Matthew 11:29+30 (NIV) “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

**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.

Connect with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith on Twitter: @DrDaltonSmith Facebook: Dr. Saundra Dalton – Smith Instagram: @DrDaltonSmith or Pinterest: @DrDaltonSmith

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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.

[00:00:18] <music>

Laura Dugger: Do you love to travel? If so, then let me introduce you to today's sponsor, Dream Seller Travel, a Christian-owned and operated travel agency. Check them out on Facebook or online at DreamSellerTravel.com.

If this is your first time here, welcome! We are doing something new today, so you chose to listen in on an exciting day. And if you've been around for a while, have you heard us talk about Patreon? This is a platform that financially sustains The Savvy Sauce.

When listeners appreciate the content they have access to for free, they sometimes choose to financially support our team so that we can be funded to continue producing podcast episodes. You may have heard me say before that if every listener gave only $1 per month, it would completely offset all our production and team costs to produce this podcast. [00:01:18]

As a thank you to those who support us through Patreon, our team releases a bonus episode each month and a downloadable scripture card each quarter, exclusively for those paying patrons.

These recordings are timeless, and we have decided to unlock the vault and release just a few of these throughout the year. In doing this, we hope to show you what rich content you're missing out on by not being a patron.

So, I would like to personally invite each one of you today to visit thesavvysauce.com, click on the Patreon link, and follow the prompts under "Join Patreon here". For just $5 per month, you're going to instantly have access to over 50 bonus episodes like this one, with new ones released every month. You will also receive a downloadable scripture card designed by Ange at Jars of Grace every quarter.

So, for today, I'm pleased to share an episode that originally aired in December of 2019 with my guest, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, who is a clinician, author, and speaker. [00:02:21]

Here's our chat.

Welcome back to The Savvy Sauce, Dr. Dalton-Smith.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Thanks for having me.

Laura Dugger: Great to have you back. In case our listeners missed our previous chat, will you just share a glimpse of who you are and what you do?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes. I'm a board-certified internal medicine physician and an author. My latest book is Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. And I'm a mom of two teens and a wife of almost 19 years now.

Laura Dugger: Well, and as a doctor, what issues are your clients commonly presenting with?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, some of the main things that are coming into my practice are, number one, is just chronic fatigue, people that are tired all the time, insomnia is a big one at this point, as well as lots of people who are struggling with anxiety and depression. Those seem to be the main areas of concern when someone shows up. What I'm finding is that a lot of people are dealing with insomnia. [00:03:22] That's probably one of the biggest ones.

Laura Dugger: And we haven't really discussed that much on this podcast. So are you seeing any reasons for insomnia or anything that helps people with this frustrating issue?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, I see that the typical way that medicine is treating it is to toss a pill at it, which is kind of typical for medicine. But that's effective to some degree. I don't have a problem necessarily with people using sleep aids periodically.

But the issue with that is that your body can become very dependent on them. So even natural things like melatonin and then the prescription sleep aids, when your body becomes dependent on it, then you have to take them to be able to go to sleep. I prefer to try to help patients kind of determine what it is that's keeping them from getting their body in a calm enough state to be able to get to those higher levels of sleep.

I mean, when you think about sleep, you really have to look at the kind of the sleep process. [00:04:24] You have REM and non-REM sleep. And with the non-REM sleep, you have four stages. So most of us are getting stage one and stage two, which is very light sleep. You don't actually get the restoration of the body and kind of the nerve regeneration and all of those good things that happen in sleep until stage three, which is a much deeper type of sleep. It's where, you know, if I tried to wake you up, I'm going to have to shake you a little bit. You're not just going to wake up from hearing a sound.

And then rarely do adults get to that stage four, which if you have kids you've probably seen it. When they fall asleep in the car and you pick them up and they're like a rag doll, they're just like floppy. So rarely do adults ever get to that stage because it's such a deep level of sleep. But the good thing is, is you don't have to get there. You actually start getting a lot of the restorative benefits of sleep in stage three.

Laura Dugger: Are you saying adults don't usually get there because they're not sleeping long enough periods or because maybe physically we don't need that stage? [00:05:28]

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, that stage, you can jump to REM from three to four. So when I say adults don't get there, they transition through there. Maybe a better word. They don't stay in that stage. They transition through there onto REM sleep, which is that rapid eye movement sleep where really you get a lot of the great benefits with the awakening of the senses and being able to process information. That's where the new synapses come in and creative ideas burst forth and dreams and all of those things can start taking process.

