Link Round Two

 Me and Shelby!

                                                         

 Family dinner at Tanya and Jane's! I Love my Family!

Me Rachael and Jamie!

 Jamie and I wore our onsies to Mystery Monday this week:)

While it was great to be home for the holidays, it is great to be back in Branson at Link Year. Everyone at Link Year has become like family to me and I missed my Link Year family while I was away. Link Year has seven pillars, and it wasn’t until over the break that I was really able to see how these pillars have influenced my life over the past few months. The seven Pillars are: maximizing moments, student of scripture, authentic accountability, Biblical worldview, privilege responsibility, heart transformation, and growing in gratefulness. It’s taken a while for me to see how these pillars have influenced my life, but that’s because they are centered around heart transformation and not behavior modification. It was great to reflect over everything I am learning here over the break but I am so HAPPY I am back. I know this semester will fly by so fast but I am excited for what semester has in store for everyone here at Link.

            This week started off with a very big breakfast for Mystery Monday. We all hung out and talked about our breaks. We heard from Ted Cunningham this week, a local pastor, as well as a renowned Christian author. He spoke to us on the fun hot topic of relationships. He spoke about the unnecessary delay of marriage. I didn’t exactly agree with everything he had to say on this though. He talked to us about how people are prolonging adolescence, and not wanting to grow up.

I really liked what Ted had to say on communication. He said that the issue is rarely the issue. Usually there is something behind what people “think” they are arguing about. He pointed out that 93% of communication is non-verbal. Did you know that women on average speak 20,000 words each day while men speak an average of 7,000? Everyone knows that women talk more, but 13,000 more words each day, that’s a lot! Women and men communicate differently, but communication is key when it comes to relationships.  He shared two skills to help communicate better, the first being to L.U.V.  Talk. This means to listen, understand, and validate when talking to someone. The second skill drive thru listening, what he meant by this was that we have to actually listen to people and give them out full attention instead of half way paying attention. We are interrupted every 3.5 minutes, usually by technology, but it takes 25 minutes to refocus. If we continue to allow these interruptions in our life every 3.5 minutes then we will never be able to fully refocus on a conversation or task; this is sad.