Tag: needverse

305 – Know Crazy, Don’t Go Crazy

Personality types help us identify common canvases and primary colors that God uses to make every person beautifully unlike every other. Personality profiles only feel like cramped boxes to those whose worldview crams life into boxes. Everyone is unique, but crazy is always the same.

One common warning is the addiction to chaos; another is refusal to accept personal responsibility to fix the problem—or that there is any problem at all.

Only so much peaceful, “content” time passes before mental-certifiables need their “chaos” fix, imagining or inventing problems where none exist, thus the need kicks in to control, run, blame, suspect, nanny, provide, entertain, deliver, protect, retaliate, receive, lecture, or whatever unneeded “neediness” disrupts normal relationships. Not even to save their own lives, careers, reputations, families, or loved ones can they accept or adapt to any situation. It isn’t their problem, you see?

Blame shifting is the early onset. If nothing is one’s own fault, nothing can be done to help, but God doesn’t create anyone permanently helpless. We all act crazy once in a while, but it becomes a certifiable dysfunction when the problem becomes permanent. A lie sets in, we start to “go crazy”, and we refuse to admit that our own worldview is slowly turning us into a monster. It grows until we either take the first and most important step—to admit the problem—or else end up in a mental institution or the care of a licensed case worker.

Reading about mental disorders can be a good way to look in the mirror. Crazy is very unoriginal, never changing, even from one person to another. Learn to recognize crazy before it overwhelms and matures into something unspeakable. Anyone can learn from a layman’s guide.

Just a little familiarity can help keep your own sanity and recognize what sets off the crazy in others so you might avoid poking the sleeping bear. The best way to help anyone going crazy is to refuse to participate, take personal responsibility, require the same, and don’t enable by agreeing with the lies that make crazy crazy. Crazy is easy to spot because, while God makes us each unique, crazy makes everyone the same.

304 – Law of Chaos, Placement & Order

Order does not necessarily look neat and tidy by our limited human standards. A stack of wheels may fit nicely into a corner, but it is not the correct order for allowing a cart to roll down the street. Order means having things in their proper place—according to function. The living, organic, thriving, moving, growing, flowing channels that allow things to function don’t fit into nifty boxes as we might like.

Boxes and niftiness make the world around us easier to understand, whether in actual living and work space or in a worldview. But, God and His Creation are bigger than we could ever fathom. As His order sprawls, it seems chaotic to us. Chaos has an order, but that order will never always make sense to us; we can only become familiar with its “personality”, as it were, like getting to know an area within a vast forest.

The currents of wealth are part of this ordered chaos, as is forgiveness and its law. When we forgive, the complex web of action and consequence triggers a cascade that spirals through channels in the chaos of both spirit and matter, eventually coming back around like a boomerang to exactly where the forgiveness originated. It’s a law because it is all part of chaos.

All too often, forgiving seems impossible. This is because we can only “forgiven” something that is actually wrong; chaos understands this. When you cannot forgive people for a dirty deed, it could be because you should be thanking them. Deeds may only seem dirty to us, but actually be well-cloaked blessings, such as being made to work too hard for too little in order to become strong enough to swim in the currents of wealth. Or, you may need to thank and forgive them all at the same time. Or, you may need to forgive them for the properly-labeled dirty deed. It is quite impossible to forgive even the right person if it is for the wrong thing.

Every part of life will only open up and break through into a healthy flow once everything is placed into proper order according to the thriving flow of chaos. Focus your energies there.

303 – Peace Starts in the Home

Harsh words jar the senses. Snippy responses cause whiplash. It’s difficult to be a peaceful, calm person when the home is prone to tremors, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. But, if the home is a haven of still waters, travelers can find rest and replenish their supply.

In every sector of life and society, people with peaceful, calm spirits become those havens where ships seek shelter. This is an unexplained—and arguably unfair—reason why some people gain quicker success, trust, and respect in careers and friendship. We all need peace.

A peaceful person is like an oasis. Everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle. When you can be that break in the turbulence for everyone who encounters you, everyone will want to encounter you.

Some we call this “being present” or “being ‘with’ those around us”. Thinking about who you are talking to and not letting your mind wander, staying focused on the conversation with the person you are with, listening to understand rather than to persuade, inviting others to talk, even knowing what words to share that inspire—all of these “people skills” depend on first being a person of peace.

A “person of peace” may create incredible turmoil for enemies. Like an eye of a tornado, the fiercest adversary is the peaceful worker roused to wrath. This is not the introvert afraid to speak, but the neighbor who is inwardly solid and therefore comfortable everywhere and therefore focused on tending to his own responsibilities so as not to make work for others. That peaceful man or woman or family, organization, city, nation, religion, or people group—the one with true peace—will stand against opposition with unbreakable terror. Never provoke anyone who is strong because of inner peace.

All inner peace begins at home. Parents create that haven at home by teaching, correcting, punishing, even spanking in calmness and continued “joy by choice”. Children take on the temperament that their parents cultivate. Adults who grew up in turbulent homes can create a haven at home—even for themselves—by giving their children the calm they lacked. Prayer helps, as do good company and counsel. Whether given or received, peace begins at home.

301 – Your Friends Aren’t All Worthless

In Heaven’s Kingdom, God raises up our leaders from among our brethren. David was the runt of his litter. Joseph nearly was the same. Jesus’s family thought he was mentally ill.

For decades, God prepares someone quietly, secretly. The one being prepared may have a sense that the preparation is happening, but still can’t fathom how everything will play out. Even Jesus doesn’t know the hour of his own return to Earth. If Jesus doesn’t know when he will come back to deliver us from the evils on Earth, then there is no way in Heaven or on Earth that we could ever know who is and is not in the quiet fields of preparation for the Lord’s purposes tomorrow.