Laura Dugger: That's so fascinating to learn more about the brain. One more question on this topic of insomnia. Do you see it being related to other life factors like diet or lifestyle?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes. There's lots of studies that suggest that caffeine later in the day does affect your ability to go into these deeper levels of non-REM sleep. So many of the studies recommend that you stop caffeine, preferably before noon. [00:06:28] But some go as far as saying you could go to two o'clock and still not have any adverse effects from it.

What I always recommend with my patients who are dealing with insomnia is to stop at noon and see if it does improve their sleep. And that includes tea and Coke, which gets complicated here in the South where I live because everybody likes tea, either sweetened or unsweetened. So there's lots of caffeine being consumed long after the coffee in the morning. So I think it's important to really have some times when you are doing a self-analysis to see how your body is responding to these different things.

Laura Dugger: That's so interesting. What about sugar as well? Is that a culprit for insomnia?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Sugar stimulates most people. So large amounts of sugar at night. But considering sugar is consumed within about two hours after eating it, as far as your blood sugar spike and then it going back down. [00:07:27] If you were eating, let's say, ice cream or something like that, you know, something really sweet right before bed, then there wouldn't be enough time for your sugar levels to kind of spike and go back to normal or even bottom out, depending on the situation.

You've heard of people say they have a sugar rush and then kind of the lull that comes after it. So depending on the timing, that could play a part in it as well.

Laura Dugger: You mentioned anxiety, depression, and insomnia are some common presenting issues. How has that changed over the years?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Well, our lifestyles are way more stressful. So I've been practicing medicine now for about 20 years. And when I first started practicing medicine, it truly was all about medicine. It was high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, all of the basic internal medicine issues.

Now we have gotten a really good grasp on prevention for a lot of these. So people are mindful of the things they need to do to try to keep their blood pressure and their sugars under control but they're not keeping their lifestyles under control. [00:08:35] So they are packing more activities and taking away their time to rest and replacing it with more work.

And then when social media hit, what, maybe 10 years ago, I guess, when we first started having kind of this big influx with social media, that catapulted all of it in the wrong direction as far as those things that I mentioned with insomnia, depression and anxiety. Because then what little downtime we had before got consumed with activities that make us compare ourselves to other people, that give us very broad glimpses and a lot of lives. And we're only seeing the beauty in the life. We don't really see all the other stuff when you're looking at a lot of these social media posts.

So it really started affecting us mentally in a way that I think most of us didn't realize. You know, our social capacity and our ability to have empathy and to relate to people only extends so far. [00:09:40] We really aren't hotwired to be able to keep up with 3,000 people and how their day-to-day lives are going. But that's what we do.

Laura Dugger: That kind of leads me into another question. What are the most common stressors in the lives of the patients that you see?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Some of the big ones usually are family. If they have kids, that's usually a consistent stressor. Just the worrying about the day-to-day process of being a parent. I think parents always have some level of worry just kind of ingrained in them.

The age group that I deal with tends to be between the ages of 40 to 60 within my practice. And so there's a lot of stressors having to do with elderly parents or aging parents. So you have your kids you're dealing with who are getting ready to go to college and then you have your parents who are probably getting ready to go to a nursing home. So you've got kind of this weird dynamics where you're having to intercept within two lives that are on completely different playing fields. [00:10:41]

Other stressors include trying to find that work life. I know a lot of people call it balance. I call it work-life harmony because I don't think you can balance the two. But trying to find that harmony between your work life and your home life. That seems to be a huge stressor.

And then finances. Having enough and getting the bills paid and debts and all the different parts that go with just the financial part of it.

Laura Dugger: Just to elaborate on one of those topics, we've had multiple listeners ask different things about aging parents because there's not a lot of helpful information out there. So if that is a common stressor, what encouragement do you have for somebody in that sandwich time where they maybe are still caring for their children and their aging parent?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: There are resources, but they're not well promoted is what I'm finding. What I recommend, if you have any type of way of getting in contact with your aging parents' physician... and that gets really tricky because let me tell you a trick. [00:11:46] You can't just call the doctor and expect them to talk with you because we have all type of HIPAA laws now.

So the very best thing you can start with is having your parent include you as an authorized person the physician can talk to about their case. That's just a signed piece of paper with your name and any of their kids or whoever that your parent would allow the physician to talk to. That way, when you call, they can let you know what's available in their area to help your particular situation

It could be home health, having a home health aide come out to help with bathing and cleaning, and those kind of daily activities that your parent might be having trouble with. Also, home health aides can do a general home assessment to see if there's any areas in the home that appear unsafe. Maps that they may slip over or fall and those kind of things.

