Religion & Spirituality
81. Sacred Rest with Doctor, Wife, Mother, and Author, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith
**Transcription Below**
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith is an author, speaker, and board-certified internal medicine physician. She has an active medical practice in Alabama (near the Birmingham area). She received her B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Georgia and graduated with honors from Meharry Medical College in Nashville. She has been an adjunct faculty member at Baker College and Davenport University in Michigan teaching courses on health, nutrition, and disease progression. Dr. Dalton-Smith is a national and international media resource on the mind, body, spirit connection and a top 100 medical expert in Good Housekeeping Doctors’ Secrets. She has been featured in many media outlets including Women’s Day, Redbook, First For Women, MSNBC, and Prevention. She is the author of Set Free to Live Free and Come Empty (winner 2016 Golden Scroll Nonfiction Book of the Year and 2016 Illumination Award Gold medalist). Her newest release is Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, including ground-breaking insight on the seven types of rest needed to optimize your productivity, increase your overall happiness and live your best life. She has shared her tips on merging faith and medicine with over 16,000 health care professionals to encourage the current and next generation of doctors to treat the whole person. Learn more about Dr. Saundra at IChooseMyBestLife.com.
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Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s Website
Books by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:
Sacred Rest
Come Empty
Set Free to Live
Connect with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith on Socials: @DrDaltonSmith
Take Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s Rest Quiz
30 Day Sacred Rest Challenge
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Gospel Scripture: (all NIV)
Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”
Romans 3:24 “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
Romans 3:25 (a) “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”
Hebrews 9:22 (b) “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”
Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:11 “Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Romans 10:9 “That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Luke 15:10 says “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”
Ephesians 1:13–14 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession- to the praise of his glory.”
Ephesians 1:15–23 “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”
Ephesians 2:8–10 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God‘s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.“
Ephesians 2:13 “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.“
Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
**Transcription**
[00:00:00] <music>
Laura Dugger: Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, where we have practical chats for intentional living. I'm your host Laura Dugger, and I'm so glad you're here.
[00:00:17] <music>
Laura Dugger: If you've listened to The Savvy Sauce for very long, you know I'm a big fan of our sponsor, FabFitFun. Now the 2019 Winter Box is on pre-sale. Visit them at FabFitFun.com and enter code SAVVY at checkout for $10 off your first box.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith is my guest today, and we will discuss stories and applications she discovered through research for her recent book, Sacred Rest. This goes beyond recommending more sleep. She's going to break down seven different types of rest for us to intentionally engage with so that we can become restored. Here's our chat.
Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, Dr. Dalton-Smith.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Hi, Laura. Thanks for having me.
Laura Dugger: Excited for you to join us. And for anyone who isn't familiar yet with you and your work, can you just give us an overview of who you are and what you do? [00:01:20]
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Absolutely. I'm an internal medicine physician and author. I live right outside of the Birmingham, Alabama area, and I have two boys ages 13 and 14. I'm married to the love of my life, we've been together now for 19 years.
Laura Dugger: You've recently written a book, and I just appreciate your openness in your book about becoming a wounded healer. So can you share how there was a tragic event in your infancy that set you on this path to pursue rest?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, I started off in a situation where I really just felt like God had not been fair to me, if I'm going to be completely honest, and it left really a deep wounding. That was when I was born, my mother died about three days after childbirth, and my father at the time was in the military. So he had come home for the birth, but he went in expecting to leave with the family, and he ended up leaving the hospital with just an infant. So he wasn't prepared for that. [00:02:21]
So he gave me to my great-grandmother to raise and went back to the military to finish up with his tour. So my whole thought concept of home was one that... I looked at home as this place I was trying to get to, this place of security and love and acceptance and just everything being whole. That wasn't how my childhood was. That wasn't how it felt. It didn't feel whole.
When I looked at other families and other kids in my class who had a mom and a dad, and I had neither. This orphan spirit, this wounding resonated, I think, into the rest of my life. I really believe that's part of the reason I became a doctor.
Laura Dugger: I remember reading in your book that that was even part of your process in turning ultimately to God. Is that right?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: It was. Because I kept trying to find peace in things. Maybe if I got enough accolades, and maybe if I got enough degrees, and if I got enough awards, that some way that I would get to this place of feeling whole. [00:03:26] And none of those things satisfied. None of those things led me to that place, except for God.
