I love to express what I feel called to say. Writing helps me to open up my heart and do that. I hope that what I write helps you in some way. I hope it makes you think, encourages you, or inspires you. If it challenges you or if you disagree, I hope you know that I respect your right to have a different point of view.
Insincerity is motivated by the fear of truth. The fear of truth too often robs us of freedom from lies and deception. A closed heart feels threatened by sincerity.
When people say, “I’ll be honest,” I wonder what they’ve been before that moment. The courage of an open heart helps us live with the absence of pretense.
Untruthful people can’t trust themselves. At least they can’t trust their own words.
People try to not let their harmful feelings show. It’s better to not let them grow–to treat them as an inner foe and make them go.
When proof verifies unpleasant truth, it takes courage not to dodge, disallow, or deny it. When people have the courage to be sincere and to openly expose their heart, they experience deep connection with other people.
Calling your opinions and feelings, “my truth,” doesn’t make them accurate reflections of reality. We can sincerely believe that we know the truth about something yet still be wrong about it.
It’s hypocrisy for an insincere person to call someone a fake. To violate your conscience is insincerity, even if no one but you ever knows it.
I prefer reality over formality; sincerity over pretense. True friendship cannot grow beyond the sincerity level of either friend. When human hearts genuinely connect, pretense melts away and sincerity rushes in.
A sincere compliment is powerful. Find something that you genuinely admire about a person and tell them about it. Fight the inner anger that tries to keep you from actively loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you.
You have the ability to find and assemble your own words. You don’t have to repeat or share what other people say.
Tears don’t always mean pain. Sometimes they’re a sign of deep sincerity. To grow in sincerity is to open your heart up to incredible experiences with God.
I think that I’m by nature a pessimist, but rationally I choose to be an optimist. I work very hard at it.
Life looks beautiful when viewed thru the prism of optimism. My favorite “ism” is optimism. Will your struggles be problems or or will they be adventures? It’s your call.
Optimism doesn’t just wait for a better future. It works to improve today. Optimists optimize their options.
Optimists will persist until they see hope break through the mist of despair. It’s easy to be discouraged. I prefer to struggle for hope by persistently pursuing the challenging call to optimism.
Optimists see opposition as an opportunity to use their positive outlook to overcome obstacles. Hope (the expectation that a desire will be fulfilled) + optimism (confidence about the future) = hopetimism.
Optimists don’t insult people. They find the good in people and inspire them to live it out.
Optimism gives you the fortitude to stay hopeful when things look bad, and to get up and keep going after a fall. When your comfort zone cracks up and leads you to a happy future, you realize that it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
Prayers that you allow To spontaneously flow, With words from deep within, Will connect your heart with God.
Let go and let God flow From deep within you. “Quench not the Spirit.”
Like a river, the living Jesus will carry you where He’s going, but only if you surrender to His inner flowing.Christianity built on the living, present Jesus, looks different than Christianity built only on the historic Jesus.
It’s time for Christianity to let formality go and let Christ’s joy flow.The living Jesus often releases from within me, a playful flow of joy. He continually enthralls me.
The living Jesus wants to freely flow from deep within you. All you need to do is to not hold Him back. I find that the symphony of my life flows better when I let the living Jesus be the conductor.
Like a field of grass
Flowing with the wind,
And an eagle soaring
In its rising current,
Let the living Jesus move you
With His inner wind
And raise you up
To soar with Him.
Innocent silliness that makes people smile is always worthwhile.If you can’t find happiness in everyday moments, it does little good to pursue it elsewhere.
Life’s full of currents trying to push and pull you. Make sure you want to go where they’re going, before you jump in.
To hear or see something, without pondering it to find out what inspiration it will spark within you, is to miss out on much joy.Traveling helps us have fresh experiences in the material world. Pondering helps us have fresh experiences in the inner world.
Your emotions and thoughts flow from within you, carrying a mixture of good and bad. Sort them before you follow them.