So just kind of getting in relationship with your parents' doctor would be a great start because that way they can tell you what they're seeing that you may not see if you don't live there. [00:12:52]

Laura Dugger: And during our previous conversation, listeners can go back and find that episode on sacred rest. And it seems like maybe those caregivers are in a season of being more depleted and hopefully they can really focus on getting some helpful restoration.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes, that's so important because caregivers often they get into that give, give, give mode and they really don't see how allowing themselves to be restored helps them to maintain that. You can't continually give and never receive without eventually becoming depleted and burned out. Caregiver burnout is a huge thing.

You hear about that even within parenting, not just with caring for the elderly, but where it seems almost as if someone snaps at some point. And really what's happened is they've become burned out. They've given so much that they just don't have anything left.

Laura Dugger: Those are really great recommendations for caregivers. [00:13:52] But then as we're talking about these stressors that your clients present with, do you have any highest recommended stress relievers?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: A lot of them are the ones that have to do with some of the rest issues that we talked about. So one of the big ones is social. And that's basically in the form of community, making sure that you have a community kind of mindset, those people that you are allowing to restore you, those life-givers that are allowing to pour back into you.

So making sure that you take the time for relationship with friends that don't need anything from you other than just wanting to be within your presence. And that can be difficult when you're a caregiver. Let's say if you have a demented parent who is staying at home with you, how are you going to go out with friends?

One simple way and something that a lot of homeschool or stay-at-home moms have been doing after talking with them about this concept is allowing electronics to work for you. Using things like Skype or Zoom or WhatsApp or FaceTime to have virtual times of social rest. [00:14:59]

So have a virtual coffee date with someone who is life-giving to you. Set a time. It doesn't matter if the kids are screaming in the background. It doesn't matter if the demented parent is walking around in the background. It allows you to have that eye-to-eye contact where you can actually see the person's mannerisms, their facial expressions. You can get that energy from just being in their presence and allow yourself to enjoy that without even having to leave your home.

Laura Dugger: That's a great idea because having a support system may be a stress reliever that's lesser discussed than others. Do you have any other lesser-discussed stress relievers?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes. One has to do with just that whole concept of making sure that you are getting good physical rest, both passive and active. The active part is what I want to focus on. I know we talked a lot about sleep earlier. So I want to focus on the active part of physical rest because so often when we have a lot of stress, we carry it within our bodies. [00:16:03]

Some of us will have kind of tense muscles. You'll feel like your neck and your head's not moving well because it's just very tight. Some people clench their teeth and grind their teeth. So they'll have pain that's in their jaw and kind of behind the ear area and the TMJ joints. All of these are areas where the body has a tendency to hold on to stress. So you want to do things that relax those muscles.

One of the very most simple things is to be mindful of if you have constriction of the neck, like when you move your head from side to side, you feel pulling down into the neck, to take the first two fingers and to push them into that muscle and just to kind of do a little kneading. It's just a simple self-massage to try to get that muscle to release.

And sometimes isolating the muscle by doing that, by putting those two fingers on it and just rolling them over it to knead them a little bit, can start allowing you to recognize when it's tense so that you can quickly start doing the things needed to release it, like neck stretching or neck rolls and things of that nature. [00:17:09]

I highly recommend massage for people who carry a lot of stress in their neck and back areas, because those muscles can become so toxic that it really just kind of limits you in other ways. It can be very distracting and keeps you from being able to focus because of just that ongoing tension.

Laura Dugger: It's a great creative solution. Let's take a quick break to hear a message from our sponsor.

[00:17:33] <music>

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[00:19:28] <music>

Laura Dugger: Any others that you can think of?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Looking at life as an adventure and determining what you need to discover next. I think oftentimes that when we get more stressed out, we have a tendency to focus solely on the work that needs to be done and we take away the play and the fun because we feel like, I've got so much to do. I don't have time to just have fun or to play or to explore or to enjoy your life. And that's no life at all.

We always say that people should take a vacation so that they can go have some fun. Vacations are great if your sole purpose of the vacation is to have fun. But if you're going on vacation because you're tired and stressed out, you probably need more of a retreat than a vacation.

Because our standard vacations are not restful in the least bit, be doing a lot of fun work. And so what ends up happening is people feel like vacations don't really work to relieve stress because they come back from vacation more tired than when they left. [00:20:41]

So we really have to look at when we do vacations, when we're doing the planning part of it, what exactly is my goal? What am I needing to be accomplished during this time away? Because if you're needing to have that playfulness and fun, great. Do that at the early part of the vacation because we need that. We need those breakaways to have fun.

