Intense determination without celebration becomes your downfall
Joy comes from seeing the complete fulfillment of the specific purpose for which I was created and born again, not from successfully doing something of my own choosing.
Oswald Chambers
Every experience, even the most unwelcome, if offered to Jesus, can become your gateway to joy.
Elisabeth Elliot
Celebrate God all day, every day.
Philippians 4:4 MSG
Life did not turn out as expected for Liz and Gary Puffer. Things had been looking so good. They had two little boys, six and eight years old, who were filling their house with energy. Liz was fully engaged in raising these boys and in the life of the community. Gary was working in the aerospace industry, installing hydraulics for commercial and military projects, including the space shuttle. His life had just recently turned back to faith after years of struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol.
Then came the news that Gary had a brain tumor. It was not cancerous, but it had slowly grown into much of his brain. He would require thirty-five hours of surgery and would be left with deafness in his left ear and partial paralysis on the left side of his face. Many months of recovery stretched out before him.
This would not be the only physical challenge that Liz and Gary would face together. In the years to come, he endured a heart attack and a stroke due to issues with blood clots. In his midfifties, Gary had to retire with disability, a very difficult choice for a man who wanted to work to support his family.
I asked them, “What do you do when life doesn’t turn out as you expected?” Their answer wasn’t a surprise. I’ve seen it evidenced in their lives many times. Liz said, “Instead of looking for how God could bless us, we looked for who we could bless.” Out of their pain, they turned their hearts toward serving others.
That’s not where we always turn when we are in pain, so I asked them what caused them to turn toward serving rather than self-centeredness. It took them a moment to answer. Their first thought was that they simply couldn’t have done anything else. As they reflected further, they realized it was the examples of serving they had witnessed that prompted them to serve others.
Gary remembered growing up in a pastor’s home. The ways his dad served the community came back to him as he went through his health crises and the identity crisis of early retirement. He knows that Proverbs 22:6 has powerfully become true in his life: “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”
Liz did not grow up in a Christian home. Yet she distinctly remembers the faith that was shown to her when her sister Robin died at the age of eighteen. One memory of a local pastor visiting their home and having the family hold hands in a circle as he prayed speaks to her even now of the powerful difference made by simple acts of serving others in love.
Liz and Gary are two of the most servant-hearted people I know. If you were to ask me whose servant gifts have most impacted Saddleback Church, it would be women like Liz Puffer and her predecessor on our pastoral care team, Renee Yapp. They have pastorally cared for more people in the hurt places of life than anyone I can think of. And Gary is often right there alongside Liz.
Years later, Liz’s and Gary’s examples of serving would have a powerful impact in the life of one of their boys. Their son Brandon became a major league relief pitcher with the Houston Astros, San Diego Padres, and San Francisco Giants. In 2008 he was pitching for the minor league Frisco Rough Riders, hoping to get back to the majors.
Dealing with his own addictions to drugs and alcohol, Brandon broke into someone’s home. He was so intoxicated that he doesn’t remember the events of that night. He was arrested and eventually sentenced to five years for his crime after pleading guilty. Nolan Ryan, the famous pitcher who had become a friend, spoke as a character witness for him at his trial. Brandon’s lawyer told him that if he got sentenced in Texas, even with Nolan Ryan as a character witness, he needed to know that time in prison was a part of God’s plan for his life.
Liz and Gary had to deal as parents with yet another twist in a life that wasn’t turning out as they expected. They had been watching their son pitch in major league parks, and now they were visiting him in prison. Liz would go to the store and find herself unable to get out of the car. She just couldn’t handle the thought of running into someone she knew. Eventually, they were able to trust God with this turn in their lives. They knew that God’s will for Brandon would be done, even in the midst of these circumstances.
During his time in prison, Brandon had to choose the direction his life would take. As much as he wanted to get back to the major leagues, he began to see that goal as being only about his ego. He decided instead to follow his parents’ examples and look for ways to serve.
He now works with the Nolan Ryan Foundation, helping young baseball prospects. He’s able to serve them by showing them how to improve their skills. Even more importantly, his story serves as a warning of the traps they can all too easily fall into.
