A Personal Invitation From Dr. Z:

Get Regulated. Increase Capacity. Build Resilience.

Biblical resilience is the God-given capacity to remain rooted, faithful, obedient, and hopeful when life takes a turn you did not choose.

For most people, regulating your nervous system is the first step. And that’s what we’re walking our Inner Circle Subscribers through…

Six live Wednesday discipleship sessions, walking the seven R’s together for the next 41 days, inside a community of Christian families doing this work alongside you.

Explore the 41-Day Nervous System Reset

“Thank you so much for everything you all do, and especially today for the Scriptures on rest. I really needed those today.”

— Mary G.

Hey y’all, and welcome to Monday Manna!

Six years ago, we marked Dr. Z’s 40th birthday at the kitchen island under a forced lockdown, with a homemade cake and every candle lit by hand.

We never imagined marking that milestone sheltered in place. But that night we were grateful to be together, and at peace, while so much of the world around us was not.

We have been thinking about that night all week...

Six Years Later, We Went Back to Normal and Called It Recovery

April 2020, the day before Dr. Z’s 40th birthday — mandated lockdowns, the gyms were closed, but thankfully we had a few dumbbells in the basement, so we took them outside with the kids to get some exercise.

Ask yourself what has actually changed since then.

The doors reopened. The services went back on the schedule. Everybody exhaled.

But exhaling is not the same thing as building something.

What 2020 exposed was never a virus problem, and it was never a faith problem either. People who love Jesus deeply came apart at the seams, and it had nothing to do with how much they loved Him.

What came apart was the nervous system of the body of Christ, all at once, in public. It had been that fragile the whole time. The virus did not make it that way. It turned the lights on.

And when the lights went back off, almost nobody built anything.

We have not seen a wave of churches come out of that season and start teaching their people the ordinary things:

How to carry stress without it carrying you.
How to sleep.
How to eat.
How to sit in enough silence to actually hear God.
How to make what your family needs instead of depending on a shelf being full.

We picked the routine back up and hoped the next one would be gentler.

So here is our concern, plainly…

Another storm is coming, and six years later the Church is no more ready for it than it was the first time.

Hear us carefully, because this is where people get nervous.

Preparation is not fear. Fear is what shows up when the thing arrives and you have nothing underneath you.

Noah built before the rain.
Joseph filled the storehouses before the famine.
The wise man dug down to rock before the storm, and the storm came for both houses.

From what we were told, they weren’t panicking. They were paying attention and creating guardrails in their lives, preparing for the storm ahead of them, building resilience.

When everyone else raided the supermarkets, we stayed home. We already had what we needed, and we knew how to make more if we ran out.

We had been making our own hand soap and cleaners for years, and those were among the first things to vanish from the shelves. We had a couple months of homemade make-ahead freezer meals on standby and shelf-stable food in the house — not because we are survivalists with a year of rice and beans, but because we have a house full of kids and don’t want to run out of food.

We work from home and own our business, so the shelter-in-place orders never came with the fear of losing a job.

None of that was planned. It was simply the path we were already on.

We did not follow the propaganda. We did not follow the fear.

And our nervous systems responded accordingly.

A couple weeks into lockdown it dawned on us that our life had barely changed. The one real shift was grocery shopping.

People asked us more than once why we were not affected the way everyone else seemed to be. We never had a clever answer. We were prepared. We felt God’s peace. We were taking it one day at a time.

And from that anchored place, we watched it happen. Marriages collapsed. Businesses failed. Churches shut their doors.

That is the part we cannot shake this week, and that’s why we created the Nervous System Reset for our Inner Circle subscribers.

Spread the love…

“The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” — Proverbs 22:3

Solomon is not describing a coward here. He is describing somebody who is awake.

The word behind prudent carries the sense of shrewdness, of a person who thinks ahead. And notice that Scripture does not praise him for predicting the danger. It praises him for doing something about it.

Now notice the other man. He is not called wicked. He is called simple. His only failing is that he kept walking at the same pace, in the same direction, with the same habits, straight into something he had every opportunity to see.

That was most of us in 2019.

And here is the part that should stop you. Solomon says this twice, almost word for word, once in chapter 22 and again in chapter 27. That is the Bible’s way of underlining a sentence. It was worth saying twice because we are so good at forgetting it.

So here is your one thing this week.

Pick the one guardrail you know you should have built after 2020 and never did. Not five. One. The sleep. The pantry. The walk. The morning with God before the phone. The friend you keep meaning to call.

Then build it this week, while nothing is on fire.

Preparation is not the opposite of faith. It is what faith looks like on a calm Tuesday.

Know someone who needs to read this?

Refer a friend

What We Are Loving This Wee

Wish Your Nervous System Had A Reset Button? Join the 41-Day Nervous System Reset to Get Regulated, Increase Your Capacity & Build Resilience (God’s Way!)

Live on Substack (starting this week!)... Join the 41-day live group mentorship for Christian families who want a Scripture-first path through stress, anxiety, overwhelm, racing thoughts, poor sleep, reactivity, and a body that never fully stands down.

Featured Posts

Everything we’ve published since Manna #19, all six pieces (articles & video replays), right here.

Three of those are the live workshop we hosted this past week, Days 1 through 3. If you only have time for one thing, start at Day 1 and let it run.

From Natural Living Family

Bible Health is where we teach the why. Over on Natural Living Family this week we taught the how. Here are four favorites worth your five minutes…

Want more from our Natural Living Family Substack?

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Your Voice Matters

One question this week, and it is the one we keep asking ourselves.

What did you build after 2020?

And if the honest answer is nothing, what is the one thing you would build now?

Monday Manna #20