Peace to Your House no. 19

"It's easy to want everyone and everything else to change . . . the difficult thing is to change ourselves."

Embrace the Within.

Folks always want someone else to change. They may need their neighbor to change or a stranger to change. BUT there is always someone else’s ideas or actions that need to change for folks to get the world they want. And that is a pathetic way to go about your life. Living a life where everyone else needs to constantly change for you to have the kind of life you want to live, being a victim of the world around you at all times.

Some folks even want to change God. A lot of biblical stories are all about folks wanting God to change. A lot of our prayers are even asking for God to change. Folks are living a life where they are the victim of God. And that is truly a pathetic way to look at life.

Even before I started walking this path with Christ, I could see the truth in biblical teachings. We don’t hurt people. We don’t take their things. We should be charitable. We should love our neighbor. We should help our community. We should help the victimized. We didn’t need any government to do these things. In Galatians Paul lists the gifts of the spirit and how we should act as Christians, “But the fruit of the Spirit [the result of His presence within us] is love [unselfish concern for others], joy, [inner] peace, patience [not the ability to wait, but how we act while waiting], kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (5:22-23 AMP). These are outward signs that we are doing and living the way that God intended.

Have you noticed that it is alright to assault the beliefs of Christians? It even seems like a game any more for folks. That is because Christians can have their beliefs assaulted. We can stand the attack because we have the Truth and the Word to support our lives. We have the ability to either live the fruits or discard the fruits. We can live an example that shows that we are Christ’s or we can choose to falter and fall. We can be a beacon to the broken and the depressed and the lost and the hurting and the folks that are looking for help. Or we can be the stereotypical holier than thou church goer. We get to choose how we act and not how others act.

Peace to your home. Bless your being. The reign of God is now. Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyNepheshMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain #EmbracetheWithin

Peace to Your House no. 18

“Peace to your house.”

Embrace the Within.

I can’t live a life of dishonesty and portray honesty. I can’t tell folks to do one thing while I do another. I can’t be of two minds about things in which I profess to believe. And a lot of that involves calling myself out on beliefs and thoughts and actions that do not reflect what I want my values to be. And it is perfectly alright to be struggling with getting yourself aligned. I am struggling with alignment with God’s path for me every day. It is not just waking up and walking correctly. Life is a struggle even if you’re doing it wrong. Life’s an equally or even more difficult struggle if you are attempting to do it correctly. So don’t think I don’t struggle, you don’t struggle, they don’t struggle. We all struggle.

BUT am I struggling just to struggle or am I struggling with getting better? And I think that is the focus to adopt. I might be struggling just as much as I was fourteen days ago, however, my struggles are getting me somewhere I want to go. Fourteen days ago, my struggles were getting me more of the same. And I didn’t want to be the same.

I was always reading and studying and learning. I was always working towards finding a way to live that aligned with my values and what I believed the world was meant to be like. And, that journey got me to appreciate the ideas I had taken for granted when I was a child. I took for granted all the time spent in church when I was a kid. I didn’t appreciate the time and opportunity I had as a kid growing up in a church with a family. It took me having my own family and being afraid that the government was going to starve them to really kick start this journey back to the basics of understanding. It took the idea that folks were going to take away my family to get things right with myself and my God.

It’s easy to fall back into complacency. It’s easy to forget the lessons I was being taught during the fourteen days. It’s easy to go back to blindly trusting in the systems of humans. It’s easy to think that folks are looking out for each other. Some of us are BUT the majority of folks are broken, are lost, and even some are wicked. They aren’t living aligned with goodness. They aren’t working on being better people. They aren’t working as images of God. They are struggling to make things worse.

And that is the choice we get to make in daily decisions. Am I on the right side of this thing called life? Am I doing my best to bring order and peace to the world around me? Am I doing my best to make things better for myself and my neighbors? Am I doing my best to make the world into a natural garden or concrete creation?

These are questions we all need to consider if we are going to start working our way along the journey to be more like Christ. We started out in a garden and Christ waited there for arrest. There is a pastoral motif that permeates the stories of peace in the Old Testament. The disciples were rescued from the cities and brought to the countryside to learn. There is a long process of connecting to nature that we need to not neglect. Find your garden and plant some seeds.

Peace to your home. Bless your being. The reign of God is now. Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyNepheshMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain #EmbracetheWithin