Stronger than Stress with Barb Roose
Special guest Barb Roose is the author of "Stronger Than Stress: 10 Spiritual Practices to Win the Battle of Overwhelm." She's also a speaker, literary agent, and Bible teacher. According to her website, "She is a real woman who's experienced deep anxiety, parenting challenges, family addiction trauma, and long seasons of walking by faith in unanswered prayer." Lifestyle medicine has six pillars: restorative sleep, nutritional eating, physical fitness, minimizing harmful substances and social connectedness. But when we talk about stress, it affects all of them. It's an overarching theme to health. Barb: We know that stress is out there and we talk about it openly. "Oh, I'm so stressed." Like if you talk with people, stress is going to naturally come up. And so there's this social acceptedness that there is stress. The reason why I wrote the book and the reason why I want to engage in these conversations is because you and I are aware of the damage. And so it's a situation, particularly as women, we just live with stress. And so it is trying to elevate the hidden damage of chronic stress and to convince women not to set themselves on fire to keep everybody else warm. The challenge is these days, as women, we want to protect what we love. We want to fix what's broken. We want to get things on track. I call it the good Christian woman syndrome. We will sacrifice ourselves trying to be everything to everybody. We keep little people alive or a spouse. We found keys every day so that a spouse could get to work. In some ways, there was a season where so much relied upon us, but there are those practical moments where we have to remember that there is a God. And it's not us. Dr. Vickie: That is so , absolutely true. There is a God and it's not us. And I think that's the thing. When we take on all that responsibility, we learn to depend on ourselves and then we think we don't need God until our whole lives start unraveling. Barb: I use spinning spinning plates as a metaphor for all of the things that we have happening in our lives. And I recognize the reality that there are some of you listening and you've got spinning plates. The big picture of the book. is helping us recognize that God can actually take care of us and our spinning plates so that we can take care of ourselves. Dr. Vickie: Practically speaking, how does that play out? Well, my favorite chapter title of the book is, "Get Off the Cross, Honey. Somebody needs the wood." Sometimes we can't just convince people that they need to change. They have to feel their need for change. And what I want to do is create that feel for the need of change by using Jesus' words in Matthew. And so in this chapter, I cover Jesus' words and he says, "Come to me, everyone who is weary and heavy burdened." And, I think that pretty much everyone listening is going to say, yep. I am weary and heavy burdened. In the original language, weary was all about feeling like everything was on you. That self-sufficiency, that's what the weariness is that Jesus was talking about, and then carrying heavy burdens. That is about all of the expectations, all of the duties, all of the to-dos and the do mores. And so if you are exhausted by all of that, overwhelmed, Jesus doesn't tell you, you've got to read your Bible five days a week. He doesn't say you've got to pray for 45 minutes a day. He says, "Come." It's an invitation. And what he wants to give us is rest. He wants to care. The work has to be done, but He wants to teach us how to live in him. So that we let Jesus carry the weight as we do the work of our lives. When I think about that verse, like the word picture, Jesus goes on to say, take my yoke upon you. And yoke always felt like this really antiquated word, but yoke still exists. And most of us know that a yoke is where they have one animal that is basically harnessed to another animal and the visualization is
