, there's a lot of talk about acceptance and so I just wanted to take a moment when I think of acceptance, to me it's not resignation. It's really just accepting that something just is and so when it's raining outside, you can say I don't like the rain, I wish it wasn't raining, it was gonna go for a run, now I can't go for a run. So we'd like this, it always rains when I want it to be sunny, rain, rain. This is so awful. Or you can look outside and it's raining and you're like, yep, it's raining. It's just, yep, we are in quarantine mode. Yep, we're gonna be home for a while. Yep. And it doesn't mean you can't have those moments of like some self-pity or a moment of pity party and it doesn't really help us to have this experience with I can't believe this is happening, this is so wrong, like all of the rants that we hear. Yes, I get it and it is what it is, right? And here we are.  So I'm gonna make the best of it. I'm gonna set up this little makeshift office in the corner of a room so that I have a space to see my patients virtually and to do some of my work. It is what it is. Yep, I don't have a dining room anymore because my daughter, that's like essentially her schoolroom. It is what it is. Here we are. And it's just, it's one of those things where you can, like it's the choice, right? And again, this is the awareness of where our thoughts at, where is our minds sitting. And to that note, this is one of my favorite Venn diagrams in the world. I use this all the time. And again, it's a mindfulness piece of really just being aware of where your emotions are at. And where your emotional mind is at.  Or is your mind hanging out in this more reasonable side where you're more like being very cognitive, thoughtful, staying on very the surface, statistics, you know, a lot of us kind of tend towards one side or another. And the idea here is to have awareness of where your mind is hanging out. And to try and leverage the other side to pull yourself into what we call wise mind. Where yes, I feel this way and I know this. And so let me just make a choice or be really in the moment in a wise minded space. So this is just really a trigger to kind of think about or a framework to see where your mind is hanging out. You know, as an aside, I often see couples kind of struggle where one hangs out more on the emotional side and one hangs out more on the reasonable rational side. I'm a psychologist married to an engineer. And so this is often where, you know, I think we're very respectful of each other. So we work it out, but sometimes I know he's very like not, he's thinking very like logically where I'm on the other side. And so we try and pull that together. I wanted to just put this out there because I feel like this is a great little checklist to kind of think about how are you doing? Like again, going back to that, how do I survive this pandemic? And so it's really thinking about this, like to do less. Am I doing the essential tasks? Showering, medication, whatever else you need to do on a daily basis. I love the idea of cleaning one thing or space a day. And for, you know, this could be the dishes. It could just be dusting something. You know, we recently just got one of the vacuum robots which like we're loving. So we're letting her clean one space or thing a day, but it just, there is something, there's an sense of accomplishment. And then the idea of tending to something growing, right? Like that to me, that is such an investment in the future where you get to see a plant grow or to work with a child and really watch their mind grow. And so that's really lots of value there. And we talked a bunch about mindfulness already, but really thinking about what you want to be present to and even just sapping and just listening to a sound, really mindfully listen to a song, maybe even actually listen to the words of a song. And then thinking about reaching out to someone beyond your home, you know, maybe just one, again, this is a daily list, right? So once a day, I try and I have a list of colleagues and mentors and people who I like who pop in my mind and I'm actually just taking the time to reach out and say, hey, how are you doing?  And then again, I've mentioned this before and I think it's important here is do one thing that gets your heart rate up and then do something that you'll be glad you did later. So this is kind of like, you know, what would your future self thank you for? And so thinking about your, one of the pillars of wellbeing that we often talk about, right, is growth. And so what are you doing to grow during this time and really being intentional about that? So let's just talk briefly about getting your heart rate up. You know, I think one of the things we talk about is doing microbursts between meetings and sessions and so really making sure that you're actually moving. So you're not just sitting, maybe you're standing during a meeting. I try and personally stop my meeting five or 10 minutes before the hour, so I realize like we're there now, but stop and really just, I actually get up, I go downstairs, I maybe fill up my water glass, but I'm now running down the stairs, checking on my daughter, running back upstairs and I've gotten my heart rate going a little bit every hour and my Apple Watch is great at like reminding me about that too. And just wanted to make a reminder about sleep and really making sure that you're getting that, that's a great place to take your temperature, check in on yourself. There's lots of, and this is, a lot of people are reporting struggles with sleep, so be gentle on yourself with that. And being grateful, you know, what are you grateful for and being really thoughtful about that? You know, and thinking about how can you apply this within your homes or family? We often will stop and at dinner ask about, you know, what the highlight of our day was, we do something called the rose bud and thorns. We asked what the rose of our day was, what the thorn, the low point was and what we're looking forward to and really just bringing that like forward so that we're focusing on not just what we're missing out on and also what we're gaining during this time. There's been a lot of silver linings of this pandemic, especially those of you that work in the tech field. I've been really impressed with how agile we really have become and how quickly things are moving. I'm very sensitive to our time and I don't want us to run over. So I just want to make a quick note about values, thinking about what matters to you really, when you're taking that temperature and you're thinking about that wellbeing, those buckets of wellbeing, what else can you do? Where do you need to really pivot? What aren't you taking care of? And it might be yourself, right? We have, you know, we have this thing in the metaphor of, you know, probably last time you fly, you remember that we often are told to put our oxygen masks on first before we help anyone else. How often do we do that in our lives where we really take care of ourselves on top of taking care of everyone else? And so it's really thinking about those different buckets of values. And then thinking about communication, right? Really listening to the people around you, not just at home, but at work. Really mindfully listening. So using your present moment awareness skills and communication helps out a lot. Collaborating, using your compassion, self-compassion, validating and empathizing.  