In many ways, the focus of Brandon’s celebration has changed. He used to be celebrated by forty thousand fans in the stands for making the right pitch. Now he’s choosing to celebrate the ways God is working through his life to make a difference as he serves others.
To continue to rebuild, we almost always face a change in what we celebrate and how we celebrate.
THE NEED FOR CELEBRATION
Many rebuild their wall only to find that it has crumbled! They accomplish the task only to find that they have been consumed by it. They have become so busy and successful that life is just no fun anymore. We are not meant to become unsmiling workaholics in order to put things together again. We can accomplish great tasks while still being able to enjoy life.
Celebration of what God is doing is one of the keys to putting it back together again in a way that lasts. If you can’t celebrate, you’re likely to repeat whatever caused you to have to rebuild in the first place. You may not face the same circumstances, but you’ll find yourself stuck in the same places. It is celebration that gives continued strength for the changes God is working in your life.
Begin by embracing the truth that you are made to celebrate. Celebration is not your idea; it’s God’s idea. Some Christians seem to think they can have “joy” without enjoying anything. For them, serving God is serious business to be faced with a holy intensity that does not allow for a smile. This makes no sense. Being in the presence of the sacred does not mean we have to be sad all the time.
In Nehemiah 8:9, Nehemiah addresses this issue: “Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and teacher of the Law, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, ‘This day is holy to the LORD your God. Do not mourn or weep.’ For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law.”
We obviously can and sometimes should mourn in the presence of God. It’s where we began in Nehemiah 1. There are times when we need to weep before the Lord. But the idea that the only way to have a sacred experience is with a mournful heart and a downcast look is totally false. Enjoyment is God’s idea. He gave us that capacity. He gave us those emotions.
CELEBRATION GROWS OUT OF WORSHIP
Worship is the vital key to the personal celebration and joy that enable us to endure in anything we have rebuilt.
In Nehemiah 8, the Israelites hold a great day of celebrating God in worship for all that he had done. Celebration cannot be divorced from worship, because it grows out of worship. The word celebrate comes from the Latin, meaning “to gather to honor.” Our attitude of celebration is rooted in gathering with others and honoring God for what has happened. We can’t truly celebrate without worshiping, because God is the one whom we most celebrate and the one who created us to celebrate.
It is an indictment on our times when the tie between celebration and worship is not immediately obvious. We live with a strange propensity toward celebrating everywhere but in worship. Personal devotional times are serious; our get-togethers with friends are where we celebrate with fun and laughter. Church worship services are somber and quiet; football games are filled with loud cheers.
We can celebrate apart from worship, but they will be celebrations that leave us wanting. As wonderful as it is to celebrate at a family gathering, sporting event, or business party, there is a longing for something more if these celebrations are removed from a life of worship. Celebration apart from the God who made us to celebrate is a temporary escape at best; celebration connected to the worship of God is an infinite source of joy.
This is not to say that we must sing hymns at baseball games. In a life of worship, we recognize at the deepest level that God made the green grass of the baseball field, gave the players their skills, and gave us the ability to enjoy it all.
While there are multiple places of celebration in our lives, an obvious place to begin to connect celebration and worship is in our worship together as a church. As a start, we must ask ourselves whether we celebrate when we worship. Many people who come to a worship service every week seem to be sadly lacking in the joy department.
If we’re honest, the Sunday morning service in many churches is more like a funeral than a festival. Christians look like they’ve been baptized in vinegar and taken the Lord’s Supper with lemon juice! Showing up on a Sunday morning is obviously not enough. Nehemiah shows us two vital attitudes for worship. Without these attitudes, celebration is reduced; with these attitudes, celebration is multiplied.
Worship with an Attitude of Unity
A vital aspect to joy-filled worship is being in unity with others. That unity is described in Nehemiah 8:1: “All the people came together as one in the square before the Water Gate.” To increase your celebration in worship, enjoy the people you worship with.
That may sound easy—until you try it for a while. The problem is, the people you worship with are just as imperfect and sinful as you are. So the longer you worship with a group, the more you’ll be irritated, disappointed, or even deeply hurt by those you are getting to know.
