#126: How To Live Loved Instead of Afraid

Welcome to Season Five! We're calling this season "The Curated Life - A Fresh Take on Living Loved" because we're all at a real fork in the road. It's a brand new year. Which direction will you go? How will you curate your story?   We only have two choices and it's often not what we think. We're not looking at a new year, hoping that more good choices and less bad choices will finally tip the scales in our favor. No matter what our culture keeps telling us, conforming to the patterns of this world will never lead us to the deepest desires of our hearts. Even if you're tempted to pursue the traditional resolutions of more exercise and less overeating, you're not going to wake up one day excited to get out of bed and embrace the day if the best you've got to guide you is a list of how many minutes you need to keep your heart rate up and how many calories is your limit.  The new life we're invited to celebrate because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus won't fit in the patterns of this world because the patterns of this world teach us how to live and move and succeed and fail in a culture of fear, not a culture of love.  Join Janet and Doug and they begin a season of community-wide storywork and an invitation for you to risk a relationship with God as your narrative therapist. This year's challenge for all of us is to embrace our stories as curators and cartographers, combining theological and neurological discoveries with personal life experiences to create a map out of fear stories into the land of love stories.  Listen now and linger in these TAKEAWAYS: The CURATED LIFE alphabet teaches you to read the label on the culture in your home, your child's school, your church, and your community so you can recognize artificial ingredients that are teaching us all to live a life Jesus set us free from. We don't need to look too closely to see the catastrophic impact on our stories. The CURATED LIFE alphabet is also a list of essential ingredients for participating with God as your own narrative therapist to build a culture of love. These ingredients offer fresh energy, connection, and safety that automatically clean out and restock the pantry of your habits, rhythms, and routines.  The CURATED LIFE alphabet is not a list of laws, resolutions, and rules. The alphabet is about the atmosphere you breathe in, the rhythms you create, and the relationships and ideas you trust.  It's not just a tagline - together, there is great hope. Subscribe to Janet's newsletter, THE CURATED LIFE at janetnewberry.com. Also, shop fun merch from the LOVE IS FEARLESS collection to find t-shirts, hoodies, kitchen towels, posters, and more. Every purchase from this collection helps support our work with John 15 Academy.