Tag: needverse

337 – Routines

Know life’s routines—food, exercise, sleep, study, work, whatever. Know them in yourself, know them in others, keep them, change them, always respect them in others. If changing your routine proves a difficult necessity, tell yourself that changing your routine might be part of the routine. Still, changing and managing routine remains an individual task. The most important thing in having a routine is to know that one has a routine and to then respect it.

If you get fat, miss your exercise, lose needed nutrition, skip a Sabbath rest, lose sleep, oversleep, don’t read your daily Bible, fail in your commitment to positive entertainment, or don’t add the daily brick to your road—you will have many more problems than you thought you saved yourself. Staying true to necessary steps of your routine is one part in keeping your personal integrity and staying true to your values.

You can’t always keep normal routines. In travel and holidays, routines can get upset, which will test your resolve. So, you must be prepared to return to your routines after those disturbances. Moreover, you must structure your routines in such a way that you can keep them going to some extent, even during irregular times. Itinerant speakers and highly productive people have very sporadic schedules, but their routines must stay maintained to some extent in their travels. The key is to be low-budget and scalable.

Resourceful routines endure. You do not need to buy super expensive food to eat healthily or to get minimum nutrition supplements. Convert some junk food money to Calcium or change “beer to sleep” time into exercise time. Learn to do push-ups on your bed, and include multiple skills in your exercise repertoire, including street dance and martial arts. Buy the cheaper, smaller computer first, if computing is part of your routine, then you can take it with you. Sometimes your only place to work or exercise is at the airport and your only place to buy food is a gas station. Some shoulder freezes at the train station will draw YouTube likes and a chili dog with sour kraut, extra ketchup, and double mustard might compensate for a day without vitamin tablets.

335 – The Middle Demotivation Trap

Poverty and affluenza are two extreme demotivators, but the most common is in the middle: averageness. Medium-sized success can be the biggest obstacle to success. Stay on your guard so that success never gets in the way of your success.

Routines sneak up on us. Ruts attract rivers and rats. Graduate, then find yourself driving on the road during the same two 30 minute rat races as everyone else, morning and night. Once rat-race fever sets in, many buy their dreams on borrowed money, locking themselves in even more. They didn’t plan to get there because “not planning” is exactly what got them there. They don’t lead their own lives, so their families don’t respect them either.

By the time they see it, it’s seems impossible to get out. The only way out of a rat race requires sacrifice. Once you recognize that “average normalness” has its noose around your neck, the next step is to recognize what holds you there. Getting out may not be as difficult as it seems.

Consider the monkey trap in which the monkey won’t let go of the peanut, even to save his own life. The monkey can never get the peanut, but opening its hand will allow it to slip away.

Let go of whatever keeps you stuck in whatever rut finds you. The most common rut is impatience. If you’re willing to learn a little from personal study every day and add a few doses of delayed gratification, you’re more likely to break your cycle. But, that will involve pausing, stopping, reassessing, taking a deep breath, releasing frantic feelings, and, of course, praying.

Few people get themselves trapped in any vicious rut because they prayed for it. Prayerlessness helps get us into ruts and prayer helps get us out.

Ruts find us more easily when we over-extend ourselves until our ships are too bulky to steer. Over-spending is only one subcategory of over-extending. Over-working oneself is another, the cause behind prayerlessness and too many resources squandered on unprofitable hobbies.

Determination keeps us out of ruts. Breaking out of ruts requires enormous determination—the same amount of determination that will prevent the next rut from pulling you in.

333 – Happiness Is Contagious

It should be no secret that happiness are a sheer choice. The reason that so few people know this is because so few families teach this at the dinner table and in the car. If you understand that happiness is a choice, you must teach everyone around you actively and often. Even at work and among peers, encourage and counsel everyone with the undeniable truth of life that happiness is a choice. If you don’t teach an idea to others, then you will forget it yourself.

Uncontrolled anger is easy to recognize in children, while adults mask their emotions by “acting mature”, but the untame emotions remain the same. For the child, hold him and let him cry on your shoulder; after a few minutes, poke his cheek and provoke a smile. Help him see that happiness is still a choice. For the adults around you, even yourself, find whatever way this truth applies to the situation. Proactively seek out opportunities to inject the small, subtle presupposition that happiness is a choice. Do it everywhere you can.

This does not mean silencing people with “negative energy”. Happiness being a choice means being happy when other people are not. “Getting rid of the negative people” may be necessary for family and organizations. But, in brief times like staff meetings and dinner out, the ability to choose happiness means overcoming negativity with your own joy. If you can’t, then you are the one who needs to learn.

One example was Brad Pitt’s character in “Fury” when he wouldn’t let his fellow soldiers ruin his dinner. People who reject the truth that happiness is a choice label it “propaganda”. Whether they doubt the choice or they try to be happy by “negating all the negative people”, such people did not grow up knowing about the choice. At one time, they wanted to be happy too, but it’s not easy. When we try and fail, we want to give up.

Happiness must be contagious. Once you stop sharing your happiness with others, you’ll stop being happy. There are plenty of sad people who need cheering up. But, happy people can become happier still. Choose happiness by spreading it everywhere.

331 – Spirit & Worship

Biblically worshiping God involves spirit and truth. At the beginning of the 21st Century, most Christians worshiped God in one or the other, but rarely both. God offers such wonder to our spirits and truth to our minds that we easily become satisfied with only one of the two. This creates an imbalanced heart since the heart is a junction of the thinking mind and the emotional spirit.

Mostly peer-motivated, few Christians of the last two thousand years tapped into the immense, intrinsic, self-motivated power of the human will to pursue worshiping God in both spirit and truth. This captivating energy is only discovered when one has a deep, burning fascination with God Himself. Once this is discovered, “encouragement” from other Christians fades to static because God is that fascinating.

Gathering to study and learn, encouraging each other, talking through our challenges together, checking our moral compasses—these are good and necessary. But, they have been oversold by leaders in the Church—both professional and volunteer, both lay and trained—to such a point that they unintentionally invalidated the value of individual motivation. To be fully healthy as humans, each of us must chase after both spiritual and truthful things that can only be found in a relationship between God and one, single human.

While we must interact with each other on the level of truth and spoken ideas, we also require awareness of each other’s spirits. Christianity often describes the Christian life as having horizontal and vertical “growth”, with God and with our fellow Man. Both of those involve spirit and truth. Emphasizing the horizontal relationship to the exclusion of the individual-vertical also imbalances the spirit-truth element. When that happens, the condition of the human heart becomes akin to a body builder who exercises only upper or lower body, or only right or left.

Balance is for all people. Spiritually, that means getting comfortable with the discomfort of emotions, whether in repentance or worship. Balance strengthens one’s genuine connection to God while entertainment-driven excitement is a poor substitute for the real thing. “Spiritual” growth requires that we diligently pursue spirit-inclusive truth—neither trying to contrive one’s own truth nor dismissing academic diligence as “unspiritual”.

330 – Morality & Sentience

The brain is only a buffer, a temp folder, a cache where memories eternally stored in the soul can be directly accessed during our temporary lives on Earth.

In the theory of pre-existence, humans existed in some state of God’s foreknowledge and choice, from which the names were written in the Book of Life before Earth’s founding. This theory implies that there may be additional memories and character-shaping choices that date earlier than our memories currently cached in our brains can remember.

If this is true, then part of our own “innate” personalities might not be “innate” at all, but could have resulted from a willful, intentional choice before our present session of consciousness. In other words, we may have already had some say in our own personalities, passions, and talents we were born with—before we were born. But, since that was “pre-life”, we can’t remember in this life.

The Bible is not clear about this, but its teaching on foreknowledge and the Book of Life from before Earth’s founding do allow for such things. Regardless, our sentience—our free will, the “eternal human” in everyone—does not exist in our brains. Brain damage cannot remove our memories in the next life, of course. So, our brains are not actually where one’s core, true sentience abides.