Laura Dugger: Well, definitely a tragic journey, but I'm so glad for that ending that you found Him. You've written extensively about rest, which rest can seem like such a simple process. So why do you think so many people struggle with fatigue and insomnia?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, I think that the issue is, is that many of us have combined the concepts of sleep and rest. So we think we're resting when we're really not. We call things rest that are not restorative. That's the big mindset shift that most people have to make is that rest should equal restoration. When you're doing something that you're calling rest, if you can't tell me what's being restored, then it's not true rest.
For example, you know, people are constantly saying, well, I'm going to rest on the weekend and they go watch Netflix or they just lay around on the couch. [00:04:29] But nothing is truly intentionally being restored. That's how we relieve that fatigue. Whether the fatigue is spiritual or mental or emotional or physical, we relieve it by restoring that area.
Laura Dugger: So let's just lay a foundation with definitions then. What is the distinction between sleep and rest?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Sleep is purely physical. When you're thinking about sleeping, you're just talking about the physical aspects of resting. We're not going into the other parts of it. Within my book, I've noticed that there's actually seven different parts of rest. Rest is more inclusive. It includes everything that pertains to your life and your well-being and restoring all of those areas, not simply focusing on restoring the physical.
Laura Dugger: So let's elaborate then. Like you mentioned in your book, Sacred Rest, you do describe seven types of rest. So what are they? [00:05:28]
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: The seven types are physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, and creative.
Laura Dugger: Okay. We can get a sense of what these types of rest are just from their names. But to gain a better understanding, could you just briefly define each type of rest?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes. Well, physical is probably the easiest one for most people to comprehend because we automatically think sleep. But in physical rest, we have to divide it up into active and passive. So sleep and napping are the passive types of physical rest. The active physical rest include things like stretching, anything really that improves your circulation and gets the lymphatics flowing. Like leisure walks, prayer walks, things where you're not trying to burn calories necessarily, but you're just trying to improve the circulation. Also with muscle tension release is another thing with physical rest.
Mental rest is allowing your mind to kind of get to that quiet place. [00:06:28] So for many people, that's a huge area. When they try to go to sleep at night, their mind's racing or they can't seem to turn their brain off. And so that's what mental rest does. It kind of gets everything to settle down in the head to clear that cerebral space.
Spiritual rest. I look at spiritual rest as building that relationship with God. Not so much focus on religion and the dogma related to that, but more of a focus on relationship and that feeling of belonging and love and acceptance that we get from that relationship.
Laura Dugger: Could you also elaborate... if somebody is longing for that mental rest, what are a few examples of something that's restorative?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yeah. With mental rest, one of the biggies is when people try to lay down at night to go to sleep. So if you're lying down and you're having one of those situations where you're ruminating over something, whether it's something you have to do the next day, kind of doing a mental checklist of your to-do list, or if you are rehashing a conversation or something that you wish you'd said different, it's recommended to do what we call mind dumping. [00:07:35]
So the way the brain works is it automatically wants to hold on to any information that you're ruminating over like that. So if you're able to put it on something concrete, like a piece of paper, I mean, it could be a post-it note, a journal, just some way of concretely getting it out of your head onto something. That way, your brain will allow you to let it go because it's preserved.
So you can always go back and look at that note card that says, oh, don't forget to do X, Y, Z in the morning. And it keeps your mind from holding on to it, trying to preserve it for you in that way.
Laura Dugger: Oh, that's so helpful. Then you said spiritual rest. What are some examples for that one as well?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, a fun one I do with teens when I'm discussing spiritual rest is to send yourself a text that states what you would need God to say for you in that day for you to feel loved. And what it does is it gets that whole mindset of relationship. Because of teens that's how they communicate now, everything's by a text message. [00:08:35]
So if God texts you, what would it say? What do you need to hear to know that He loves you unconditionally and that you're wanted and needed?
Laura Dugger: Thank you for clarifying. Those are the first three, and I'll let you continue on with the rest of them.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Emotional rest is that ability to be authentic and just express yourself truthfully. There's a lot of people-pleasing type behaviors that we adopt to try not to have confrontation with others. But really, personal boundaries require that there be some level of confrontation. By definition, that's what a boundary is.
So with emotional rest, it's giving yourself that freedom to be truthful, to use your nose appropriately, to really make decisions based on what is needed now in the moment. And maybe not necessarily what you've always done or what people expect of you, to have that freedom to just be authentic.
Laura Dugger: As a clinician, are there any specific relationships where you see this is really difficult for your patients? [00:09:38]
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I see it as being difficult for women more than men. There's kind of a perception that women should just be extra nice or nice to the point of sacrifice all the time, I guess maybe what I'm thinking. But there has to be some boundaries. You can't automatically become the go-to person for every bake sale just because you did it one time or the go-to person to teach Sunday school just because you did it two years ago.
You have to be able to actually say and feel the freedom to say when something no longer is a good fit and not to just do it because you don't want to make anyone mad.
Laura Dugger: That's a great word of encouragement. And you said that one was?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Emotional. Emotional is really closely tied with social because both of them have to do with people and how we interact with people. Social rest is the rest we get from our relationships. So every relationship either revives us or drains us. That doesn't mean that a relationship is good or bad. It's just the nature of how the dynamics are for that relationship. [00:10:46]
For example, your kids are always pulling from you. They're needing things. They're draining parts of you. But that doesn't mean they're bad. That's just the nature of that relationship. You're giving into their lives. Same with marriages.
But the flip side of that, both of them can also be restorative. But it just depends on what's going on in that moment, whether you are giving or you're receiving from that relationship. And so you have to recognize how different relationships pull on you.
There are always people in your life, particularly if you work outside the home, you may notice that you go into the room and a certain co-worker, every time you're around them, you just leave feeling ahrr. You feel like, Something about them just leaves me not feeling good.
When you recognize that about someone, it doesn't mean you can always avoid them. But it does open up an opportunity to make sure that you get restoration and whatever it is they're pulling from you. So with adults, one way of correcting that is to always be mindful of how regular you're getting time with your life-giving people. [00:11:51]
Your friends who don't need something from you all the time, but you just feel good to be around. To make sure that even with your spouse, that you're making time to just enjoy each other. And that your only face-to-face time isn't when you're arguing or when you're discussing the kids or paying bills and kind of doing the deep work. That you're actually spending some eye-to-eye, face-to-face time just loving on each other and talking to each other, communicating.
Laura Dugger: I have to admit, I think that was my favorite one to learn more about. Because at first glance, you think it means taking a break socially. But how you unpack it, finding more time to be around those life-giving people. I just feel like that provided a lot of freedom. I think a lot of listeners are like me. They're in a stage where they're with kids all the time. I felt like you gave the freedom not to feel guilty that you need some of those life-giving adult conversations and time spent together to recharge, really. [00:12:51]
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: You do. Absolutely, you do. I think that's one of the reasons that when we look at studies, you know, when we're kids, we have all these friends. As adults, with social media, it looks like we have a lot of friends but those relationships are very superficial. They are not the deep kind of relationship where you can really feel like someone gets you.
So it's very important to make sure that there's a couple of people in your life who you really feel like are those life-givers. And to honor them with your time and with your presence. Because that's what you're getting from them is their time and their presence.
Laura Dugger: I think you put words to why date night with my husband each week, why that's such a highlight. And it fuels us in all areas.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yeah, that's awesome.
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Laura Dugger: So those are the first five. I'll let you continue with the final two types.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: The next is sensory rest. Sensory rest is the rest needed from the external stimuli that we get from our surroundings. For example, you mentioned being a mom. If you're a mom with girls, particularly, who have a tendency to be very high-pitched, and even their laughter is high-pitched so you're constantly hearing kind of high-pitched sounds, or you're working on the computer, or if your job requires you to be in an office space where you're hearing kind of that background hum from people talking in the background and phones ringing, all of that leaves our senses in a bit of a toxic state.
So sometimes people don't understand why, at the end of the day, they're just so agitated. That's that sensory overload that many of us live under, and we just kind of stay constantly tense. Well, sensory rest is undoing that. [00:16:07] It's getting back to the silence and an understanding of why dimming the lights on your computer as you're going into the evening can be beneficial to help lead you into deeper, higher-quality sleep.
It's kind of down-toning all of these stimuli that we have on a regular basis and making a point of getting back to just kind of some simplicity within our senses. Turning off the TV if no one's watching it. Driving in silence and not always having the radio on. All of these are ways to start getting more of it easily.
Laura Dugger: Even with brain research, are there certain people that are more genetically predisposed to be really sensitive to these sensory stimuli?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes. And if someone has a tendency to have higher cortisol levels, like their job is just naturally is more stressful, so they tend to have chronic increases in their catecholamines and their endorphins, those people really have to pay attention to this because it's almost like their body is just primed to be hyper. [00:17:11] And so you don't then want to feed that with even more external stimuli.
Laura Dugger: That definitely makes sense. I'm curious, does that apply to somebody who's experienced trauma as well? Do you see any correlation there?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, I think it depends on the type of trauma. I look at trauma in two ways. We have trauma that's more depressing. It brings you down. And then we have trauma that's more stimulating, that kind of keeps you heightened.
So if the trauma is in a way that was more stimulating, then, yes, any kind of excessive stimulation is going to kind of worsen that. If the trauma is more kind of depressing, that it's kind of suppressed your spirit more than agitated it, then I'm not thinking that's going to make up because you're already kind of in a down state. So that extra stimulation is probably just going to kind of make you look normal. No one would ever be able to tell the difference. [00:18:07]
However, someone who's had something traumatic that's more stimulating, you may even have noticed this. Like if someone drops a book in a library or restaurant, somebody drops a glass, it's like they're about to jump out of their skin. They're just so at the edge of their stimulation that any little extra is too much.
You also see it like if they go to something like a concert. There are some people who say, "I just can't stand loud music. I can't stand being at concert. It just really upsets me." And that's that kind of overstimulation coming out in a different form.
Laura Dugger: Okay. That's another reason why this book is so helpful. You give tips of how to restore that area. What is the final type of rest you cover?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: The last type is creative rest. It's probably my favorite because it's one that a lot of people have never even heard of. Some of these others, you may not know the specifics, but you at least have some idea.
But with creative rest, it's really allowing beauty to inspire awe and wonder inside of us. It's that playfulness that we all need, but we all try to act like we don't need it because we're grownups now. [00:19:14] I think that is probably my favorite.
When I tell people creative rest, the very first thing they start thinking about is, Ih, I need to take an art class or I need to do something like that. And really that's creative work because it's pulling on your creativity. And you have to remember rest is about being poured back into. It's about restoration.
So creative rest would be going to the theater and enjoying the art or going to a museum and letting the art inspire you or going outside your door and taking a walk in nature and looking at just nature and the things around you and allowing the beauty that you see to make something come alive inside of you.
Laura Dugger: I really like that one as well. But as a culture, why do you think we view rest as lazy or selfish or say that it's a luxury?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Within our culture, we really have made rest out to be just sitting around. We've made it out to be this just cessation of activity. And that's not what it is. You can cease activity and not restore anything. I mean, look at the majority of the population. We have sedentary jobs, and so you're sitting, but you're not restoring your body because the lymphatics and the circulation are getting stagnant. So you still are needing that body fluidity. [00:20:37]
When you change the mindset of what rest looks like, it no longer looks like a luxury or laziness. It looks like something that's vital for you to actually be at your best.
Laura Dugger: You even say that the greatest gift that we can give God and others is a rested, best version of ourselves. Do you have any scripture to kind of reinforce that point? Or how did you arrive at that conclusion?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, the scripture that I focus the book really around comes from Genesis. I don't quote the scripture specifically in the book, but that is the framework of actually how the book was created. When I look at Genesis, really chapters one and chapter two, we see that man was created on day six. Animals were created first, man was created. And after we were created, He told us to be fruitful and multiply. Basically gave us our assignment, gave us our mandate for what we were here for.
And then the next day after that was day seven. And on day seven, it says God rested. [00:21:37] Well, most of the time, we don't think about what man and woman did on that day. But if God rested, we were resting, too, because it was after that, at the second part of that second chapter, that it then starts talking about the work.
