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Archives for May 2020

How To Make Trusting God Easier

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Trusting God throughout your day is challenging mostly because of all the distractions. Some distractions are positive and some are negative. Either way, consider how much you have increased your trust in God today.

Staying focused on God requires intentional effort. It would be even more difficult without the Bible and your memories. God promises you’re not wasting your time when you seek Him, trust Him, and make your requests known to Him.

In Isaiah 46, God says a lot about who He is and what He likes to do. God promises He will act. He isn’t a worthless idol. God doesn’t forget about you. He knows your future so of course, He knows your past. He’s been attending to you since even before you were born.

I have cared for you since you were born. Yes, I carried you before you were born.

Isaiah 46:3 NLT

But that’s not all. God proclaims that He will care for you and carry you throughout your future.

I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you.

Isaiah 46:4 NLT

If you put your trust in something other than God, you will be disappointed. But God cares about you enough to rescue you from trouble.

[An idol] can’t even move! And when someone prays to it, there is no answer. It can’t rescue anyone from trouble.

Isaiah 46:7 NLT

God has already rescued you and is more than capable of continuing to do so. He is in complete control of the past, present, and future. Only God can make such bold statements as these:

Remember the things I have done in the past. For I alone am God! I am God, and there is none like me. Only I can tell you the future before it even happens. Everything I plan will come to pass, for I do whatever I wish.

Isaiah 46:9-10 NLT

God can and will do whatever He wants. For those who are friends of God, this should provide increased comfort and trust. For those who are yet enemies of God, I bet that is scary and irritating. I remember the emptiness I felt when I was unable to understand who God is.

If you are a believer, then you must have some positive memories. At the very least, God has done a work in your life to cause you to cross over from death to life. Can you remember what that felt like? I remember how uplifting and hopeful I felt when I first believed.

Remembering what God has done in your life is a source of spiritual strength. When you recall the ways God has touched your life, it helps you trust Him with current life challenges. When God breaks into your life, that’s God building trust with you. Use it for all it’s worth to make your faith solid.

God is real. Let’s pray with anticipation of the good things He will do. No matter what is happening around us, God is still good and in control.

Photo from pxhere

Remember Your Past For A Healthy Present

Remember Your Past For A Healthy Present

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How does remembering your past help you today? Think of re-membering as bringing scattered parts of your life together. It’s like gathering the parts of a jigsaw puzzle and assembling them together where they belong.

God wants you to see the whole picture of who you are. Have you ever worked on a puzzle only to get to the end and realize some pieces are missing? It’s frustrating because it feels so incomplete.

I’m fascinated by my past. I’m not thinking of historical facts. I mean my psychological and emotional journey. Memories are important because they are the key to setting a person free from being trapped in the past.

You can’t change what has happened to you but you can change its meaning. You decided how much a particular memory has the power to define who you are. They answer the question: How did I get to where I am today?

How you first experience something has long-lasting implications. Your journey is, in many ways, a series of first-time experiences. To put the pieces of your life together, you must revisit your first-time experiences to create follow-on experiences. Healing can be both strengthening the positive memories and weakening the negative ones.

Questions to Help You Remember

Your relationship with your childhood memories can tell you a lot about yourself. Here are some questions you can use to explore your emotional health:

  • How do you feel about your childhood?
  • Do you feel like you are still a child?
  • Do you feel like you are stuck in your childhood?
  • Do you feel extremely distant from childhood, almost like it was another lifetime?
  • Does childhood feel real to you or more like a fantasy?
  • Does childhood seem unimportant or highly relevant to you?
  • Do you remember a lot or a little?
  • How much was childhood the same or different every day?
  • What positive memories come to mind?
  • What negative memories come to mind?

Did you skim through these questions or pause on each one and give a real, in-depth answer? Are you willing to embrace your childhood or do you think you’d be happier if you never thought about it again?

Even if you considered only one of the questions, you’ve got a taste of what it’s like to move toward emotional health. You dipped your toe in the water. If you considered more than one, you might feel overwhelmed as you swim in a pool of emotional memories.

As I said, memories are fascinating. They aren’t part of who you are. Yet, in another way, they are part of you. You’re not five years old anymore. But you might feel five years old sometimes.

Remember the Past, Compare it with the Present, and Plan the Future

Here are a few more questions for you to consider: In what ways do you feel the same, today, as you did when you were a young child? In what ways are you the same? In what ways are you different?

Life can lead you away from being in touch with who you are. The pressures, demands, and trauma open a chasm between your performance and who you are. It’s possible to become so familiar with present-day performance (life responsibilities) that you forget what it’s like to enjoy life on your own terms.

Here are three more questions that should help you “pull yourself together.” What day would you most like to relive? What makes life worth living today? Now, what new day do you imagine you would like to live in the near future?

In answering all these questions, look for two things. First, look for any infections: emotional wounds that haven’t fully healed. Second, look for peak experiences: emotional highs that give you energy.

If you’d like more practice at developing follow-on experiences, then you should try a book from my Journal Your Way series.

More about the benefits of exploring your past.
Image by Nato Pereira from Pixabay
Last updated 2022/12/11

Your Struggle Is Related to Childhood

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Optical illusions are fun. They work because of your assumptions about reality. To some degree, you will perceive what you want to perceive. Sometimes that aligns with reality and sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, after you see past the illusion, it’s difficult to be tricked again.

Your consciousness is similar to an optical illusion. You have meaningful events buried beneath the surface. The significant events are rich with life lessons and strong feelings. As you intentionally uncover the significance of your history, it becomes harder to ignore, unless you are determined to avoid it.

Becoming in touch with your uncomfortable memories is helpful. This can seem counter-intuitive until you realize that to not be in touch with your history is to be in denial. What is distressing tends to stay buried, unless you are determined to be healthy.

As you probably know, there is a tension between wanting everything to just be okay and admitting everything isn’t okay.

Many of your childhood struggles continue to play out in your everyday interactions. You just don’t realize it unless you look intentionally. Without some prompting, it’s easy to leave pain buried. You might think you are better off leaving sleeping giants undisturbed.

A decade or two or three isn’t enough time to fully resolve life’s challenges. Chances are, whatever you struggled with as a child, you still struggle with today. Ideally, you struggle with it to a lesser degree. But there’s no shame in noticing you continue to struggle.

Everyone has to overcome their fear of inadequacy if they want to grow. Don’t be surprised and discouraged when you experience some of the same feelings you had during your younger years. Instead, see this as a positive sign that you are strong enough to take a clear look at how you are responding to life.

How you respond reveals a lot about yourself that you need to know if you want to continue healing. This works for both positive and negative emotions.

Positive emotions can tell you what you’ll naturally be drawn to. They can get you into a trap just as easily as negative ones if you’re not vigilant. For example, a person who notices they feel great when they win might be tempted to gamble for a chance to win big.

Negative emotions tell you what you want to avoid. They become a trap when they take center stage. For example, a person who fears competition might become so consumed with failure, that they avoid trying.

Spend time noticing what makes you exceptionally happy, sad, angry, or anxious. Then make connections with your earlier experiences. What themes do you see?

For those of you who made it this far, the picture that goes with today’s post contains an optical illusion. I found it on the internet. Apparently it was popular around 2014.

How To Live With Rejection

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Confidence is the antidote to rejection. It’s easy to think that confidence is only something other people can have. But you can have it too. The secret to confidence is to stop trying to be something you’re not.

Living with the excruciating pain of rejection is hard. Some people would rather be physically beaten than be emotionally beaten.

Does anyone in the world like you? Does anyone want to spend time getting to know you? Does anyone appreciate you? Does God? If you answer these questions “no” then you are living with the oppressive feeling of rejection.

Rejection, though it feels real, is more of an illusion than a reality, if you know Jesus. God knew you before you were born. Jesus redeemed you from all sin that separated you from God. God accepts you exactly as you are.

But this doesn’t mean you won’t struggle with rejection. You have experienced some rejection and you’ll experience some more. To gain confidence, you must learn to not care about the rejection that others direct your way.

Rejection can easily become a downward spiral. None of us knows who we are as much as God knows who we are. The more you’ve experienced rejection, the more you’ve probably gone into hiding. The more you are in hiding, the more people are rejecting the false you (because you are keeping the real you out of sight). But it will still feel like people are rejecting the real you, so you end up hurting more and hiding more.

There is no good reason for anyone to reject the best parts of you that come from God. Therefore, rejection has to do with being misunderstood rather than being defective. I would guess people with obvious disabilities experience this all the time in a much more direct way. How frustrating it is to be judged superficially. How frustrating to be judged instantly and only based on your performance in one moment rather than your potential.

How much have you become your own worst enemy? If you struggle with rejection, you struggle to understand who you really are. If you’ve stopped wanting to know the real you, it will be difficult for others to see you (as in “I see you” from the movie Avatar).

God sees your potential. Your potential comes from your heart, from who God made you to be. He sees you at your best even when you look your worst. You have the best qualities that God placed in you.

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

1 Samuel 16:7 NLT

If you struggle with low self-worth, you might be quick to focus on the negative part of this verse. You might be thinking, “But God rejected Eliab, so that means He most likely rejects me.”

God has the right to choose whoever He wants for what He wants to accomplish. God can’t make everybody king. Just because you are rejected for one thing, doesn’t mean you are completely rejected. God will reject you for everything He doesn’t have planned for your life. But this also means He accepts you for all the good things He has planned.

So don’t worry so much about rejection. You’ll probably be rejected 99 times out of a 100. But it’s that 1 out of 100 that matters. You only need 1. Cling to the truth that God accepts you as you are, for the purposes He has for you. Ask God to help you understand your purpose and forget about what He hasn’t chosen you for.

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay

Surviving On The Fringe

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Are you on the fringe? Fringe means “to be on the outskirts.” That can be good or bad depending upon what it at the center.

Last week I wrote about feeling on the outskirts of God and what He is doing in the world. But what if we flip that around and define fringe as being on the outskirts of what the world is doing? Then being on the fringe would be a good thing.

Jesus lived on the fringe while He was on earth. The leaders at the time expected Him to join them in their agenda. But Jesus certainly lived as if not engrossed in the world:

What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.

1 Corinthians 7:29-31 NIV

If you find yourself depressed and anxious about what is happening in the world, maybe you are too deeply engrossed? What is too engrossed? This means living as if this life is all there is. If it were all there is, you’d have to put your full hope in it. You’d have no other choice.

If you are holding too tightly to this world, you’re going to feel discouraged. You’re going to be worried because this world in its present form is passing away. But, there is another option besides hoping in this world.

If you are in Christ, you are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). God has separated you out from this world. He’s brought you to the fringe. He’s sent you into the world to help it, not to be engrossed in it (1).

Don’t love the world or anything that belongs to the world. If you love the world, you cannot love the Father. Our foolish pride comes from this world, and so do our selfish desires and our desire to have everything we see. None of this comes from the Father. The world and the desires it causes are disappearing. But if we obey God, we will live forever.

1 John 2:15-17 CEV

Jesus had no place to lay His head (Luke 9:58). Of course, this doesn’t mean that He never slept lying down. It means He didn’t ever settle down as if this was His permanent home.

Sure – it’s okay to own a home and live in it. More important that where you live is how attached you are to your life in this world. It’s impossible to be completely satisfied with this world. If you try to find your life somewhere in the world, you will feel empty and disappointed.

But if you join Jesus at the fringe, you will find your life and you’ll be in good company. You can be on the fringe and not feel lonely.

If you’ve been engrossed in the world, it takes time to detach from it. At some point you have to let go of the world.

Have you ever lost something and become focused on finding it? What if you can’t find it? Eventually you have to move on. If you spend your life consumed with what you’ve lost, your life will be compromised. It won’t be all it could be.

Imagine what it feels like to let go of what you’ve lost and move on. That’s what you need to do with the world. The world isn’t as great as you thought it was. That’s good or bad depending upon how you look at it. If you can give up on finding your ultimate happiness in it, you’ll end up content and peaceful.

(1) https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/lets-revise-the-popular-phrase-in-but-not-of
Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay