Identity

Freedom Can Save A Marriage

November 22, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Do you believe it’s possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons? Love without freedom isn’t real love. You might be following the letter of the law but miss the spirit when your heart isn’t in your actions.

God’s standard is freedom. He wants us to want to follow His instructions. But no one is perfect. The law He provides shows us how our hearts fall short of having pure motives. Following orders under strict obligation misses the mark.

The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
2 Corinthians 9:6-7 ESV

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1 NIV

Obligation Results In External Motivation

Performing a task under obligation indicates only a limited amount of self-control. For example, wearing a seat-belt out of obligation will protect you just as well if you agree it is a good idea, provided you buckle it correctly either way.

Compliance works at first, as long as there is accountability. If you don’t agree with a law and there isn’t any enforcement of the law, what is likely to happen?

You probably won’t wear your seat-belt every time.
You might not buckle it correctly every time.

The motive to wear your seat-belt will come from law enforcement; you will be externally motivated. Sometimes this is the only motivation we have. It is adequate but not ideal. You might only comply with the law when you know someone in authority is watching. Even then, you might not recognize anyone in authority.

Freedom Results In Internal Motivation

Rebellion happens because of our innate desire for freedom and autonomy. In this sense, rebellion is a good thing. Everyone needs to learn how to develop responsibility when they have freedom. It’s possible to have both. When you do, what is likely to happen?

You will wear your seat-belt most of the time.
You will invest in learning the correct way to wear your seat-belt.

The motive to wear your seat-belt will come from your heart; you will be internally motivated. You will be in agreement with the law, even if you don’t follow it perfectly every time.

Relationships Need Freedom

Relationships need freedom to function properly. Obligation opens up relationships to other sins like control. If I am obligated to serve you, then I might resort to control to attempt to prevent you from taking advantage of me. This intensifies when I believe I must continue to serve you even when it is harmful to me.

Freedom allow genuine love and care to develop in a relationship. With freedom, I can serve with joy in my heart. The value I have for another person motivates me.

Relationships Need Boundaries

Boundaries provide a natural way to escape the vulnerability of obligation. Boundaries promote healthy attitudes in both husband and wife. They are necessary when one person lacks the desire or ability to follow the way of love. When this happens a person could respond with good or bad control.

Unhealthy control attempts to manage another person. Healthy control attempts to manage yourself. If I am obligated to serve you, I believe I must serve you or I suffer guilt, so my only other option is to try to manage your behavior.

A home can be a good analogy for boundaries. Imagine a husband as a home and a wife as a home. What happens if the husband blames his wife that his home isn’t clean and the wife believes she is obligated to serve her husband by cleaning his home? They will probably end up in a dysfunctional pattern because of the unhealthy dynamic of taking advantage of another who feels obligation to serve.

In this example, the wife could attempt unhealthy control by focusing on her husband’s flaws. “You don’t love me.” “Your house is too dirty.” “You only want me in your life because I’ve been cleaning your house.” This sounds like nagging, doesn’t it? She feels trapped and hopes her husband will accept responsibility for his home. But she is the one working hard to convince him to change.

While these attempts could lead to some fruitful discussions, they place too much of the control outside of the wife. She would be better off focusing on what she can control. She only needs to recognize her opinion on the matter. “I don’t feel comfortable cleaning your house.”

She doesn’t have to participate in something that violates her sense of self. She has the freedom to choose to clean or not to clean. She can use discernment to decide whether cleaning is a good idea. This way she maintains a healthy amount of control over her situation.

For more on boundaries.
Image by Anja from Pixabay

How To Ensure Your Empathy Is Healthy

November 7, 2020 by Matt Pavlik 2 Comments

Have you ever taken on someone’s pain as if it were your own? How about feeling the same way someone else is feeling? Only one of those is healthy empathy.

The primary difference between healthy and unhealthy empathy depends on how much self-awareness you have.

While listening to someone, the more you lose touch with your opinions, desires, and needs, the more likely you have an undeveloped sense of self. Some people might object by pointing out that good, empathetic listening means the listener forgets about their perspective. That is true. But it must remain a choice to de-emphasis one’s desires in favor of another’s. The unhealthy alternative is to default to what another wants because you have no idea what you want, or worse, you avoid exploring what you want.

The choice to focus on another must be positive. If you focus on another but harbor resentment or build up irritation, your empathy probably isn’t healthy. If you feel empty inside and have never really taken the time to understand your needs, your empathy probably isn’t healthy.

If you focus on another, feel pain, and think it is their pain, you might be deceiving yourself. Without a developed sense of your identity, it’s easy to become confused about whose pain your feeling. In reality, any pain you feel is your own.

Identity Guides You To Healthy Empathy

Whenever you are relating to another, keep one foot planted firmly in who you are and the other reaching out to the person who needs help. It can be difficult to do this perfectly, so you might temporarily (for a few minutes) lose touch with your identity. When you become confused by taking on other’s pain as if it were yours, ask yourself questions like:

Who am I?
How do I feel about what the other person is going through?
What part of my life reminds me of the other person’s pain? Often, you can be focused on another person’s pain, but are really feeling pain from your own life.
How have the difficult life situations I’ve been through taught me to surrender (or perhaps “forget”) who I am when I’m around other people?
What are my limits when it comes to experiencing someone else’s raw pain?

If you lose yourself while focusing on someone else, then you are already past your limit. When you reach your limit, you should excuse yourself from the conversation until you regain your strength (your sense of self).

When you take on another’s pain, it probably means you are needing self-care or someone to care for you. If you continue to help another person without a sense of who you are, you are leaving yourself in a state of self-abuse, and you won’t be much help to someone like that. It doesn’t work to abandon yourself in order to help someone else.

Ownership and Responsibility Guide You To Healthy Empathy

Women are usually better at empathizing with others, but healthy is healthy. Everyone needs to be fully willing to feel and respond to their own pain.

Consider a wife who is listening to her husband. No matter how much she cares and wants to help him with his pain, she can’t work through his pain for him. It’s his pain. Only he can do something about it. She can help by listening, but his pain is still his responsibility. In this sense, pain only multiplies. If her husband chooses to deny or disown some of his pain, his wife can’t make the situation better by taking on more pain. The increased pain she might feel doesn’t directly reduce her husband’s pain.

Self-Care Guides You To Healthy Empathy

If after you’ve been listening to someone, you notice that you have lingering pain, realize it’s your pain, not the other’s pain. You have some issues to work through, so it’s time to focus exclusively on yourself. If you lose touch with yourself while trying to be empathetic, you should be able to get back to yourself in minutes, not days or weeks.

To help you connect with yourself, you might try journaling your feelings and answering questions like the ones listed earlier and these:

What do I need to help the pain in my life?
Who do I have to listen to me?

Healthy empathy is knowing what it feels like to walk in someone’s shoes and communicating it to them without judging them. Unhealthy empathy would be wearing someone else’s shoes and thinking that they are your shoes.

3 Steps To Achieve Healthy Grieving

October 25, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Grieving allows the healthy emotional resolution of a disturbing event–especially when the event seems impossible to accept.

All grieving is temporary. It is time-limited. It has a beginning and an end. Yet, it is possible to become stuck in grief. This happens because we are unable or unwilling to face the reality of a difficult event (or multiple events).

When the event seems to be too much for you, how can you become free again? To be stuck in grief is to be stuck in time. Events happen in time. Memories of those events are reminders of what you’ve been through.

1) The Past Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

To move forward in grief, you must first move backward in time. A substantial part of the grieving process involves working with your memories. There is a lot you can do (and perhaps need to do) in order to fully process a memory (see additional posts about this at the end of this post). But if your goal is to become unstuck, the first question to ask is: What did the event cost you?

When you attempt you answer this simple question, you have little choice but to re-enter the memory and recognize the true nature of your loss. What changed? How did the event affect your life?

You might not be willing to relive the event, but maybe you are willing to look at how your life changed for the worse because of it? After a negative event, you are never the same again. What did the event cost you?

2) The Present Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

After you have a clear picture of what the event cost you way back in the past somewhere, the next step is to see how the cost carries forward in your life. What is the event still costing you today?

This question helps you see how well you’ve managed the cost over time. How has the cost changed? Is it worse, the same, or improved? It can be a shock to realize how much an event from years ago is still influencing you today.

Have you been ignoring the cost or actively managing it? To complete this second step, you need to know the overall impact of the event on your life. What additional opportunities have you lost since the original event?

3) The Future Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

If you’ve completed steps 1 and 2, you’ve accomplished a lot. However, you can still be stuck if you haven’t allowed the event to propel you forward in some new, ground-breaking direction.

In step 1, you recognize you’re in a hole. In step 2, you learn your resistance to getting out. Step 3 pulls everything together: you determine to not only get out of the hole but build and climb a ladder that takes you higher than you have ever been. What do you want to do about the event now?

Your grieving and recovery are not fully done until you look beyond your loss to how you can change for the better. For example, if you lose a job you loved, you probably won’t get the job back, but you can focus on what you love even more which could lead to a different but better job. Or, you might even decide to become a job coach to help others with their job losses.

Another example is the loss of a loved one. You can struggle that you will never see the person again. That’s step 1 and 2. Step 3 is figuring out how your loss is changing you and how you want to make a difference because of who you are.

In step 3, you shift your focus from what you can’t do to what you can do. You can’t bring your loved one back, but, because of your loss, you can more fully realize what is most important to you and to God.

God wants you to make it through your grieving, so you can see what else is possible in your life. Grieving is necessary, but it’s not the end. You can grieve your losses, discover the cost, and find a way forward that brings positive change to yourself and others.

Image by kirillslov from Pixabay
Read more about healing memories.
Read more about growing through change as God makes all things new

Man desiring to be powerful, looking to God for help.

Be Powerful Without Being Self-absorbed

October 4, 2020 by Matt Pavlik 1 Comment

The quickest way to be powerful is to develop healthy doses of humility and confidence. If you lean too far in one direction then life becomes unbalanced and can lead to a world of hurt and trouble. But, healthy humility and confidence result in joy.

How does joy related to power? To answer this, I first want you to consider the following four possible combinations of humility and confidence:

Self-loathing: a false humility without much if any confidence means harmfully low self-worth. This person actively rejects the truth about who God is and who He made them to be.
Self-deprecating: a helpful amount of humility without enough confidence leads to questionable self-worth. This person is healthy when they have a lighthearted ability to laugh at their mistakes. However, their negative self-expression can also come from a poisoned self-image.
Self-confident: a helpful dose of humility and confidence means self-care without arrogance. This person lets God be God while also feeling good about who they are.
Self-absorbed: too little humility with too much confidence results in an inflated sense of importance. This person becomes overcompensates for their low self-worth by focusing too much on trying to feel powerful. Increasing focus on self becomes a dead-end at self-loathing. An unhealthy preoccupation with self misses out on what God has to offer.

People become self-absorbed when they look only within themselves to heal their brokenness. In futility, people try to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But, the power that originates anywhere except from God promises only the illusion of confidence.

For example, if self becomes everything and God is minimized, then God isn’t in His rightful position in our lives. We’re not really going to succeed – maybe we’ll succeed with financially or something – but overall for God’s kingdom and his purposes we won’t be succeeding.

Be Humble So You Can Be Powerful

The world says you must be strong and independent to be powerful. But an “I can do it all by myself” attitude fails to activate God’s power.

Do you want to be full of your own power or full of God's power? You can be humble, confident, and full of God's power. Why settle for only what you can muster without God? Click To Tweet

God says to be powerful, you must be weak enough to accept His help. A healthy weakness is a vulnerable dependence. Depending upon God activates His power.

Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.
2 Corinthians 12:9 NLT

Be Confident So You Can Be Powerful

If you focus too much on God, if that’s possible, and minimize yourself then you can develop self-loathing where you don’t feel like you’re much of anything. Self-loathing is simply another form of arrogance that blocks God out of your life.

God’s power isn’t going to shine through you then. You need to have a right view of yourself so that God’s power will rest on you and work through you.

Be Joyful So You Can Be Powerful

The joy of the Lord is your strength (Nehemiah 8:10). How can you experience joy if you carry the heavy load of bitterness toward your own spirit?

Passively waiting for God to make you powerful doesn’t work. To be full of power, you must actively allow God to fill you, which also means keeping yourself empty of substitute fillings. Being filled with the Spirit means having great joy in God.

So be very careful how you live, not being like those with no understanding, but live honorably with true wisdom, for we are living in evil times. Take full advantage of every day as you spend your life for his purposes. And don’t live foolishly for then you will have discernment to fully understand God’s will. And don’t get drunk with wine, which is rebellion; instead be filled with the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
Ephesians 5:15-18 TPT

How Can We Be Powerful And Not Self-absorbed? How Can We Be Confident While Also Humble?

If we want to be powerful, we must be joyful. If we want to be joyful, we can’t live rebelliously independent from God. We must stop living with the habits of self-deprecation and self-absorption. The antidote for poisoning shame is to look to God for help.

Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces.
Psalm 34:5 NLT

So we should go for everything. We should do all that we can – shoot from the moon so to speak – but also keep that in check by accepting whatever God provides or doesn’t provide in our lives.

He may have a different plan than the one on our minds, and it may take some time to figure out what that is, but it doesn’t mean we should just be sidelined and sitting back and waiting for something to happen either.

We should take the truths in the Bible that God has given us and run with them as best as we can. But ultimately it is up to God to author our success.

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had with Kidron Tirey.

Image by İbarihim Halil Uyğur from Pixabay

How To Keep Going When You Feel Like Giving Up

September 7, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

What are some reasons you feel like giving up? Do they include any of the following?

Have you experienced too many failures or rejections?
Do you feel worth less than others?
Do you feel not needed or not wanted?
Do you feel tired, lost, or confused?
Does your existence seem pointless?

You might not think of yourself as depressed, but if you answered yes to any of those questions, then you are experiencing some form of discouragement. When your burden becomes too great, you’ll naturally consider giving up. Feeling like you want to give up should throw a red flag for you.

Unfortunately, you will encounter discouraging people and circumstances. Sometimes you can make better choices to prevent bad things from happening. Other times, there isn’t anything you could have done differently. Either way, when you continue to suffer long after a difficult experience, there’s usually a good reason.

What keeps you weighed down and prevents you from moving forward? Do any of these sound like you?

You’re trying to do it all yourself.
You believe God doesn’t care or He is somehow against you.
You think being humble means you should have low self-worth.
You think you’ve committed the unpardonable sin and God is condemning you to hell.

Unfortunately, you can become committed to a life strategy that doesn’t work. If so, it’s either based on a lie or it’s not the right approach for you.

What do you need to know to keep going instead of giving up? Can you say that any of these are true?

You have a clear purpose and act on it consistently.
You ask God to help you advance His kingdom.
You ask God to purify your motives.
You understand God is responsible for the results (the fruit).
You trust God to multiply your efforts.
You surrender the outcome to God.

Why are you really doing what you’re doing? Do you have at least one main reason? If you don’t, you’ll find you have no gas in your tank to draw on when the going gets tough.

Are you weary, carrying a heavy burden? Then come to me. I will refresh your life, for I am your oasis. Simply join your life with mine. Learn my ways and you’ll discover that I’m gentle, humble, easy to please. You will find refreshment and rest in me.
Matthew 11:28-29 TPT

You are to be faithful to the resources God has given you. God causes all things to grow.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.
1 Corinthians 3:6-9 NIV

It’s easy to have selfish motives. If you can see yourself as partnering with God, then you’ll be more willing to let God help you align your desires to His desires.

Don’t give up. God loves you and has a plan for your life.

Are you still feeling like giving up? What do you struggle with the most about finding and living your purpose? Are you able to both know your purpose and enjoy your life?

Photo From: https://www.si.edu/object/signal-flag-pole:nmaahc_2017.111.19

Are You Selfish, Self-Neglectful, Or Selfless?

August 30, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Selfishness at its root is wastefulness. Poor stewardship is the misuse of resources. Gluttony is a perfect example of selfishness. You are selfish if you consume more than you need while others don’t get what they really need.

The selfish person refuses to do what is helpful and right. He prioritizes his wants over another person’s needs. Selfishness overlaps with pride. A selfish person might throw away good food instead of giving it away to those in need. It’s deliberately spiteful or intent on seeing others suffer.

With such a bleak definition, you might be thinking, “I’m not that selfish.” And maybe you’re right. Instead, maybe you are self-neglectful. Would you starve yourself so another can eat? That doesn’t sound any better than letting others starve.

The selfish person can’t be thankful. Being thankful allows you to see the abundance of what you have. Take a moment to consider the excess you have. Most people have well beyond what they need to be happy. Yet, many people aren’t happy. What will it take for you to be happy?

Selfishness can also have a fearful root. True happiness is living with peace in any circumstance. It’s the ability to be content. It’s impossible (or nearly impossible) to be content and selfish at the same time. Paul wrote about contentment:

I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.
Philippians 4:11-13 NIV

Because of sin, it’s easy to be selfish. Because of sin, it’s also easy to give others exactly what they want (to avoid any uncomfortable conflict). But can you be generous and have healthy boundaries at the same time? You can because Self-care isn’t selfish. With God’s help, your motives for giving can be free of resentment, bitterness, or anything negative.

So I have decided to ask Titus and the others to spend some time with you before I arrive. This way they can arrange to collect the money you have promised. Then you will have the chance to give because you want to, and not because you feel forced to. Remember this saying, “A few seeds make a small harvest, but a lot of seeds make a big harvest.” Each of you must make up your own mind about how much to give. But don’t feel sorry that you must give and don’t feel that you are forced to give. God loves people who love to give.
2 Corinthians 9:5-7 CEV

God wants you to be selfless. That means you work toward being a good steward of the resources God has given you. You know the difference between what you need and what you want. You derive your happiness from the abundance of what you already have. You share what you have to those who have need. You give to others only when your giving helps instead of creating further harm. You allow yourself to enjoy the life God has given you.

When you are focused on God and His kingdom, you can be happy and content whether you are in need or you have plenty.

Image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay