Incredible scene in Kansas City right now! Bikers from across the metro are joining with three men who have biked all the way from Argentina to KC. It’s been a 10 month, 10,500 mile journey that ends today at the Argentina team hotel. @kmbc
21 years ago, I sat in a prison cell and learned I was pregnant.
Every sign pointed toward abortion. Every circumstance said this baby would never have a chance.
But I chose life.
I saw value in my daughter before anyone else could.
What I didn’t know was that her birth would help change laws in America. Fifteen years after I gave birth while chained to a hospital bed with a sheriff standing watch, that story reached the highest levels of government. And @POTUS granted me a full and unconditional pardon and signed legislation ending the shackling of women during childbirth in federal prisons.
Today, that same baby walked across the stage as a graduate of MIT.
From a prison birth to one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Never let your circumstances determine someone’s worth.
There is value in life.
There is purpose in every child.
Go, baby. The world is yours. ❤️🎓
#MIT #Graduation #ChooseLife #Redemption #SecondChances #ValueInLife
@Yoda4ever@Yoda4ever Matthew 25:40 “And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.”
God sees your kindness… 😭🙌🏼
@_makkiee Without Jesus’ birth we wouldn’t have the cross. The eternal, uncreated son of God chose to become flesh in blood, created so that He might then live in a body with all it’s limitations for 33 years for the soul purpose of being crucified on our behalf.
Have you trained your brain that to complain about:
Money
Children
Jobs
Weather
Traffic
Relationships
Bosses
What they haven’t achieved.
Choose to be thankful and retrain your brain.
🚨BREAKING: 8 weeks of gratitude practice physically rebuilds the neural pathways between your memory and reward centers.
Your brain physically rewires itself every time you feel grateful.
Eight weeks of intentional gratitude practice creates measurable structural changes in the neural pathways connecting your hippocampus to your ventral tegmental area. The memory center starts talking to the reward center in a fundamentally different way. New synaptic connections form. Existing ones strengthen. The physical architecture of how you process positive experiences rebuilds itself.
Most people approach gratitude like a mood they can choose to feel. A psychological vitamin they remember to take when life gets difficult. The neuroscience reveals something far more profound.
Gratitude is a biological intervention that sculpts brain tissue.
Researchers tracked participants practicing gratitude exercises for two months using brain scans. They watched new neural highways construct themselves in real time. The anterior cingulate cortex developed stronger connections to the medial prefrontal cortex. The brain learned to route positive emotional experiences through higher order thinking centers instead of storing them as fleeting feelings.
Every positive experience you��ve ever had exists as a neural trace in your memory network. Most sit dormant, accessible only when something external triggers the specific sensory combination that originally encoded them. You smell coffee, suddenly remember a conversation from years ago. Random. Unreliable. Outside your control.
Gratitude practice systematically rewires that retrieval system.
After two months, participants could voluntarily access positive memories with increasing ease. Their brains had built stronger pathways between memory storage areas and emotional processing centers. They experienced deeper emotional resonance during memory retrieval. The quality of remembering itself had improved.
The participants also started noticing positive details in their present environment they had previously filtered out. Their attention systems recalibrated. The same neural pathways pulling positive memories forward were scanning current experiences more thoroughly for elements worth encoding as positive memories.
Their brains became biased toward collecting evidence that life contains meaningful moments.
Most cognitive interventions try to change how you interpret negative experiences. Gratitude practice changes how thoroughly you notice positive ones. It teaches your visual and emotional processing systems to detect opportunities and pleasures that were always present but neurologically invisible.
The timeline reveals something crucial about neural plasticity.
Weeks one through three showed minimal structural changes.
Participants felt slightly more positive, but brain scans looked identical to baseline. Weeks four through six showed the first measurable increases in gray matter density. Weeks seven and eight revealed entirely new neural network formation.
Two months. Your nervous system can physically restructure itself with consistent practice.
The method was almost embarrassingly simple. Participants wrote down three specific things they felt grateful for every evening, explaining why each mattered. No meditation apps. No guided visualizations. Just pen, paper, and the requirement to identify gratitude targets with enough detail that their brains had to actively search for positive elements.
Specificity drives the neural development.
General statements like “I’m grateful for my family” generate different brain activity than precise observations like “I’m grateful my daughter laughed at my terrible joke during dinner because it showed me she still finds me funny despite growing more independent.”
The brain needs detailed targets to practice connecting memory specifics to emotional rewards.
After eight weeks, participants developed a fundamentally different relationship with their attention and memory systems. Someone whose brain automatically scans for and emotionally amplifies aspects of experience that make existence feel worthwhile.
The neural pathways remain permanent after practice ends.
Gratitude carves lasting roads through consciousness.
@BostonByBirth I speak great grace to you, your beloved wife and daughter. This is a horrendous reality to live the rest of your life with. I’m deeply sorry. Asking the Lord to draw near to your family in a real way. To help carry your burden of your broken hearts. Share as often as you want!
@SenMarkKelly@SenMarkKelly I implore you to stop misleading people with completely wrong information. Yes I will need a drivers license. I will not have to re-register.. you know that. You do not need a passport. You are 100% lying to America.
"The Bible commands that we must each take up our cross daily. Compromising and conforming to the world's standard is against God's Word." —Billy Graham