So many of us go about our work in a way that we think we have to work to earn our rest. Where if we look at just from the very beginning, we are to... after we get an understanding of who we are and what we're supposed to be doing, once our purpose is kind of clear, our job is to first rest and then we work from our rest, not work to rest.
Laura Dugger: That's an incredible paradigm shift. What are the long-term effects if we focus only on work and then omit regular periods of rest?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, I think we see it in media all the time where we see these really successful people and we hear about them ending their life because they just felt like they weren't worth being here anymore. [00:22:41]
I can totally understand that because when you don't allow periods of rest, you rob yourself of the ability to enjoy the work that you do. So you're constantly pouring, pouring, pouring. You can be blessing everybody around you and internally feel empty because you are not allowing yourself to enjoy the work that's being done and to receive back from that. It's great to be a giver, but to be able to continue to give, you have to get to a point where you are also a receiver. And rest is where we get that receiving.
Laura Dugger: Seems like a natural balance. We've discussed a few spiritual topics. So what do you think the enemy wants for us as it relates to rest and burnout?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I think that's one of his biggest ways of keeping people bound. In Isaiah chapter 30, I think it's 12 through about 15, that's one of the scriptures where I really got an eye-opening as well, because it talks about when the Israelites were coming out of slavery and going into the promise. [00:23:50] But God tells them, in returning in rest shall you be saved? In quietness and trust shall you proceed. It said, "But you were afraid and unwilling."
And when I read that, it really dawned on me because I thought, you know, You're right, God, I am unwilling to rest because I'm afraid that if I rest, then everything's going to fall apart. That quietness and trust... I had no trust. I trusted in my own ability to get it done, not in God's ability to obtain it and sustain it while I rested. And I think that's the thing. When we look at rest, we don't look at it as how it is identified with our relationship with God, but how well you rest as a level of how well you trust God with what you have.
Laura Dugger: Never thought of it that way. I really like that.
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So what do you think God wants for us?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I think He wants us to return to His original plan. I love that, you know, in the Ten Commandments, we have all these thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not. And only one of them says to remember something. Why does it say that? Because He knew we would forget.
I think His desire for us is to do just that — to remember why we need rest and to remember how important he even thought it was that He emulated it to us in the very beginning. So that our very first full day on the earth was one where He was showing us the way.
Laura Dugger: That is such a gift from him. In your book, you mentioned the gifts of rest. So what do you mean by that?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes, the gifts of rest are 12 different things that to me, they come from rest. So when you're resting well, you experience these without even trying. So that's the gift part of them. [00:26:14]
And just a couple of them. One of them is boundaries. You know, we talked about those personal boundaries. Well, I think it's important to realize that we have to have them. Otherwise, we get in these situations and these relationships where we start getting resentful because we feel like people aren't being respectful of our needs. But they don't even know what we need if we don't have any boundaries up to let them know kind of the limitations of what we find acceptable.
Another one of the gifts is a gift of reflection. Just being able to see things from a different perspective. And sometimes you can't get that until you stop for a moment and really take some time to look at the situation kind of from the 30,000 feet perspective and not just from where you're standing at right now.
Laura Dugger: Those are helpful. Your book also has a lot of teaching stories in it. Do you have a favorite?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes. My favorite teaching story, I would say, is the very first one in Chapter Three where I'm discussing a businesswoman who is basically coming home from work. [00:27:21] But in her travel home, she is using that time really as her opportunity to unwind. Her life is packed. So the only time she's kind of allowing some mental rest is when she's driving home in traffic.
And as you can imagine, that is not the ideal time to let your mind wander. But people do it all the time. You know, that's the time they kind of zone out a little bit. Well, in her situation, she zoned out and didn't see the car breaking in front of her and had a wreck.
I met her in the ICU after liver lacerations and intubation and all that had to go on to get her back stabilized. The part of the story that really stuck with me, because she was with us for a while, she had quite a recovery, was at the end of her recovery period... We were getting everything ready and kind of saying our goodbyes. I recall her just being so emotional and so tearful. And I'm like, "You get to leave." In my head, I'm thinking, "This is great. You're alive, you're healthy, you get to leave." [00:28:25]
And she was like, "I don't want to be who I was before I came in here." That time of just being forced to rest to kind of get her mind cleared out. She had done some deep soul-searching. God had really just met her during this time. She recognized the benefit of that set-apart time. But she had to be forced into it almost through this accident.
And just listening to her express that I thought, "God, I don't want anyone else to have to be forced, so to speak, into rest. I want them to enter into the rest."
Laura Dugger: I think that empowers all of us that we have a choice to enter into that rest. And if a listener is really tracking with you, Dr. Saundra, where can they dive deeper into this topic online or connect with you?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: One of the main ways I would recommend them to really start looking at this topic would be through my free rest assessment at restquiz.com. [00:29:29] It basically allows them to answer a series of questions that will help them to see which of the seven types of rest they are most efficient in. So they're not just kind of grasping at thin air trying to determine, well, which one do I need or do I need all seven? Usually, you don't need all seven to really dive into. You're likely already getting most of them. You just didn't know what they were or how determined.
But there's normally one or two that you're deficient in. So being able to identify those specific ones where you need more rest can help direct you as you're being more intentional.
Laura Dugger: That is great. We will link to that in our show notes and also put your website in our "Resources" tab on our website. I have one final question for you today because our listeners know we're called The Savvy Sauce because "savvy" is synonymous with practical knowledge or discernment. And so we'd love to hear yours. Dr. Saundra, what is your savvy sauce? [00:30:29]
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: My savvy sauce is I nightly dump my mind junk. I'm one who likes to hold on to things and process information and kind of go through all of that. So every night I dumped all the mind junk. I have a piece of paper where I jot down whatever that is so that I can go to sleep with a clear head.
And then if it's something that needs to be processed, I still have it in front of me so I can process it at a more appropriate time when I'm not trying to sleep.
Laura Dugger: Oh, that's a great idea. Dr. Saundra, you are so knowledgeable and I feel like you've just given us so many practical tips that we can grab on to. I really appreciate you being our guest today.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Oh, thanks so much for having me.
Laura Dugger: One more thing before you go. Have you heard the term "gospel" before? It simply means good news. And I want to share the best news with you. But it starts with the bad news. Every single one of us were born sinners and God is perfect and holy, so He cannot be in the presence of sin. Therefore, we're separated from Him. [00:31:36]
This means there's absolutely no chance we can make it to heaven on our own. So for you and for me, it means we deserve death and we can never pay back the sacrifice we owe to be saved. We need a savior. But God loved us so much, He made a way for His only Son to willingly die in our place as the perfect substitute.
This gives us hope of life forever in right relationship with Him. That is good news. Jesus lived the perfect life we could never live and died in our place for our sin. This was God's plan to make a way to reconcile with us so that God can look at us and see Jesus.
We can be covered and justified through the work Jesus finished if we choose to receive what He has done for us. Romans 10:9 says that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. [00:32:38]
So would you pray with me now? Heavenly, Father, thank You for sending Jesus to take our place. I pray someone today right now is touched and chooses to turn their life over to You. Will You clearly guide them and help them take their next step in faith to declare You as Lord of their life? We trust You to work and change their lives now for eternity. In Jesus name, we pray, amen.
If you prayed that prayer, you are declaring Him for me, so me for Him, you get the opportunity to live your life for Him.
At this podcast, we are called Savvy for a reason. We want to give you practical tools to implement the knowledge you have learned. So you're ready to get started?
First, tell someone. Say it out loud. Get a Bible. The first day I made this decision my parents took me to Barnes and Noble to get the Quest NIV Bible and I love it. Start by reading the book of John. [00:33:37]
Get connected locally, which basically means just tell someone who is part of the church in your community that you made a decision to follow Christ. I'm assuming they will be thrilled to talk with you about further steps such as going to church and getting connected to other believers to encourage you.
We want to celebrate with you too. So feel free to leave a comment for us if you made a decision for Christ. We also have show notes included where you can read Scripture that describes this process.
Finally, be encouraged. Luke 15:10 says, "In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents." The heavens are praising with you for your decision today.
If you've already received this good news, I pray that you have someone else to share it with today. You are loved and I look forward to meeting you here next time.
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