I was eating quacamole And thought about A roly-poly, The tiny bug That rolls into a ball. Then I slowly Began to realize, I haven't seen a lowly Little roly-poly Since I was a child. Did they go extinct Or did I just blink And overlook them All these years? I'm wholly Confused. What will happen When I eat ravioli?
God wants to make a lifesaving incision in your heart, not to fill your head with precision. When your heart hears God speak over you, it’s a moment you never get over.
Preachers try to describe Jesus, to dissect Him, when what people really need is to experience a demonstration of Jesus’ presence that penetrates the hardness of their heart. If you’re not enthralled by Jesus, there’s a good chance you’ve only heard about Him, but not yet encountered Him.
Too many Christians try to live without continually experiencing and stirring up the inner overflow of God’s Spirit. By trying to analyze, categorize, and systematize God, we miss out on His mystery. A closed heart doesn’t experience the flow of God’s living water.
There’s little stability in a shaky world, but much in a Christ-filled heart. Thoughts, feelings, and desires are shaky things. If you don’t use discernment and discipline, they can easily shake you down.
Even allowing a small opening in your heart will let God’s light begin to come in. I don’t want to go to church where people are bored. I want to see Jesus passionately adored. If we don’t deeply realize our extreme lack of worthiness, grace is just a rather unamazing, religious idea.
According to the Bible, Christians aren’t called to go to God’s house, but to be God’s house. The only building the Bible ever called the house of the Lord was the Jewish Temple (not a church building). If the idea of endlessly worshipping Jesus sounds uncomfortable, you probably wouldn’t like Heaven.
Church tends to be a place for casual Christianity. It doesn’t seem to welcome passionate, Spirit-led Christ-followers.
The happiest place
I’ve ever found
Is wherever I am
When I’m aware
Jesus is around.
When is the time
To bow
Your heart
Before Jesus
And let Him wow
You from within?
Now.
A sermon
That tidies up
Your intellect
Does little good
If you neglect
Jesus.
Many people give up on spontaneous, inner joy. They try to replace it with programmed, outer entertainment or a chemical high.
What you’re doing behind your eyes (on the inside) impacts your life more than what you see going on around you. Without emotional and mental housekeeping, the joy seeps out of life. The more we train our mind and emotions to function optimally, the greater will be our sense of wellbeing and joy.
As humans, we can’t avoid problems and pain, but joyous people demonstrate that we can learn to be happy anyway. Openness, honesty, and humility connect people heart-to-heart, bringing light for healing, recovery, and joy.
It’s hard to be happy if you let tormenting thoughts and toxic people pull your strings. Emotions, thoughts, and desires are real, but they’re often inaccurate and off track. Tough minded positive thinking is much more powerful than wishful drinking.
To be dumbed down is to avoid rational thinking. To be numbed down is to avoid caring and compassion. When we begin to undo years of harmful, habitual thinking and behaving, we start down the wise and kind path to a better life.
Thinking is like walking in the woods. The more you mentally follow the same path, the more permanent the trail becomes.
Perhaps as humans, our biggest problem is the darkness that we carry inside of us. When light disagrees with our darkness, we too often side with darkness.
The further away people are from reality, the angrier they get when it is pointed out. Social media is an internet platform often used to express anger and hostility when people disagree. Too much consumption of its contents can lead to discouragement.
When life shakes you to rock bottom, stand on the Rock and look up for His supernatural help. The living Jesus is the Rock.
It takes more courage to respond to a threat with kindness and compassion than with anger or violence. Kindness hinders violence. It’s hard to be violent to people who are showing you heart-felt compassion.
Acts of violence are attempts to dominate and control someone. To threaten people is to demonstrate insecurity. When human life isn’t respected, valued, and treasured, violence cripples a culture.
Laws don’t stop post-natal violence. They won’t stop pre-natal violence either. Violence can only be overcome by sacrificial love.
Showing pictures of what abortion does to a human fetus isn’t conservative or liberal. It’s factual.
The difference between infanticide and abortion is merely the definition of the kill zone. Partial birth abortion straddles the zone.
If pulling a living, human fetus apart isn’t an act of violence, nothing is. Abortion is an act of violence against the most innocent form of human life. Most people believe that child abuse is morally wrong, yet many of the same people believe that prenatal abuse is a good thing.
The Soviet Union fell apart without civil war. If America insists on falling apart, let’s follow their example and be nonviolent.
I’ve never read CRT and never taken a class on it. I only know about it through social media, so I’m sure my knowledge of it isn’t very accurate. However, for many decades, I’ve searched American history to learn about race, how the concept developed, and how it was used to justify atrocities. I’ve also crossed racial lines as a White man and reached out to many Black people in friendship and humility to listen and hear what they have to say.
Telling the truth about the atrocities of slavery and Jim Crow is neither liberal or conservative. It’s factual. The part of Critical Race Theory that tells the truth about history and its impact on the present deserves to be heard, not hidden.
I believe in telling the truth with kindness and compassion to all. Here’s my attempt to do that: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind To Color-Kind.
