Embrace the Within no. 6

“You support what you love.”

Embrace the Within.

I have for years been explaining that what you spend your time and money doing are the manifestations of what you love. You can’t love something that you don’t invest your time into experiencing. So, where I spend my time and money says a lot about what I value in life.

Fourteen days ago, I decided that I loved freedom enough to act free as much as possible. For me that started with gardening and moving on shortening my supply chain. It then transformed into getting my body healthy by eating foods that were not processed and filled with syrups and oils and beginning the day with some exercise. And then it transformed again with the addition of getting my mind healthy by reading and studying and writing every day. And then it finally transformed again by focusing on my spiritual health which led to a reading of the Word from cover to cover and a covenant to attend a few different houses of God. Now, every day begins and ends with my focus on my body, my mind, and my spirit because that is what I support and love.

In a strange way, my focus on loving freedom eventually freed all aspects of my life. I don’t worry about politics and the news. I am more concerned with my chickens, rabbits, and plants. I don’t worry about prices and inflation. I am looking for ways to remove myself from the systems around me. I don’t worry about looking foolish or weird. I have always done things my own way and with my own approval as the ultimate stamp. And as I grow into the person that I want to be, I can only do that through supporting the things I love.

It is through our love that we show what we truly value in this life. It is through love that we act in showing our support for those things that are important. We are given this reminder about love in the first book of John, “Beloved, let us [unselfishly] love and seek the best for one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves [others] is born of God and knows God [through personal experience]. The one who does not love has not become acquainted with God [does not and never did know Him], for God is love [He is the originator of love, and it is an enduring attribute of His nature.]”(1 John 4:7-8 AMP).

What is your life showing that you support? What are your actions showing that you love?

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

Embrace the Within no. 5

“It’s hard to love your neighbor when you don’t love yourself.”

Embrace the Within.

I am going to get better at being disappointed in the actions and words of people without anger or resignation. And all this stems from my own self righteousness. And that self righteousness is rooted in the seriousness and sincerity with which I approach living. Character flaws can occur from an overabundance of good as well as evil.

Ever since I reached middle school age back in the late 1980s, I have been questioning and struggling with life. And most specifically, my struggles are always with my relationships with other humans. That is the aspect of life that was always a problem and continues to be a problem. And, as I stated earlier, that problem is rooted in self righteousness because I take living seriously and I want to live in alignment with what I believe. I take the concept of living your beliefs seriously. I am not a fan of hypocrisy and, as my eldest daughter and I quite often say, “I do not suffer fools.” And I have a difficult time when I see foolishness masquerading as truth. And there comes the self righteousness.

I have spent the bulk of the last four decades struggling with my place and role on this planet. I bounced from idea to idea and friend group to friend group and diversion to diversion and reading to reading and philosophy to philosophy until I had to really focus on one way forward. And that moment for me happened when things got locked down. I realized that I was wholly unprepared for what could happen in this world. And that is when my journey of what I refer to as the “fourteen days” began. I am not going to get into all those journeys since they are well documented here in previous posts. BUT that is the moment that the seriousness and sincerity got a keener focus.

I was being foolish and I do not suffer fools. And over that journey I have arrived where I am today, which is a Christian struggling with disappointment in people. And that is nothing different than the struggle I embraced over three decades ago. Folks are a constant disappointment because we are human. I have disappointed others and I have disappointed myself. I do, however, get to choose my reaction to those disappointments. I need to remember that none of us are all that great, not even me with all my self righteousness and sincerity and seriousness. We are only humans struggling to make our way through a broken world. And those of us that have hope in a better world, those of us that have hope in salvation, those of us that have hope in God, are still only humans that struggle. We may struggle less or more than our neighbor, we may be less or more sincere than our neighbor, BUT we are all less or more flawed like our neighbor. So, the grace that we get from God is a grace and a peace that we need to grant not only our thoughts BUT ourselves. It is very difficult to love your neighbor if you don’t love yourself. And we need to start seeing ourselves through the eyes of Christ rather than the eyes of humans.

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