"Not casting your pearls before swine" offers a powerful framework for building resilience.

Practice discernment to recognize those able and unable to receive what you offer.

Guard against internal "trampling"; don't repeatedly offer your deepest thoughts to those who mock or distort.

Protect the most valuable pearl of all: your time and energy.

For New Year's, I often choose a slogan—a personal mantra—that helps keep me on track in the year ahead. I repeat it to myself when I feel myself drifting toward whatever it is I’m trying not to do. It serves as a kind of guardrail.

This year’s slogan isn’t the usual two or three words. Instead, it’s a well-known proverb from the most famous sermon ever delivered: Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Some people are surprised by how blunt the gentle man from Galilee could be when he said, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” The proverb is usually shortened to: Don’t cast your pearls before swine.

The wisdom here is an instruction in discernment—about being thoughtful and selective with the people with whom you share what you hold sacred, your “pearls.” Those pearls........

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