Everyone looks ordinary in person. Seeing a face on a billboard or movie screen makes a celebrity easy to recognize. But, in person everyone remains human.

Say Einstein were to deliver his theory of relativity to one of his college classmates. Or, imagine if Oswald Chambers had gone off on one of his rants as a student in Sunday school. They would be brushed off as annoying and self-obsessed. But, if either man were to sit down in a television studio and show the world how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the whole world would take notes.

That’s what made Oswald Chambers special to all of us: His wife took notes while he would rant at home. That’s how his famous devotional was written. He dictated off the cuff; she actually wrote it down. We have his words to read because his own family had the insight to value his words first.

Thomas Aquinas was called the “dumb ox” by his classmates because he was fat and soft-spoken. But, his teacher told the class, “One day the ‘dumb ox’ will speak and the whole world will listen.” That teacher recognized talent without needing a movie screen to determine whether his own student had a brain worth publishing.

Don’t assume that your peers can’t include the king God will anoint—that you could never be so ‘lucky’. Your friends aren’t all worthless. Learn to spot talent among your peers before the world does.

299 – I Need Help First

The world is full of semi-good people who help others. Semi-good is the same thing as semi-bad. So, put differently, the world is full of people who who help others while also hurting others. These “semi” people have enough goodness to gain trust, but retain enough ill will to harm people who need help the most once their goodness earns them status.

The truth that semi-good people never come to accept is their own need for help. They help others from perspectives of compassion and concern, the Good Samaritan, and shared love for everyone in the world. But, we all need help.

People who make the biggest difference in the world recognize that they need help just like everyone else. We don’t all need the same kind of help, for the most part, but we are all in desperate need of help and no one is an exception.

The man who helps others from the seat of benevolence and charity—but not from having his own need through which he identifies with those he helps—places himself above others. He sees himself as the demigod who needeth not, helping the lower, unfortunate “lessers” who are beneath him. We can only help others from pure goodness to the extent that we have received needed help ourselves. Any other position from which we purportedly “help” is for nothing beyond our own egos.

Christianity is a religion of pure help and need. It’s not about buildings and priests and liturgies. One can be a Christian without any of those things and many who have all of those things aren’t Christians at all, no matter how much they believe they are. The Christian God died because it was the only way to help humanity. The only One who needed nothing gave everything to help we who had no way of helping ourselves. He came as a baby named Jesus, no other. Acknowledging your own need for Jesus’s help is all it takes to be a Christian, nothing more.

Our universal need for help never ends. Even after receiving help today, we need more tomorrow. “Good” people are good because they help others, remembering that they also need help everyday.

298 – You Can Handle More and Less Than You Think

Due to both sin and God’s good design, we are in constant need of recalibrating our sense of our own strength.

Our ability to think is marred by sin, yet we continue to grow. Like children growing up, every day our bodies are bigger than they were the day before. Like mature adults, our bodies don’t always do what they were able to do before. As we grow and mature in our hearts and minds, our strengths and weaknesses also change every day. Know your new strengths and limits each new day and you will achieve things in life that no one thought possible, even with supernatural miracles.

Most of the time, we aren’t concerned enough about the right things and worry too much about things that aren’t a problem. Even when your heart gets its priorities in line—and you are more concerned about charity and looking for anyone and everyone ignored by society’s systems—little, tiny problems crop up that make us worry and we still tend to neglect things that matter. Take sleep for example, exercise, or the simple need to stretch our muscles. Reading Bible daily is minimum if you want a life that’s not a complete waste—any amount will do. When we neglect the little things that keep us healthy, it becomes easy to worry about scary monsters that can’t bite.

Even if a tsunami is headed right for you, the safest place to be is wherever God wants you. Maybe by standing at a certain place in the street, the water will pick you up, keep you afloat, and no debris will hit you. But, if you run to a building several floors above the water, the tsunami could collapse the whole building. What we think is safe might not necessarily be safe because we never see everything.

Only God sees everything. He knows where you are safe and where you are in danger. He knows your strengths and weaknesses on a level that you never can. With God at your back, you can walk through anything. So, when it comes time to walk your road, always get God’s opinion about what matters in the situation for today.

297 – You Have Both More and Less Time Than You Think

Whether due to sin or some good design that God intended, our human gauge for “concept of time” usually registers both too much and too little.

When we don’t have a good work ethic, we tend to think we have much more time to be lazy and lax than we actually do. A good work ethic carries a healthy sense of urgency. But on the flip, when we work with that healthy sense of urgency, worrisome events can trigger false flags, making us think that things are even more urgent than they actually are. Busy people becoming worried results from a compound of two perceptions of urgency—the healthy sense of urgency of a good work ethic and the feeling of external pressure from our surroundings.

As you work and bustle to get out the door on time, something may slow you down. The sink may clog, the baby may vomit, the car might not start, the kids may start whining, or your personal gadgets might decide to suddenly stop functioning. But, then you arrive to find those you were meeting were also delayed, and it couldn’t have been timed better.

Frustration with things beyond our control indicate we are somehow “frantic”. Never make excuses for yourself to be frustrated over things you can’t control. You will be so frustrated, just never excuse it. God brought those circumstances to help you calibrate your own heart.

When we are thinking about time, we actually have more time than we think. When we aren’t thinking about time, we actually have less time than we think because we aren’t thinking.

As you work diligently, do not allow tragedies or global shifts or even local catastrophe to trigger that fearful sense of panic. This only applies when you are already working with a healthy sense of urgency. As you work to get things done, but then war breaks out or war is rumored to break out soon, remember that God is still in control. Keep plugging away, keep your Sabbath within God’s schedule for you, keep time to pray. Even an “unjust” traffic light might be a gift from the angels for a needed moment of some extra prayer.