Well, it's summer, and that means the last installation in my seasonal music mixes (I might do a second edition for each -- not sure yet). Where I live, the summer climate has already been in full swing for a couple of months and likely won't let up until around October (please prove me wrong, nature!). My body is quite heat intolerant during this fight against chronic illness, so I wanted to make a playlist with songs mostly giving off a relaxing air of "keeping cool". I don't live near the ocean anymore, but I think I was at my healthiest physically when I lived in Florida and I was participating in a marine ecology program. We'd go across all the coasts of the state to study the wildlife of the sea. We caught a baby stingray in a net once (we let it go, of course), snorkeled just above sharks near a reef, and traversed mangrove roots in murky waters of high tide. We were so distracted by the manatee nearby that we failed to realize the high tide was preventing us from seeing the mangrove roots before we tripped over them. We came out of the water scraped and scuffed up pretty bad. I had the scars on my legs for a few years, and it made for a hardcore story to tell my old gamer friend, haha.
All that to say I'm very passionate about the ocean, and for me, summer just isn't summer without the sea. I've been on two day trips to the ocean since moving, but other than that, I've been far from the salty wind, the balmy rain, and the ebb and flow of the tide that has called out to me ever since.
So for now, my seaside life is lived vicariously through video games. The music of my childhood will help distract me from the humid sauna going on outside until the soothing crisp of autumn comes once more.
Bite-Size Bible Study (of sorts):
One thing I'd like to note is something I may have already mentioned on my channel before but would like to say again whenever I use certain music. For this particular video, you'll see some entries from the Pokemon series. I no longer play Pokemon for reasons regarding my relationship with God. The Pokemon themselves represent what are called familiar spirits, or familiars for short. They're seen as a cool concept in the secular world but I've been taught that they are demonic spirits whose sole purpose is to know a person inside and out as best as possible in order to exploit one's weaknesses and manipulate a person into giving them permission to blot out blessings in one's life. Be it as it may that you may argue Pokemon were just thought up by a bunch of creative Japanese people, most of them are based on real-world concepts and I just don't even want to take a chance on it anymore. That's why Sword was my last Pokemon game and I gathered all my Pokemon on Home in order to delete them all at once -- the shinies, the event-exclusives, my Gameboy firsts, everything.
For a while, I thought this self-discipline also meant not listening to the nostalgic music of my childhood anymore, which made me sad. But the Lord told me that most of the music is still fine because the majority of tracks were made innocently with wonder and adventure in mind. I'm at a point in my relationship with God that God can trust me to not easily step over fine lines such as this, but if the same music causes somebody else to go back into potentially harmful habits, I'd caution them to stay in their own personal safe zone until they can handle other things.
Matthew 18:9 illustrates it rather well: "If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell." Of course, I'm not talking THAT drastically, but the point gets across. Let me put it another way. I really, really like chocolate. But sometimes I eat too much of it and cause a Mast Cell Activation Syndrome flare where I get hives and tingling in my mouth, and I even get prone to nasal allergies. Recently, my throat even closed up enough to inhibit normal breathing in reaction to drinking regular milk that didn't have a special lactase enzyme in it to make it easier for me to digest lactose (more on that incident in another video soon). So does that make chocolate inherently evil? No. Just like gluten isn't evil even though some people have to go gluten-free (though in the long run, that causes people to have yeast overgrowth!). I just have to take a break from chocolate so my body has a chance to reset and assess the situation. From there, I can choose how much chocolate to re-introduce to my diet and what kinds to keep out from now on.
So if certain tracks from this playlist are hurting you, please close out this video and watch/listen to something that's safer for you wherever you happen to be right now. Self-care is just as important for your spirit as it is for your body.
Alrighty, have I talked enough yet? Yeah, I've talked enough. Turning off the female-scattered-spaghetti-brain now.
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