In a sense, our own brains are an “Artificial Intelligence” working to calculate and access memories and conclusions about them, but our actual sentience remains in our souls, inaccessible from anything made during this temporary life on Earth. Only God can create our souls and only God can connect our souls to our bodies. To argue that sentience could be duplicated, created, reassigned, or rearranged by humankind is to degrade all humans to an AI that only exists in this natural world.

Treating AI as being equal to Created-by-God-alone Imago Dei, humans, would demean our entire Eternal existence, and dispute every benefit of “morals from above”. Therefore, any moral code applying equally to AI and to humanity would be a self-made moral code.

An AI is a useful machine, but it is not equally valuable to a human, no matter how good at acting it learns to become.

329 – Don’t Push Wet Noodles, Especially if They Bite

Few things are as demotivating to an already motivated motivator as someone who has no motivation. Affluenza is a common cause of demotivation. The Christians at Laodikeia in the Book of Revelation had this problem. Life was so comfortable for them that they didn’t care about the things that mattered to their Savior who died for them.

But, affluenza is not the only cause of demotivation. Sometimes poverty causes despair, which is wearisome in itself. It’s hard to get out of bed after being in a hospital for a year. When someone hasn’t had work for a long time, going out the door seems tiring and, frankly, embarrassing. When you give someone a first job in a long while, that worker might turn out to be one of your best, but only after a few laps around the track. If you’re the one getting off the couch, be prepared for others to need to be prepared to be patient with you.

Some wet noodles can’t come to life, some can, but they can never be pushed.

Jesus warned against giving pearls to pigs. Pigs don’t appreciate pearls for their beauty or the work it takes to find them. So, if you give them to a pig, it might think you’re throwing stones at it and attack you in turn.

Only work with people as much as they are motivated to work with you. Never chase after people who aren’t excited about your reason for getting up in the morning. We don’t need the same reasons to get out of bed in the morning, but people who work together should at least be excited about other people’s reasons. Those who aren’t excited about other people’s good pursuits aren’t excited about other people pursuing good things. Don’t confide in them.

When someone shows no motivation, if you share your joys, worries, dangers, and victories with that person, you just might get bitten. What do you mean you had “difficulty”? Someone with affluenza will think you must have done something wrong. What do you mean you “want money”? Someone who has little money may not know that “making money” is about others. It’s better to keep your peace.

326 – God Upholds the Righteous

God upholds “righteous” people, who practice fairness and justice, because He likes them for it—because He likes justice and fairness. God wants justice and He won’t let someone who does rightly by others to easily slip between the cracks.

It’s hard at times to believe that God cares or works justice. But, watching how God upholds the people who uphold justice can be proof enough that God is real and God is near.

Everyone dies and hardship makes us stronger; God denies neither to the righteous. “Upholding” means that when times get too hard or the wind blows strong, God interrupts the natural order just enough to make sure that the righteous aren’t swept away. Being “upheld” may mean nothing more than surviving what is unsurvivable.

There are generally three main ways God upholds the righteous, but one could always count more than these three.

1. Because righteous people do what is right and fair, their lives are naturally stronger. Friends will help the righteous in need because people who are fair and honest and do good work naturally have more friends than greedy people who take shortcuts on quality. That was how Job’s fortune was restored. Friends gave him just enough money to start again; Job doubled his original wealth from that.

2. God also brings miracles and coincidence to the righteous. It could be that righteous people, being “godly” are “looking for God” in the small things, so they notice coincidences God already sends to everyone. But, miraculous things happen to people who are honest and fair.

3. Also, by praying, angels will always have the prayer they need to bring aid to the righteous. We each need a cloud of prayer around us for protection. Angels need prayer to wage war against evil. People who pray will supply angels with help everywhere they go, even to help the praying people.

Doing what is right and honest and fair to others is the best way to court favor in the High Court of Heaven. Prayerlessness is an injustice to the angels and to the world they want to help, including ourselves. Thus, prayerlessness is a form of self-mutilation while prayer is an act of justice.