But if you're also feeling tired, reserve some time at the end of the vacation to do things that are more in the line of creative rest. Some time just in nature, some time at the beach, just appreciating the beauty of the surroundings and the setting. So that when you leave that time, you really were able to get the fullness of what you needed in those moments.

Laura Dugger: I think vacations are wonderful. Or like you said, retreats. Do you think that there's a way to incorporate that fun or playfulness or retreat more so into everyday life? [00:21:41]

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Absolutely. I highly recommend for my patients, when we're going through kind of why it is that they're either in an anxious or depressed state, to tell me what it is that they love to do just because it feels good to them. It may not make any sense to anyone else or be logical, but it's just something they love to do.

It's important to feel like you have permission to enjoy your passions. And so that could be something so bizarre and remote. But that's the thing. The more bizarre and remote it is, the more likely you are to feel like you don't deserve to be able to do it.

I had one woman whose playful side, kind of the thing that she loves to do, is to go into these antique stores you'd see like on the road if you're traveling and try to find these antique porcelain dolls. And she just has a fascination for it. It's just everything about it comes alive inside of her. [00:22:41] When she finds a new one it's like finding a new treasure.

And I think that's important. If there's something about your life that you love. Some people it's as simple as putting fresh flowers in your house or in your office or on your kitchen counter. Something that is purely for the love of it, not because you have a good reason for it or because it's going to fix anything specific, but just because it puts a smile on your face.

Laura Dugger: And I'm sure that, like you said, that's different for everybody depending on your own idiosyncrasies.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes. I have one patient whose fun thing she likes to do is to she goes to a park, she just sits and watches kids play. And I told her, Okay, so what is it about that? She's like, I love remembering what it's like to be carefree because then I can then have it in my head when I go into my life. And I thought, How beautiful is that to be able to understand that that's an area where you struggle and you have to struggle with being carefree. [00:23:43] So being able to see people living carefree is how you remind yourself that that is a possibility for you.

Laura Dugger: It sounds like she was very self-aware to be able to identify and then problem-solve to meet that need.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Absolutely.

Laura Dugger: Another topic you seem to be passionate about is helping others thrive in life. So can you share some ways that we can turbocharge our lives?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes. Let me start just with our core relationships. One of the very first things is to make sure that you are prioritizing eye-to-eye contact in your relationships. We've created a culture with all of our electronics and all of our digital communication where we are more comfortable not looking in each other's eyes. When I go to my kids' school, I'm sometimes distraught over how frequently their friends will be talking to me. And it's like they're looking at my ear and not my eyes.[00:24:41] There's a discomfort we have now with the intimacy of eye-to-eye contact with others.

And so just to begin that within your own marriage. So often with couples, as we get further and further in our relationship, you'll find that we are in the same room with each other, but we are not actually intimate or taking a lot of intimate time in our day-to-day interactions. We're either looking at our iPads or iPhones or the computer, the TV. Or when we are face to face, it's when we are discussing things like bills or arguing with each other. So you end up in these situations where people feel like they're living with their roommate and not their lover anymore.

So one of the things that I have people do in my 30-day sacred rest challenge is I have them spend five minutes face to face with their spouse asking that question. Everybody asks, but no one stays around to hear the answer. How are you doing? [00:25:40]

I find that if you allow time for people to honestly answer that question with more than a one-word response, then you get some very deep interaction into what's going on in their life. And that can be done with your spouse, your kids, and with people that you love to not allow them to get away with "it's good" or "I'm okay" or "everything's fine". To actually require them to process that question and to give you a heartfelt answer.

Laura Dugger: Are there any other ways you recommend people thrive in life?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yeah. The morning routine, I think, is huge. I think how you start your day kind of sets the course for what the rest of your day is going to look like. For many people, when we first get up in the morning, the initial process the brain wants to go through is kind of, Okay, what do I got to do, what do I got to do? And just kind of jump into the activity.

I start every morning with a very simple opening my mind to what are the possibilities of what today can hold and just allowing God to kind of give me a fresh perspective on kind of my purpose and my goal for the day. [00:26:45] To be able to enter the day kind of with a specific mindset.

For example, today I woke up with a specific mindset of in what areas can I surprise someone with the goodness of God? That was kind of what came to me this morning. And so how may that look? I spend the day looking for how can I bless someone above and beyond what they would expect or what I would normally do. So if I go to a restaurant for lunch, I would normally maybe give a 15% tip or something like that.

So on a day when I felt like this, like I'm representing God kind of in human form, then that might be a 30% tip. It would be the above and beyond. And with a little note that says something like, "hope you have an awesome day. Be blessed." So I'm not preaching a scripture to them. I'm just loving them in a different way.