And I try not to minimize her experience. Even if I don't agree with it, I try and see it through her eyes, validate her. It doesn't mean I give in. It means I just am present for her and present with her to try and help her see that I get it. I get it. I try and get it. And so it's really just leaning into that. And this is an old proverb. It's been around for a long time. And just kind of thinking about, you know, starting to wrap us up here of, again, the silver linings. You know, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. And what we're going through right now, we are going to come out of this with some amazing skills and tools and ways of managing stress and anxiety that we've never had before because we're being challenged to do so. You know, and I think it's really just constantly checking in with yourself, what's working for you, what's not. Maybe something that worked for you for the last two weeks, you need to change. Like this is an agile environment, test and learn. You know, quick to fail. We are figuring it out as an individual, as an organization, as a team, as a world. And so being gentle. And the other piece is really just breathe. This is a chapter. It's not your whole story. And so the minute we catastrophize and really worry about everything that's going on, try and pull yourself back into this moment and that this is a chapter we're all experiencing. And this is not going to define us in the way that your mind may tell you and really worry. So I'm gonna stop there. This is just some ways to reach out to me. And I'm open, we have just a few minutes left. So if we have any Q&A or anything going on, and then these are some resources. And it also, you know, will make these slides available for you all so you can reference anything that we did. And I know the recording will eventually be available. So JD, my friends, I don't know if there's anything that we wanna make sure we tackle in the last few minutes. If anybody has any questions, now would be the perfect time to get them in. Looks like we have about three minutes left. So speak now or forever, hold your peace. Mike, I'll hand it over to you to close out if you're finished, Dr. Drakken. Yeah, that's it, thank you very much. All right, thank you. Hold on, Mike. Mike, your audio's not good. And it looks like we do have a question that just came up as well. Oh, I'll be quiet then. JD, you wanna handle this? Yeah, I'm reading it to... Let me see if I can. Okay, I'll just read it verbatim. Previously, I would have potentially more physical locations where I could escape to slash from work, open source, family, friends, private time, et cetera. Now these have been reduced even more so when the weather is poor. Excuse me, yep, it's raining. And if I need escape, I escape from everything. And this has caused me to miss important virtual meetings, meetups, one bill, work chat, volunteer opportunities. I'm still trying to figure out a way to accomplish this and was wondering if you had any ways to help. Yeah, I mean, so thank you, JD, for reading that. You know, it is real, so it is so tough, so tough that we're all stuck in a similar physical location with family, right? And so, and it just finding, in fact I, like I think pretty regularly complain to my husband about exactly this, that I don't have a space that feels like my own where I can like close the door. I mean, of course I have our bedroom, but like, you know, he also shares that. So I find what a lot of patients that I'm working with are doing, and I, you know, I do this myself, I do take walks. I also take walks in the rain, right? Like, and then I'll take a mindful walk in the rain. People, and I don't know where the person lives, but people are also, they'll get in their car, so whether you have a car or not, but a car seems to be like a safe space that people are finding to get a little bit of quiet time. The bathroom, which feels very old school, right? Like, we all used to go to the bathroom to get a little bit of peace and quiet, but I've done sessions with patients in the bathroom. Sometimes even just, so think about, I think thinking creatively about where you can go to hide away without avoidance, right? And so part of what I would say, and part of what the person was asking is, I just wanna say, I know this is really hard, and I'm guessing part of what you're struggling with is that is not, is letting it get too bad, right? And so it's really, again, it's taking that temperature. One of my favorite metaphors is thinking about a pot of water boiling, and thinking about it's always on the stove, and ideally we want it to be on the stove without the heat on, but the reality is it's always a little bit hot, right? Because a little, we're always a little bit stressed. There's really a little bit, like if I wasn't stressed, I wouldn't be worried about the fact that like the noon hour just hit, right? And so it's, there's a little bit of stress, but I don't want it boiling so much that I can't be articulate in this last minute. And so the idea is catching it before you're out of rolling boil that you feel like you need to avoid or miss things that have significant consequences. And so taking that regular temperature check on yourself, every morning, how am I doing? What do I need? Where's it going? You know, what do I need to do today? And communicating, and that's part of why I very intentionally included that communication. I know we don't have a ton of time to spend in any of those coping, but thinking about communicating with the people in your household, with your team members, everyone, if you just say I need, I'm struggling, I'm having a hard time. I often find that those are really met with people want to be helpful. The thing is thinking about, well, what do you need? What would be helpful? And maybe just say, you know what? I need an hour to myself in a space. I just need to be, I just need to do me for an hour, and or whatever you need, but thinking about that. And so I would say that's my best, my best answer in our last like minute, but I think it's a really great question. And I think we're all struggling with that. Like, we have no privacy at all, right? It's really tough. Hang in there. And, you know, just be as creative as you can try, test and learn, right? Try different places to get some of that privacy. Thanks, JD. All right, well, we're a few minutes over, so I think it's time to wrap up. So thank you to JD for managing that. And again, thank you, Dr. Trapkin, for the presentation. And I will mention that there will be a transcript available at some point in the very near future. And so when the video is posted, hopefully the transcript will be at the same time or shortly thereafter. And with that, I think we will wrap this up. And so thank you very much. Thanks, everybody. Have a good day.


In this presentation, we will continue putting together the statement of cash flows using the indirect method focusing here on the change in accounts receivable. The information will be a comparative balance sheet, the income statement, and some added information we will be focusing in on a worksheet that was composed from the comparative balance sheet. So here is our worksheet. So our worksheet that we compare that we made from the comparative balance sheet current period prior period change. So we have all of our balances here for the current period, the prior period, and the change. We have put in this change and this is really the column that we are focusing in on. We're trying to get to this change in cash by finding a home for all other changes. Once we find a home for all other changes, we will get to this change in cash, the bottom line here, 61,900. The major thing we're looking for is right here. We've already taken a look at the change in