Questioning Ourselves

How many times do we come to a decision about something major in our lives, only to find our hearts fluttering a little faster, sweat forming on our foreheads, and our minds running so fast we can hardly keep up with them?  Why do we question decisions we have made?  Do we feel we need to take a poll among our friends to see if they agree that we are doing the right thing?

When we believe that we are incapable of making the right choice for ourselves, we undermine our confidence, and we become less of a person.  Some of this behaviour comes from the way we were taught, that someone in our lives took the choices we made and vetoed them, or substituted something for what we wanted.  We learned that we did not make good decisions, that what we wanted didn’t matter, and this shook our resolve, caved in our confidence, and put an end to our motivation.  After all, what point would there be to working on any given project if it was the wrong choice to begin with?

How do we heal from this kind of upbringing?  It is important to start small.  Try doing something that can be accomplished within a day.  Or perhaps something that takes even less time, like a crossword puzzle or other stimulating game.  When you have successfully completed the project, give yourself a reward.  Slowly work up to bigger and bigger things.  But make sure to aim at things that you know you can accomplish unassisted.  Allow yourself to feel the increase in your confidence as you succeed.  Reward yourself with things you have really wanted over time.

Eventually, you may want to work up to something competitive in nature, something that takes a greater amount of preparation.  That is all right, but recognize that, at this point, you are competing against yourself, to improve your personal best.  You can accomplish great things when your motivation is self-improvement.  These kinds of activities will increase your confidence, be self-motivating, and offer you a firm basis for personal growth.

May you be richly blessed!

How Does God Know?

The premise that God knows all we do and say is based on the understanding that all things are made of, through and by God.  We have been given the Ten Commandments as our rules for living over the course of history, and yet, we seem to feel the need to break them, to feel that we are getting away with something.  Which leads us to the notion that, “...all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  But we still think that if we pull a fast one on someone, or shortchange another, tell a lie, cheat on our marriage, and so on, that God will not see.  We hold our attitudes that every person needs to pull his own weight.  That we should take care of our own, and no other.  But Abraham and Sarah served angels, unaware of who they were.

The point of this is that God does know.  God sees, hears, feels, everything that we do.  He weighs and measures all of the things we experience in our days, and knows if we’re selfish rather than charitable, boastful rather than humble, a liar, cheater or murderer, and so on.  If you think that you can get away with those little white lies, you’re probably right.  Most people won’t know.  Most people won’t care.  You don’t matter that much to them in all honesty.  But God knows.  God cares.  God loves each and every one of us and wants us to succeed in all of our daily living.

We can post our love of God on Facebook, but if we turn around and despise our fellow man, which message are we sending back to God?  Jesus said, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me.”  He meant that we should love every other person and help those people who need it, in whatever way they need it.  And we should give cheerfully, not with regret, not with resentment, but cheerfully, gladness in helping someone else on their path in life. 

We have all been in situations when we needed help.  Sometimes there are others who lend a hand and other times, we suffer alone.  Those times when we suffer, we are intended to learn some kind of lesson.  If we learn it, when we come to the same situation again, whether it is our own experience or that of another, we will know how to handle the situation, and hopefully, be more sensitive to the needs of whoever is experiencing the problem.  If we are hard-hearted, when someone else suffers as we did, then we did not learn the lesson, and we are bound to repeat the lesson, either in this life or the next.

We cannot cure all the ills of the world.  It would be senseless to try.  But we can pray for those in need when we cannot give, and we can share an attitude of giving to those less fortunate so that others are more inclined to charity.  For the greatest, is love.

May you be richly blessed.