Some people try to solve this problem by constantly changing churches, looking for the perfect group of people to worship with. After the first few weeks in a new church, it may look like they are going to be that flawless fellowship you’ve been looking for, but it doesn’t take long to discover that they have just as many problems as the church you just left.
The next step down this road of disappointment with people is to decide to worship alone—maybe by being out in nature or by watching services online. At least that way you only have to deal with your own problems. While that may be true, you’re also cheating yourself out of the joy that God intends to come out of worship with others.
Hebrews tells us to not forsake our gathering together, because it is out of the struggle of meeting together that the true richness of worship is found (Hebrews 10:25). Being with others in a spirit of unity has the power to lift you up when you are down—through their encouragement. It has the power to strengthen you when you are weak—through their love. It has the power to focus you on what’s truly important—through your serving others.
Worshiping God with others causes us to gain needed perspective. In celebrating God, we have the unique opportunity to see ourselves for who we truly are—every one of us equally in need of the loving grace of God. Richard Foster wrote, “In celebration the high and the mighty regain their balance and the weak and lowly receive new stature.”1
Too often we take the privilege and power of Christian fellowship for granted. I know I do. I was reminded of this when I visited our Saddleback campus in Berlin, Germany. After services end in most American churches, people leave in about two or three minutes. We are focused on getting to our cars so we can get the checkered flag in some imaginary race out of the parking lot. In Berlin, most of the church attenders were still talking for up to an hour after the service!
I asked a few people why they stayed so long, and they told me that less than 1 percent of the residents of Berlin are believers. For most of these people, no one else in their neighborhood, workplace, or school is a follower of Jesus. That hour after the service is the only Christian fellowship they get all week. They were hungry for what they lacked.
Sometimes we have a kind of “fast-food fellowship” in our relationships with other believers. Having fast-food restaurants on every corner causes us to drive by most of them and to stop as quickly as we can when we are hungry. In a similar way, having believers all around us often causes us to fail to value what we have or to give time to those relationships that are most important.
When you are not yet a believer, it is the responsibility of a church family to connect with and welcome you as you join them for worship. But once you become a follower of Jesus, it is your responsibility to connect with others. If you find yourself making your way into and out of church without talking to even one other person, you are cheating yourself out of the joy that God intends to grow out of our worship. Worship certainly must be focused upward toward God. And because we worship together, it also must be expressed outward toward each other.
To increase your celebration in worship, you must increase your enjoyment with the people you worship with. There will be many times when you won’t want to go to church. When you choose to go anyway, you’ll find those are the weeks you most needed to be in church. You were being tempted to not choose what you most needed, namely, to be around other people.
Worship with a Love for God’s Word
The more you increase your love for God’s Word, the greater your celebration in worship. The example of the people of Israel on the day of worship described in Nehemiah 8 shows that our love for God’s Word is deepened as we recognize the significance of his Word.
If you go to a World Cup soccer final, you’ll see an undeniable sense of celebration because of the significance of the event. In many stadiums around the world, the fans will stand for the entire match because it is so important. Nehemiah 8:5 reads, “Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up.”
Some churches stand for the Scripture reading, often pointing to this verse. Whether or not you stand is not the most important thing, although it can be a good thing. What is important is that a sense of significance is attached to God’s Word. This is one of the attitudes that creates celebration in worship—the feeling that nothing is more important than what we’re hearing in that moment from God’s Word.
The Israelites’ experience that day shows that for the significance of God’s Word to be a part of worship, there is something that worship leaders must do and something that the worshiping congregation must do. Both have a responsibility.
The leaders must teach in a way that people can understand: “They [the Levites] read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood what was being read” (Nehemiah 8:8). If something is significant and yet we don’t understand it, we just feel confused.
If I were to go to a World Cup soccer final, I would enjoy what was going on because I understand soccer. If I were to go to a World Cup cricket final, it would feel significant, but I’d be confused because I don’t understand cricket. There are bowlers, googlies, silly mid-offs, and dibbly dobblies—none of which I understand. I would need someone to sit with me and explain it all so I could enjoy the game.
When leaders make God’s Word clear, the celebration of God is magnified. One of the most celebrative moments in worship is when a simple explanation of God’s truth makes the light go on in our hearts! When we understand it, then we’re able to live it.
As important as it was for the leaders to make the teaching understandable, it was what the people did that day that resulted in truly joyful worship: they listened attentively to the Word. Nehemiah 8:3 reads, “He [Ezra] read it aloud from daybreak till noon as he faced the square before the Water Gate in the presence of the men, women and others who could understand. And all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law.” They listened for five or six hours! One of the keys to understanding why some worship services are more filled with joy is attentive listening.
There’s a difference between hearing and attentively listening. Suppose I’m reading the newspaper, and my wife, Chaundel, says something to me, and I respond, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” with my eyes still on the page. If she asks, “What did I say to you?” I might be able to repeat what she just said, but anyone would know I was not attentively listening. I may have heard the words, but I didn’t have my mind and heart focused on what she was saying.
Attentively listening in worship is fixing your mind and heart on what God is saying to you. When you do that, the celebration increases in your worship experience. Then your joy adds to the sense of joy that everyone is experiencing in that service.
I’ll never forget a worship experience in November 1993. After meeting in school auditoriums and gyms for twelve years, Saddleback Church had moved to its first property two years before. Land in Orange County is expensive, so for the first two years on this property, we met in an open-air tent.
Even in the mild Southern California climate, we froze in the winter, burned up in the summer, and were almost blown away by the Santa Ana winds in the fall. It was time to build, and the church had been praying and worshiping as we prepared to give together toward the building that would be our new place of worship.
As we came together to celebrate the gifts that had been given, there was a deep sense of unity and strong attentiveness to our obedience to God’s Word. The result was a spontaneous and powerful sense of celebration. I’ll never forget an older pastor saying to me that day, “Don’t forget what is happening here, Tom. These are the kinds of worship services that can inspire a generation.” This is the power of celebration.
There is an inevitable response to this kind of celebration. Nehemiah 8:6 reads, “Ezra praised the LORD, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, ‘Amen! Amen!’ Then they bowed down and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground.”
This verse reveals that true praise always results in an attitude of profound humility before God. You know God has given you what you do not deserve simply because of his love.
To express this humility, the Israelites bowed down and put their faces to the ground. There is something to be said for expressing physically what is happening to us spiritually in worship. I admit I sometimes struggle with physical expressions of praise or devotion in worship. Maybe it’s my background, or maybe it’s that these expressions can too often feel expected or copied.
I know I need to grow to see that the body and spirit are tied together in deeper ways than I imagine. Physical expressions of worship have the power to connect me spiritually and emotionally to what I’m singing or hearing. Whether it’s bowing your head, raising your hands, or just lifting your eyes ever so slightly toward heaven, take the risk to express outwardly what God is speaking to your heart.
WORSHIPING IN WAYS WE MAY NOT HAVE EXPECTED
Before we leave our look at celebration and worship, there’s an issue we must address. Sometimes we lose our sense of celebration in worship because our worship becomes routine. Yes, there is something comforting about the same routine of worship every week. Yet it is also true that the routine can cause us to lose our sense of excitement and anticipation in celebrating God.
God has designed our human minds to need both routine and variety. In accordance with our personality, we’ll enjoy one of those more than the other. Still, we need both.
There are three specific directions for celebration in Nehemiah 8 that we may not expect to find in God’s Word—and these directions give us some ideas about how to worship in ways we may not have expected.
First, Nehemiah tells the people to feast. God considers feasting a part of celebrating:
Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
The Levites calmed all the people, saying, “Be still, for this is a holy day. Do not grieve.”
Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them.
Nehemiah 8:10–12
God gave us our taste buds, and they’re a great gift for celebrating. It is a sin to worship food. And it is equally a sin not to be willing to celebrate with food. God commands us throughout Scripture to celebrate with everything he has made, which includes the food he has made. First Timothy 6:17 declares that God “richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”
You can worship God with a fast, and you can also worship with a feast. A feast is an excellent tool for celebration. This is clear throughout the Bible: in all the feasts of the Old Testament, in Jesus’ first miracle that took place at a wedding feast, in the Passover feast Jesus had with his disciples, and in the fact that when we get to heaven, we’re going to celebrate forever in the great wedding feast of the Lamb.
Eating unhealthy food all the time is obviously wrong, and so is thinking that denying yourself food that tastes good somehow makes you more spiritual. You can have a Daniel Plan feast.2 Celebrate a spiritual milestone in someone’s life or a great thing that God has done by having a feast together. Invite some friends who are not yet believers to join you for this feast. It’s one of the greatest ways to help these friends experience what it means to celebrate God.
God first tells the Israelites to feast. Second, he tells them to share. Sharing is an important part of celebrating. Look again at Nehemiah 8:10: “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord.”
Nothing can cut into your joy as quickly as selfishness.
Many of us are surrounded by material blessings that no longer seem to bring joy. When that happens, the first question to ask is, “Who can I share with?” The greatest joy in life comes not from what you have but from what you give. If you’re just holding on to things, they’ll eventually sour in your hands, just like the manna spoiled for the people of Israel in the wilderness (Exodus 16).
The third thing Nehemiah directs the people to do is to be still. Nehemiah 8:11–12 reads, “The Levites calmed all the people, saying, ‘Be still, for this is a holy day. Do not grieve.’ Then all the people went away . . . to celebrate with great joy.”
An expression of celebration is not always found in the shouting; it’s often found in the stillness. It’s a celebration to be quietly caught up in a moment of beauty, in the love of those around you, or in a spirit of gratitude. Sometimes you need to be still in the presence of the Lord with a deep sense of appreciation for who he is.
When we think of being still before the Lord, we most often think of a solemn and serious stillness. That is one way to be still before God, yet here we see another way. This is a celebrative and joyful stillness.
There are times when joy stills our hearts. Charles Spurgeon wrote, “It would be very difficult to draw a line between holy wonder and real worship; for when the soul is overwhelmed with the majesty of God’s glory, though it may not express itself in song or even utter its voice with bowed head in humble prayer, yet it silently adores.”3 Perhaps the most prolific speaker and writer of his generation, Spurgeon understood the value of adoring silence before God.
When I’m singing with others in worship, I sometimes enter these moments where I just need to be still. The joy of hearing others’ voices fills my heart to a place where my greatest expression of celebration is not in singing louder but in being still and listening to the voices around me. When your heart becomes full, it can cause you to be still—the kind of stillness a parent feels when they first hold their child. There are no words; there is just joy.
Through being still in celebration, you’ll often find yourself experiencing an exchange of emotions. In the stillness, you exchange your anxiety for a sense of trust in God, your guilt for a depth of gratitude for God’s forgiveness, your fear for a moment of faith, your grief for genuine joy.
To this point in our look at celebration, we’ve focused primarily on worship. That’s intentional! Without worship, you will never get to the place of genuine celebration, the kind of celebration that energizes your lives. Celebration begins with worship.
CELEBRATION RESULTS IN NEW STRENGTH
In the midst of this great day of celebration for Nehemiah and God’s people, we come across this sentence in Nehemiah 8:10: “The joy of the LORD is your strength.” These familiar words hold the key to the kind of strength we’re all looking for.
Notice that it’s the joy of the Lord. Nehemiah isn’t talking about joy that you somehow try to manufacture from within; he’s talking about the joy that the Lord gives. If you try to force your hearts to have this strength-giving joy, you’ll end up more tired than when you began.
How do we get the joy of the Lord into our lives? It’s the joy of the Lord, so obviously we must look to what the Lord says about this. In John 15–17, we hear the Lord Jesus talking to his followers about the ways he gives this joy. If we want new strength, we must do the things he told us to do in these verses—and we must do them with a focus on the fact that he wants to use these things to bring us joy.
If you’ve been a follower of Christ for any time, you know how easy it is to lose your focus on the joy. You find yourself grinding away at spiritual habits, trying to become more powerful, when the real intent is that you become more joyful. Feeling powerful is not your strength; the joy of the Lord is your strength. This is the truth that may very well hold the secret to the life of faith that you’ve been longing for.
In John 15:11, Jesus says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” What had he just told them that would give this joy? In verse 9, Jesus said, “Remain in my love.” To experience the joy of the Lord means you stay connected to Christ. Depend on him for your daily needs, and recognize that the significance of your life comes only from him.
Then, in John 15:10, 12, Jesus says that to stay connected to him, we must keep his command to love one another. To experience the joy of the Lord means we stay connected to other Christians.
This may seem like too simple a formula for joy: stay connected to God; stay connected to others. But it’s not a formula; it’s a relationship with God and others. And there is nothing simple about relationships! A loss of joy in your life is always a call to get closer to God and to get closer to other believers.
In John 16:20 (NLT), Jesus continues to talk about joy: “I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn over what is going to happen to me, but the world will rejoice. You will grieve, but your grief will suddenly turn to wonderful joy.” That’s real-world joy. The joy of the Lord is not permanently painting a happy smile on your face and pretending everything is OK. Sometimes everything is not OK.
Jesus says you’re going to grieve; you’re going to face difficulties in this life. But your grief can be turned to joy, because his joy surpasses any grief you can face. Please know that I don’t intend to minimize your grief in saying that. I’m maximizing the joy of the Lord. It’s eternal. It covers every grief we have to face.
“The joy of the LORD is your strength.” Joy gives the strength you’ve been looking for. If your strength for rebuilding is failing, don’t try to become more determined. Instead, look to have greater joy.
This is the secret that many never learn, so they keep failing again and again. They try to become more determined but don’t feel like being more determined, and even if they become determined, all they feel is more determined. And in determination alone a certain kind of weariness starts to set in. That’s because determination is not where your real strength is; the joy of the Lord is your strength.
Your determination will eventually wear out—for some of us, it will happen sooner than it will for others. The joy of the Lord will never run out; it is an inexhaustible supply of strength for living. You cannot do the work of the Lord without the joy of the Lord.
Celebration is not just something you do when all of the rebuilding is finished. Celebration gives the strength you need all along the way. So don’t wait until all is finished to celebrate; start today. Since the joy of the Lord is your strength, for every day you need strength, you also need joy.
What do you think of when you hear the word joy? Sometimes the misreading of one word can make all the difference.
Years ago, Chaundel and I were on our way to a meeting of churches at the convention center in Riverside. We left a little late and then got lost in the midst of a bunch of citrus-named streets in that part of town. Orange and Lemon and Grapefruit Streets all seemed to blend together.
Finally, I saw a huge sign on the corner that read “Riverside County Convention Center.” We found a parking place on the street near a side door, jumped out of the car, and rushed up to the door, only to find it locked. We pulled at the door several times, hoping someone would hear the banging and let us in, but no one came.
As we started around to the front of the building, we passed by the large sign. I saw I had read it wrong. It wasn’t Riverside County Convention Center; it was Riverside County Corrections Center. We had been trying to break into the county jail!
Fortunately, we weren’t arrested. We finally made our way to the convention center, a little late and having learned a huge lesson on the importance of a single word.
When you read the word joy, I hope you don’t see the word job. This is not a matter of it being your job to be happy in Jesus. It’s a gift he wants to give you. It’s not the joy of you that is your strength; it’s the joy of the Lord that is your strength.
That joy starts in celebrative worship. Since it’s the joy of the Lord, you won’t find it apart from celebrating with the Lord. In that celebration, you are strengthened to see what God has rebuilt last and even become a blessing to others in ways you would have never imagined.
CELEBRATE TO SUSTAIN YOUR JOY: My First Steps
CELEBRATION GROWS OUT OF WORSHIP
Here are some simple steps that can make a huge impact:
• If you haven’t been attending worship with others, start there.
• If you need to set something right with someone you worship with, do it today.
• The next time you worship, honor Scripture by writing down one thing you sense God is guiding you to do through the Bible verses that are read and taught.
• Share with someone else what God has done in you through a worship experience.
• Be still—try two minutes of just sitting quietly before God. Instead of talking, just listen.
CELEBRATION RESULTS IN JOY
Ask yourself whether you are trying to gain strength by feeling powerful or whether you are trusting God for his strength by being joyful.
Memorize these words from Nehemiah 8:10: “The joy of the LORD is your strength.”
Let these eight words run through your mind several times during the day—both when you feel strong and when you feel weak.