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

Embrace the Within no. 4

“You can’t outsource freedom.”

Embrace the Within.

Folks do not want to have to reconsider their characterization of you. It can be quite unsettling. I am currently going through folks treating me differently because of my faith. And I understand that it can be a lot for folks. We tend to take every change in life as an attack on ourselves. We tend to focus on how this change requires a total rewriting of our lives and how things work for us. Life is change and folks hate change. We want to think about something once and then never consider that again.

That’s not how I am. I am constantly thinking about life and the things I have always thought about since I was a child. Those thoughts are the reason I read, I study, and I form understanding. I synthesize the things I add to my understanding of self and take those thoughts into action and move forward. Sometimes I choose poorly. Sometimes I think poorly. Sometimes I have to go back and reconsider and reexamine and reassess. Sometimes I find something I overlooked or placed in less importance. BUT I never stop thinking and learning and growing as a person.

I cannot change the uncomfortability others feel about my faith. I cannot change the feelings of others or the thoughts of others about anything. Only they can choose to change. What I find surprising is that changing my belief was more acceptable than changing my faith.

I come back to Christ in a strange fashion. I didn’t find God and then change my life. I was changing my life and discovered that journey was bringing me back to my faith in God. It doesn’t even sound normal. When I share that part of my testimony, folks give me a strange look and don’t quite fathom that. BUT that can’t be all that strange. Is it?

I started getting healthy. I started making changes to align my life with my values. And that journey over the past fourteen days that have stretched out to years led me back to reading The Bible and back to reconsidering what I thought I knew.

Sure, I had read before BUT had I really taken the time to think about what The Bible said. Or was I just taking the word of others for it? Or was I taking verses out of context and passing judgment there? Did I really have an understanding of The Bible? Truth is that I knew a lot of stories and the main characters and players BUT I was really rather illiterate in the whole picture. So, I took it upon myself to get all the books I could. And that is where I am today. Still reading through the Old Testament even with books that are typically labeled apocrypha. I am not leaving anything out that I can find. I am going to read and study and understand. And I am not going to take the word of anyone else about what is in there and what it says. I am going to take personal responsibility for my faith. And that is what self ownership is all about. Because you can’t outsource your learning. You can’t outsource your understanding. And you can never outsource your freedom.

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