When you start days like that, you start them with a purpose and with a goal, you open yourself up to be looking for those opportunities to see that come to pass. [00:27:48] And it's wonderful. It leaves you feeling purpose-filled every day.

Laura Dugger: I love that idea of surpassing their expectations, and I think it does glorify Him. And I think it would just be a disservice not to cover something in the medical field while we've got your time. So are there any fascinating things that the medical field is discovering about our brains?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes, there is one study that really, when I was working with the book, just really blew my mind. I can't recall exactly where the study was done at, but the study was one where they were looking at how prayer affects people in the hospital, as far as how it affected their ability to heal and how it affected just their mindset and their thought processes.

What I loved about the study was that it took a look at when people were praying, what part of the brain was synapsing. [00:28:47] And what it found was the same part that was synapsing is this part that is in effect when we have communication with other people.

And I love how they concluded the study was that conversation with God imprints on our brain in the same way that conversation does with humans. It actually leaves an imprint on our brain so that it seals kind of a moment in time when that conversation occurred. It's not kind of like this out there in the blue thing that that no one can, you know, recognize. That when people talk to God and they're doing it in prayer, that it is as if he is standing in front of them and they are having that conversation.

Laura Dugger: Wow, that is incredible. And I love how he created our minds to be that way and be in relationship with Him.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Oh, it's powerful. It's a powerful concept to think, to even just have that thought that your conversations with God are that concrete. [00:29:50] That it's not just all kind of out there and you can't grab a handle to it, but within our human bodies, He's allowed it to be in such a way that we can almost hold on to a piece of Him within those conversations.

Laura Dugger: And we have covered such a range of topics today. I'd love for you to boil it down. How can we apply all of this helpful information to our lives so that we can see actual life change?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Really, it's just putting into practice all of those seven different types of rest that I've talked about regarding sacred rest. Finding that time to allow yourself to stay rejuvenated and to be restored. I love that, you know, rest is an R.E. word and then recovery and rejuvenation and restorations are all R.E. words as well, because really it's about allowing yourself to have that redo, that second chance to come back in and to repair those places of our lives that get beat down living in a fallen world and allowing us to continually be restored back to a place of being at our best and serving at our best. [00:31:02]

Laura Dugger: And a great place to start is if listeners want to grab your book, Sacred Rest, or if they want to take that deeper dive going back to our previous episode that we recorded together so you can get an audio version of just an overview of those types of rest. And Dr. Saundra, is there any other way that listeners can find you online?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yes, they can visit my website at IChooseMyBestLife.com. That's my main website and lots of free resources on the resources tab are located there.

Laura Dugger: Perfect. Okay. As always, we'll link to that in our show notes and on our website under our resources tab, it will be listed there as well.

We are called The Savvy Sauce because "savvy" is synonymous with practical knowledge or insight. And as my final question for you today, what is your savvy sauce?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I would say to love eye to eye. And that's in every relationship that you have. [00:32:01] To love eye to eye with people so that you let people know that you see them. That's not just the people that you already are in deep relationship with. But even the people that you meet on the street, give them your full eye-to-eye attention. We feel so disconnected in this world and as if we're oftentimes alone. And just knowing that someone honors you enough to open themselves up to look eye to eye with you is a blessing in itself.

Laura Dugger: That's a wonderful idea. And really, Dr. Saundra, this time has just been so informative. I really appreciate you breaking these topics down for us. So thanks for your time. And thanks for being a guest today.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Laura Dugger: We hope you enjoyed this special Patreon release. And we hope it also gives you a glimpse into the amazing conversations we're having on Patreon every month. Next week, the only episode going live is for our paying patrons, and we don't want you to miss out. So head over to thesavvysauce.com, click the Patreon tab, and then follow the prompts. [00:33:07]

By joining Patreon, you are not only financially supporting the ministry of The Savvy Sauce and making our future episodes possible, but you are also signing up to gain access to perks, such as downloadable scripture cards and bonus episodes. It will only take you a couple minutes to make a huge difference. So we welcome you to join today.

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.

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. [00:34:07] 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.

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? [00:35:13] 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.

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. [00:36:15] 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.

Welcome to The Savvy Sauce

Practical chats for intentional living

A faith-based podcast and resources to help you grow closer to Jesus and others. Expect encouragement, surprises, and hope here. Each episode offers lively interviews with fascinating guests such as therapists, authors, non-profit founders, and business leaders.

They share their best practices and savvy tips we can replicate to make our daily life and relationships more enjoyable!