Words that produce heart-felt joy in people are very helpful words. Speak and write more of them. Vibrant thoughts make life exciting. Stagnant thoughts make it dull.
Boredom happens when you let your mind and heart get stale. Keep your thoughts moving. Don’t let negative ones pile up in your mind.
Uplifting thoughts will help you soar. Down-drifting thoughts crush you to the floor.
To forget how to spontaneously play and have silly fun with people is to miss much joy. Life without some occasional, wholesome silliness gets boring.
Learn to manage your emotional flow. Embrace helpful emotions; reject harmful ones.
Continually resist and refute (with inner boldness) the thoughts and feelings that torment you.Rather than think outside the box, fill your box with fresh, creative, and encouraging thoughts.
If you keep negative and tormenting thoughts out of your mind, positive and creative thoughts will replace them.The Creator has placed a river of creativity in every human being. It’s waiting for us to more fully release it.
We have white blood cells
That automatically
Keep our blood flow pure.
But our thoughts aren't so endowed
It requires our continual effort
To keep our thinking pure.
Black ice
Shoved my feet aside
And I did suddenly collide
With the asphalt
On my elbow & hip.
Bruised, swollen, & aching,
I thank God
That I wasn't seriously hurt.
You can assemble thoughts and ideas in ways that magnify hope. Your life will eventually be mastered by whatever your mind continually magnifies.
Disappointments are less disappointing if you refuse to let your mind magnify them. If you would refuse to mentally magnify your problems, they wouldn’t seem so loomingly large.
Our perspective molds our perception. Step into another person’s viewpoint and you’ll understand why he thinks the way he does.
Pride exalts self. Humility embraces mercy. Our society needs more compassionate, mental analysis and fewer angry, emotional justifications. The more ways you can see an issue, the less you feel you feel a need to defend one point of view. What’s behind your eyes and stored in your brain and in your heart, often determines what you see, more that what’s directly in front of your eyes.
Magnify the Son of God in your soul and you will experience spiritual fire. Christians are called to “Rejoice in the Lord always,” not to rejoice in politics.
The Bible shows Christianity was never intended to be continually focused on one man talking. It’s full of “one another” commands.
Official Christianity is often superficial and artificial. Initial Christianity was uncontainable fire in the soul.
Let your soul Hear Jesus speaking And His words Will make you whole.
Complexity matters. Nothing is as simple as it seems.Complexity is your friend. It calls you to continually search for truth and understanding.
People are complex. To think you know someone based on one issue is naiveté.When you disagree with someone, there’s usually much about their opinion that you don’t understand.
If some people were good and others were bad, politics would be simple. The fact that there’s good and bad in everybody complicates things. All human opinions (including this one) are a mixture of various degrees of truth, confusion, and deception.
Life is complex. To see it as simple robs us of wonder, awe, amazement, and mystery.Anybody can simplify a complex political problem, but it takes courage and wisdom to fully and honestly examine it.
Truth is paradoxical. It’s beyond the ability of humans to fully understand. To be uncomfortable with paradox and ambiguity is to be uncomfortable with truth.
Many apparent contradictions are paradoxes–truth that’s too complex for human minds to fully understand. If we understood paradox, we would understand each other better. Both sides of a paradox contain truth. Thus, rejecting paradox docks your understanding of reality.
If you’re not confused about politics, you’ve probably settled for superficial slogans and sound bite answers.If you’re stuck in oversimplified, polarized conflict, trying to see things from the other side will help. Not to think and grapple with truth, is to make life simpler than it should be.
If you think and ponder, instead of getting mad, conflict can release rivers of creativity. If you can only argue one side of an issue, you’re thinking is too small.
Any political opinion that requires few brain cells to conceive, but much anger to defend, is probably inaccurate.We need to expand our understanding so we can grasp complex ideas, not compress complex ideas to match our understanding.
Complex problems are seldom solved by opinionated emotion. They require expanded thinking, not narrow mindedness. Inflammatory language is almost always based on over simplifications. The unwillingness to accept some ambiguity causes many problems and much deception. The ambiguity of life is too big for you to ever explain away.
Complicated ideas are a threat to our ego–to our mental pride–so we tend to simplify them to fit our understanding. Our complex political problems need more than simple, one-sided solutions.If either my simple political solution or your simple political solution worked well, we wouldn’t be arguing about them.
Seeing truth from your own perspective isn’t a lie, but it’s also not the entire truth. To simplify a complex concept to fit your own understanding, is to compromise the truth.If you won’t listen to the whole story, you’ll be stuck with a half-truth.
Political issues are much more complicated than our emotion-driven opinions. The working of the human brain and emotions is a great complexity. Telling people to “get over it” is an unfounded simplification.
Political debate has been simplified into the consistent repetition of half-truth, while denying the other half, however, nothing is as simple as a sound bite. Transforming the complicated into the simple usually whittles away much truth.
At some point, the simplification of truth morphs into error by leaving out important information. Facts I don’t like, also matter. To leave them out of my opinion is self-dishonesty. To give a simple answer to a complicated situation and demand that people agree with you, is arrogance.
When people disagree they’re often focused on different parts of the same truth.The simplification of complex issues often peels away truth and leaves us with a partial-truth.
Simple answers seldom contain all the facts. Insisting on simplifying complex concepts causes much divisiveness. The over simplification of complicated ideas leads to the multiplication of conflict. The urge to simplify everything causes much misunderstanding in human relationships.
We need each other. Many of the essential workers you rely on, don’t vote like you!Although humans no longer live as hunter-gathers of food, we all desperately need to be hunter gathers of truth.
I can’t find the idea in Scripture that meetings of the body of Christ, need to be built around a sermon.If Christians spent more time reading the Bible with an open heart, we wouldn’t feel such a need to hear lectures about it.
Christians have been trained to depend on a man’s sermons and have been desensitized from hearing directly from the living Jesus.All sermons and no hands-on training is ineffective for making disciples. Jesus is eternal, but sermons aren’t supposed to be.
When people leave a lecture they tend to leave it behind. When they’ve heard a deeply, heart-felt testimony, it stays with them.I recently heard two men tell how they’ve been changed by the living Jesus. Their stories are still ringing in my soul!
There comes a time for Christians to go beyond listening to lectures about their faith and start doing it daily!Humble, heart-felt conversations about Christ have impacted me far more than sermons have.
Jesus doesn’t live in organizations. He lives in people who surrender their will to follow an d obey Him.Before Christianity turned into church, it was a movement led by the living, resurrected Jesus.
All desires aren’t equal. Cultivate and follow the desires that make your life better, not worse. Desires that bend toward evil lead to inner torment, guilt, and bondage.
Your focus will determine your desires. They will rise or fall as you feed them or fight them. If you won’t control your desires, they will capture and control you.Desire for more can extinguish the joy and appreciation of what you already have.
When you truly appreciate what you already have, you’ll have enough for great joy. If you have freedom, food, shelter, and clothing, you have enough stuff for a happy life.
Many human desires are disguised longings for God and can only be satisfied by Him. Christians are called to be led by the living Jesus, not dominated by desire.
Forgiveness is too often the missing ingredient in relationships.
To confine Jesus to long ago in far away Galilee is to miss out on His present day miracles.Church says that Jesus is risen, but then tends to burry Him in the distant past or exile Him to the distant future.People won’t believe that Jesus is alive and present if Christians live like He’s dead & gone.
Remembering Jesus in the past isn’t enough. Biblical Christianity is about experiencing Him in the present.A Jesus who is confined to the past or the future, doesn’t give people much hope for today.
If we don’t want to spend all day today with Jesus, we probably don’t really want to be with Him forever.If you feel like you don’t have enough stuff, but you do have enough of Jesus, you have life backwards.
Grace doesn’t force itself on the person who insists he needs no mercy, forgiveness, or help from God.
Conscience
The light inside Will be your guide If not denied By your pride.
Champ
You won against 400,000,000 to 1 odds In the race For your conception!
