Archive for Change
How Can You Maximize Your Life?
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It’s often been said that life is a great teacher, but perhaps the greater truth is that life has the potential to be a great teacher. Life is composed of both good and bad days, wonderful and terrible seasons, Potentially we can learn from everything from everyday, every experience. However, often we fail to really gain all that is potentially ours.
We sometimes speak of how we suppose we didn’t get a particular lesson on the first go-round so we have found ourselves going around again.
Those of us who are Christians often offer that example referring to the children of Israel who wandered around in the wilderness for forty years because of their unbelief. Around and around the same mountain they went. But in reality, the Israelites who didn’t believe, died in the wilderness and never entered the Promised Land. It was the new generation who were allowed to enter.
We would all agree that we don’t want to be the generation who never learned, or who learned too late to make a difference.
So how do we maximize our lives? How do we learn? Here are a few ways that I am learning and have learned – and I hope to keep learning because I want to be all I can be. I want to maximize my life for the glory of God.
Giving Up and Giving In; The Pathway to Receiving His Grace
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My journey is a journey to know God, others, and myself.
Why You Must Not Go Back
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Last week I posted some thoughts about why you must go back.
There are times when we must deal with our past issues because our past issues are still having a current effect on our lives.We do need to go back emotionally when we need to grieve our sins, our mistakes, our losses. We need to go back and experience the fullness of moments we have ignored, avoided, or pushed to the back of our consciousness.
But at other times, it is unfruitful and even unhealthy to go back.
There are two ways that we can choose to live in the past. One is by idealizing the past, and the other is by allowing the past to freeze us in our pain. Let’s look at these two ways and see if we find ourselves in either unhealthy pattern.
The Perfect Past
“If things could just be like they used to be!”
How often I have heard this expression of a deep longing in someone’s heart! Things have changed and we just want to go back to the way things used to be.
We long to turn back the hands of time. We wish we could wave a magic wand over our lives and restore things to the way they used to be. Although it is legitimate to grieve when we have experienced loss and it is right to be thankful for a wonderful event or season, may I suggest that the answer is not in going back?
Why You Must Go Back
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God’s ways are mysterious, beyond my understanding and often seem downright contradictory. While in my humanity, I prefer to think in straight lines which lend themselves to defining a goal as completed, a task marked off, I find that God’s ways are usually not pictured best by straight lines. They are paths which appear, at times, intertwined, difficult to map out, going forward, then backward, orbiting around a center, and often perplexing my human mind. The longer I walk with God, the more clearly I see that He is truly not confined to my limited understanding. He is working, often His deepest purposes in me, when I am clueless.
This week, I was meditating on two of the seemingly contradictory ways of God. In the next few days, I want to explore these two thoughts:
1. You must go back.
2. You can never go back.
Huh? Sounds confusing? I hope you are intrigued sufficiently to continue reading for both statements are true and I am not being ambivalent. There are times in life when you must absolutely go back. You must go back, as it were, in your mind, your emotions, your relationships, to moments of the past and experience the moments again. There are some very important reasons for us to go back. And in other ways, we must never go back and in fact, cannot do so, but that is for another day this week.
The Power of Desire
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Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12
Mankind was designed to live with a heart full of hope. It began in the Garden.
Adam, walking in wholeness and obedience, named the animals. Yet as he named each one, something unsettling began in his heart. In fact, maybe we could say God was setting him up. As he named each animal, this unanswered desire arose in his heart.
“None of these animals are like me!”
With each step, this powerful desire grew. A true need arose within Adam. He needed someone like him. Someone to walk alongside him as he fulfilled his destiny. He needed a woman. He needed Eve.
And God provided for Adam’s desire and the provision became a “tree of life” for Adam. Oh, you might say that that could not be true because Eve was tempted, fell, and led Adam away from a path of life, but yet, she did become a tree of life. Through her body would be birthed the Tree of Life for all of us.
How often mankind struggles with desire! We try to kill desire, avoid desire, train desire, anything but understand our desire. Perhaps a different way of looking at desire could be profitable for us.
Could we ask the following question of the desires we find in our hearts?
What is the legitimate godly expression of this desire?