Immediately after posting this, I went to Twitter. Then I saw a prenatal drawing of a black person and I’m astonished that I’ve never seen one before. Don’t fetuses come in all colors?
Unhealthy thoughts are common, storming me from without and roaring from within. The more I refute and reject them, the better I feel. Make healthy choices about both what you put in your body and what you put in your mind.
Perfection is beyond our reach, but tiny tidbits of daily improvement can make life wonderful. The thought patters you have embraced and established in your mind influence how you feel. As humans, we have the ability to regulate our thoughts.
Embrace thoughts, images, words, and feelings that give inner peace. Resist those that cause angst.
Silence your negative thoughts. As children, we’re taught how to hold a pen so we can write, but not how to hold positive thoughts so we can feel good. It’s not too late to learn it.
Some people say it’s too hard to mentally resist tormenting thoughts. I say it’s too painful not to resist them.
If you don’t continually tend, nurture, weed, and fertilize a garden, it becomes sickly. The same with the human mind.
Feelings are mental produce. Their quality depends on how well you tend and nurture the garden of your mind. Raise healthy produce.
Continually treat your mind with uplifting thoughts and you’ll find it gradually gets healthier. Avoid profanity. It’s compulsive and becomes habitual, clogging your thinking with meaningless meanness.
Relationships matter. A humble, heart-to-heart relationship helps both people heal their thinking.
Being focused on
A purpose,
A cause,
A noble goal,
Is good for your mind.
Positive thinking Isn't pretending. It's contending With negativity And ending Its inner dominance. Search for: "Elephants INspiring The Room."
On November 30, 2021, I was at the Nashville Zoo which is housed on the Grassmere Plantation. As I walked the grounds, I noticed a quarters where human beings were housed in chattel slavery and treated like animals.
I saw the door was open, so I entered one of the two tiny, dark rooms. It contained several plaques with information about the people who had been trafficked there. Here’s one of them. It points out that in 1860, 32 innocent people were being forcibly held at Grassmere in lifelong labor and bondage (14 adults and 18 children).
Behind the slave quarters, there is a slave cemetery. The plaque in front of it reveals that the cemetery had originally been on another part of the plantation, but that these unidentified, human remains were dug up and moved out of the way to make room for animals to be held in the zoo.
Later that day, I turned on the news and heard Prince Charles speaking at the ceremony where the nation of Barbados officially removed the Queen as its head of state and became a republic. He boldly referred to: “the appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our history.”
British High commissioner to Barbados, Scott Furssedonn-Wood, said this about Prince Charles’ statement: “This is not just him coming out with a phrase; this is something that he believes very passionately in himself–that you’ve got to acknowledge injustice where you see it . . . He’s playing his part in that. It’s absolutely right that we express deep sorrow for that appalling atrocity of slavery and the unbelievable suffering that was caused.”
Perhaps the world will stay stuck in racial turmoil until we begin to honestly and openly reveal the details of the cruelty, brutality, and horrors of slavery. It’s time to shine the light on the horrible realities of the lifelong enslavement and torture of millions of Africans and their descendants.
Without the glue of humility, openness, forgiveness, and compassion, humans are divisive and combative. When people come together to listen to and obey the living Jesus, their hearts connect with invisible glue.
If you feel like
You don’t have a clue,
Let Jesus be the glue
That puts you together.
If we don’t
Humble ourselves and let Jesus
Heal our shame,
We don’t gather
In His name.
Christians make much ado
About Jesus,
But too often we resist
Letting Him glue
Our heart to Him.
Much Christianity has become like an old tube of glue. It has dried-up and lost its ability to connect people heart-to-heart. Without daily submitting to the presence of the risen Jesus, Christianity is unglued and far removed from what it is intended to be.
“Do you go to church?” is a misleading question. What matters is how strong is your heart-connection with Jesus and His followers.
If you go to church and have little heart connection with people, you’re missing the point of the Bible’s one another commandments. If sitting on a church premises on Sunday doesn’t train you to daily stand on God’s promises, something’s way off track.
If you don’t like how you’re feeling, re-examine what you’re believing. Your mind is like glue. The thoughts you allow in it will eventually adhere to it.
What you choose
To believe
Can enlighten
Or deceive.
If you read the Bible and let God copy and paste it on your heart, it’ll give you a fresh, new start. Lord Jesus, keep me glued to Your presence and surrendered to Your will.
When some history
Is considered off limits
And kept in mystery,
We’re being contradictory
To the truth.
The history
We won’t face
Enslaves us to
A limited and distorted
View of our past.
Cancel-history
Only tells
One side
And stifles
Those who
Try to tell
The fuller story.
The parts of American history
That are cruel and dreary
Are being called
Critical Race Theory.
Let’s courageously
Push the limits
Of our history
And tell
The broader story.
When You limit your thinking To the history you know You'll never grow In your understanding Of the past. Read some history That will show you Things you don't yet know. Do you know . . . The details of How slaves were treated In America Or how Jim Crow laws worked And the impact they had On people's daily lives? Learn more history.
Instead of saying
God’s on your side,
Let God live inside
And lead you
To His side.
Free Gas for Your Think Tank -- Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement 