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He lifts not only my spirits, but also me.

Waiting is a form of advancing in a silent retreat where timing trumps the appearance of indecisiveness. Waiting often has the appearance of doing nothing similar to silence having the appearance of agreement.  Both are a risk requiring faith and an excercise of the will born out of freedom. Pain or no pain the clarity that comes is gain.

I call this carrying the message by applying a life principle rather than lecturing only about it. It cost more to deliver because it weighs on you heavier.

We learn early in life not to trust mere words.

Conscious reflection on my style.

True accountability is born out of freedom, not imposition. Our deepest struggle is rarely what we think is wrong. Our deepest struggle is confronting the freedom that we have and being accountable to it by choice.

In that confrontation by reflecting on what we are thinking(carefully thought), we begin to overcome evil with good. In other words we begin to meet resistance with gentleness born out of the knowledge that overcoming evil by trying to be right is really demanding justice without giving  it. That is no accountability. It’s simply bondage.

Giving justice frees us from the need to avoid wrong and just freely turn from it.

For example if I say I struggle with jealousy, my struggle is not with jealousy but the freedom not to be while holding myself accountable to that free choice.

Helplessness with entitlement vs helplessness with affirmed dependence

Ignorance is often based on being ashamed to inquire. We have so often been shamed by asking the simple questions that we protest by throwing  out with the baby questions with the bathwater.

Those listening too often respond out of their own legalistic fears rather than leading us into the answers we so desparately need.

Eleanore Roosevelt once said “It’s never to late to have a happy childhood”. I believe that comes when we find answers to our childhood questions.

May we be the gracious ones to answer them.

I tilt, He whirls.

“Talking in Cirlces from the Pain”

Often when something has happened that is painful we feel we must scream or become deathly silent. But once we’re allowed to talk through it, we begin to feel the healing reality of being knocked off balance by pain in the descriptions we use to describe such. 

Examples include “I feel like I’m talking in circles”, “talking outside of both sides of my mouth”, “rambling”, or “going off on a tangent”.

Once talking through this pain begins, so does the healing. The reason is that we have been met where we truly are by someone giving us this freedom as well as our true self being felt.

The experience of not being alone is being rich in its truest sense. I’ve been heard because someone is with me! Philippians 4:19

If the pain deepens as it often does when healing begins I picture in my own mind that I’m talking and feeling as if I’m on a tilt-a-whirl at the county fair, a feeling much more off balance than talking in circles.

But something about it touches the joy in me that is far deeper than anything I feel.

There is an excitement to this like I had going to the county fair in Murray, Ky. as a child.

I think I just need to go back to the county fair more often, watch the beauty contest(Psalm 27:4), and get another “ticket to ride”.

Our strongest weakness. Celebrate it.

Joy is not based on something good that is happening but on something great that ready has. Suffering therefore becomes the opportunity to show that reality.