A 20-year-old granddaughter who died unexpectedly in her sleep.
The multiple losses and hardships of COVID-19.
The many other circumstances and situations that come to our lives that seem impossible to understand.
What all these things have in common, author and leadership expert Tim Dunn says, is the fact that we can’t control them. After the sudden loss of his granddaughter Mariah, he tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network, God gave him an insight he now shares with others in his Yellow Balloons book, devotionals and podcast: “We really only control three things in life, we control who we trust, what we do and how we look at things, the perspective we choose.”
“Many of us really spend a lot of time and attention trying to control things we can’t control like other people or circumstances or the future or the past,” Dunn says. “And we don’t have any control of those things. And so we waste effort and increase frustration, maybe even create depression. And in doing so, we neglect the three things that we do control.”
Joey Willis, who serves as trainer with Dunn’s servant leadership group The Crossroad, also writes the Yellow Balloons devotionals. He says they “focus on the three things you can control and letting go of all of the things that you’re trying to control that you can’t. And so that perspective just helps to align people with the truth and with reality, which invites them to take ownership of what they can control and let go of the rest. So the devotionals are just kind of a daily reminder of that—a daily reminder that you’re not dependent on your circumstances.”
Willis adds that the Bible “is inviting us into a life of faith, a life of trust, a life of love, that isn’t driven by what happens to us, but is driven by the core of who God is and who He created us to be.”
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