Category: godliness

Be guided by principles and ethics, not facts on the ground only.

Don’t get trapped between the twin lies of Heavenly and Earthly mindedness. Neither be too Heavenly-minded to be of Earthly good nor too Earthly-minded to be of Heavenly good. Anyone can be too much of either to be useless for the other.

People will tell you to “look at the reality around you”. Yes, boots on the ground should tell the brass at command what can and can’t be done, but protocols remain the same. Reality doesn’t trump protocol. Values and principles—when wisely chosen—are practical and permanent. As you mature, you will need to re-evaluate yours, but that’s your problem that everyone else has too.

In fog, pilots must fly by instruments, not by feelings. Values are necessary because, when in the fray, dust from the work and the battle can cloud our judgment. Clouded judgment can’t navigate you out of a cloud.

If you can let go of an ideology then do it in your prayer time, not when someone wants to negotiate a compromise with you. If you wait until the negotiating table to see that your ideal is flawed, you have repenting to do in your next prayer time, which should probably be made urgently and with extended time.

The world is destroyed by one compromiser after another. The cascade of compromise ripples one fool at a time. None of them think their compromise will matter much, which is why they are foolish; if their compromise didn’t matter then it wouldn’t have mattered if they didn’t make that compromise either. It’s not that a cascade of compromise overpowers the honest people of the world, but that a cascade of compromisers is a cascade to suicide. Cascaders hurt themselves. The people who refuse to compromise on truth and morals will remain standing in the end.

Know your values and core principles; never let them go, but let go of everything else before any opportunity for compromise comes knocking on your door. Know your mission—what it is and what it is not. Know who you are and know who you belong to. Then you will surely stand and last.

Our moments of greatest bravery come when we face the truth in front of us: that if we act, then we risk failure, but if we don’t act, then we guarantee failure. Immature human nature drives us to negotiate and argue with this truth, thinking to persuade the universe to change the options, telling ourselves, “Maybe if we don’t act, we will find some way to guarantee a lesser life, but life nonetheless.”

Heroes step out and take great risks, in the face of doubts and jeers, not for their own fame, but because someone else is in need. That other person depends on the hero coming through, but so does the hero depend on that other person being there. Both of them work as a kind of team and unless everyone goes all out, risks everything, and gives it their all, everything will fall apart.

You can only take risks as big as the difference you know you can make. You will make a bigger difference the more you value yourself and you will value yourself the more you know how much God values you. The more you recognize how much God values you, the more you can trust Him, the more you can trust that He will work out your circumstances.

Heroic choices can’t be made when safe outcomes are guaranteed. The hero determines to make everything work out for everyone else, whether or not things work out for the hero’s own safety. The hero doesn’t leap blindly, but only when he knows the task is within his skill. Heroes are chosen in the days of danger, but they are made over the long term, in the days of practice and preparation, gaining skill, and learning one’s own limits.

Esther’s story illustrates the heroin’s path: taking action to save others despite her own risk. A year of preparation to become queen, now she had a choice. Her people, Israel, faced extinction and she faced death if she brought a frivolous matter before the king. “If I die, I die,” she said, knowing that the words of her uncle were true—that God may have made her queen, “for such a time as this.”

Be original. Never repeat what has already been said as if it is your own, new idea.

People are unique. God made us that way. Insanity, however, bears consistent, predictable, and recognizable patterns. Healthy humans can never be fully understood; when we become all too easy to predict, somewhere we have gone mad.

When the books already written and debates already exhausted become our own repeating words, round and round again, life begins to deteriorate. Look at the Christian and Atheist having a “conversation”, each spouting ideas long published by more educated men than they. Their argument never ends and neither is satisfied. It would be better for either to say, “Books have already been written to satisfy these queries. What original ideas can we bring, if any?” Eventually, both will develop deep inner questions since neither one defends his own ideas.

Once an idea has been said, move one. Once an answer has been given, don’t ask the question afterward. When others ask you questions you already answered, say so rather than repeating yourself—rather than plagiarizing yourself. Know when all room for new ideas and new work has been filled, then end discussion so everyone can go about their separate ways, moving on to what good things they might begin next.

People who think their inner and outer struggles are unique easily become depressed. Everyone would do well to recognize a boilerplate thought life. The easiest way to recognize boilerplate publishing is to write frequently and with originality. If your life is not original, you will chase other unoriginality, trying to conform yourself to “be like others” in order to be liked by others. Living such a mimicking so-called “lifestyle” makes no one happy nor escapes life’s vicious cycles.

Study mental illnesses as often as you study history. Watch for repetition because failure and insanity are the most skilled at unoriginality. The leader who convinces his society to conform is himself insane and his society adopts culture-wide insanity by so conforming. Never trust a teacher whose pupils repeat the same answers. Never entertain inquisitive minds who ask answered questions. Quit once your work is finished, lest you over-stay your keep and repeat failure.

Acting like problems aren’t problems can make problems disappear for a reason: Evil feeds on the fear thereof.

There are demons that actually eat the emotion of fear. It makes them stronger. The main thing they do is make people afraid. Imagine it working in a circle.

When a demon or spirit of fear makes you afraid, then eats your emotion of fear and grows larger, it won’t hurt you. It needs you to remain healthy so that it can make you more afraid. Like a parasite, it latches on to you—sometimes resting like a growing red snake, other times perching with talons of a bird—and does whatever it takes to keep you producing an endless supply of its food: fear. If it injures you too much, then you won’t be afraid anymore. So, as it grows, it uses its new strength to either whisper fears into your heart or to provoke others to say and do things, then whisper into your heart that you should be afraid of them.

It’s a parasitic relationship. The last thing it wants to do is make your fears come true, only to make you afraid that they will.

The best way out of the vicious cycle of fear is to just ignore it. Recognize self-justifying fear for the cyclical, codependent parasite it is. Identify the specific fears. Notice carefully when you ignore one fear and another crops up as if on cue—because you are up against an invisible sentience. Whatever good thing you are most fearful of, trust that God will forgive you if you are wrong and go do the right thing, no matter how much emotion drive you away from it.

If you never feel fear at all, then you might not be doing anything valuable in your life. Good things disrupt demons and an easy response is to send a cyclical demon of fear to weigh down good people. If demons of fear haven’t haunted you then you probably haven’t done anything good enough to disturb them.

Don’t do whatever you fear just to break out of fear—keep doing what is good and fear will flee as fast as it came.

All of us were born in sin and we all need forgiveness. Those who don’t forgive quietly presume that a past sin is a reason someone is eternally bad. They don’t seek perfection, though they claim to; they seek to destroy the good contribution people can only make after growing up, repenting, being forgiven, and becoming better people.

There will always be people who preach the message of “past sin”—that we should remember what other people do wrong—even what we have done wrong ourselves. They think that by not forgiving—either themselves or others—they are adding “training weight” to “remember” the horrific past, thereby making everyone stronger. The past must be learned from, but to learn from it, the past must be forgotten, not memorized.

Repent, move unto hope, and move on. Carrying the past’s failures around makes as much sense as carrying training weights all day long. In the gym, weight training can make us stronger after we put down the weights and go out into the world. But, carrying 40lb dumbells all day won’t make anyone stronger; it will interfere with everyone’s day.

People who won’t let go of the past are a poisonous destruction to society and must never be silenced, but always ignored by those who understand the Bible’s teaching that everyone has been forgiven.

Refusal to forgive is actually an trait of Paranoid Personality Disorder, meaning it is deeply connected to fear. Forgiveness involves forgiving others along with being forgiven by others. People who struggle with fear might struggle with forgiveness first.

Every single person needs forgiveness. This is the ramification of the Christian teaching called “Original Sin”. We were each born with sin from Adam, therefore we will commit more sin, therefore we are born needing forgiveness and are born inclined to do more things that will need more forgiveness. Never let the doctrine of “Original Sin” become an excuse to judge, let it be a reminder that everyone falls short of God’s standard.

While we strive to become perfect, and hopefully we get better at non-self-destructive decisions with age and maturation, you and I will always need just as much forgiveness as the worst criminal.

Heaven hides sensitive information, reserving it for those who work with sensitive hands and slow tongues. If you can’t keep a secret, then you will be one of the last people to know.

God always hopes for everyone’s best, so He will let dark secrets appear on your doorstep from time to time. It’s not your job to be the gossip vine and tell those secrets to the world. When you learn a dark secret, God wanted you to know that dark secret so that you could secretly sprinkle some light into that secret situation and perhaps only God would ever know—perhaps, not even the people you helped would know that you helped them.

That’s why God brings us dark, dirty secrets in the secret. It’s not so we can gossip, but so we can help… secretly.

If you are responsible with information—if you keep secrets that find you, if someone’s dirty business doesn’t become public knowledge just because you learned about it, God will keep sending you more and more secrets. He will send you news of the biggest problems and the biggest solutions. You will even gain the ear of leaders in government at every level—because you know how to keep a tight lip about other people’s business. It’s not that those leaders will trust you with information; God will trust you with information and they will trust your words to solve the problems they can’t figure out.

But, if your mouth always says exactly what your ears hear, you may have a local reputation for being honest, but you will probably have a bigger reputation as a gossip and hate monger, and you will certainly never learn the information necessary to make a sweeping difference. God simply won’t let that information darken your door.

Report crimes with solid proof, but aid the underground railroad. Talk about normal events, but give damaging reports hesitantly and only when necessary.

There are different classes of newspapers. The gossip fliers hang on a different rack than the reputed periodical and they sell at a different price. Choose which you will be by your ability to do something constructive with other people’s dark secrets.