{"id":8432,"date":"2020-04-22T21:41:08","date_gmt":"2020-04-23T01:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/?p=8432"},"modified":"2020-04-22T21:41:08","modified_gmt":"2020-04-23T01:41:08","slug":"better-things-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/?p=8432","title":{"rendered":"Better Things To Do"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Mason-27.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Mason-27.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8434\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Mason-27.jpg 800w, https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Mason-27-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Mason-27-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Remembering and retaining joy takes work, which is why the New Testament continually exhorts us to &#8220;hold on to the good&#8221; (1 Thessalonians 5:21).  People must hold on to something.  If I don&#8217;t hold the good, then I&#8217;ll hold the bad and stay stuck in problems.  My experiment taught me to feel differently about problems.  Where before I&#8217;d experienced them as maddeningly engrossing, now they became like old flames with whom I long ago fell out of love.  They didn&#8217;t have the power to entice me as before.  In the light of my happy marriage to joy, it was easier to throw them off.  Chronic problems have a way of going round and round on a hamster wheel, and a joyful person loses interest in this.  Joy has better things to do.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; Mike Mason, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sonderbooks.com\/Nonfiction\/champagne_for_the_soul.html\">Champagne for the Soul<\/a><\/em>, p. 160<\/p>\n<p>Photo:  South Riding, Virginia, April 22, 2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remembering and retaining joy takes work, which is why the New Testament continually exhorts us to &#8220;hold on to the good&#8221; (1 Thessalonians 5:21). People must hold on to something. If I don&#8217;t hold the good, then I&#8217;ll hold the bad and stay stuck in problems. My experiment taught me to feel differently about problems. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-joy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8432"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8435,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8432\/revisions\/8435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}