Category: life

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.

The middle-income and upper-middle class traps only get people who are more anxious for the results of their work than for the sustainability necessary for their work to last.

The same story repeats too many times. A young family has a dream, they take out a mortgage too big to build a house too big with a lawn too big to keep and too many rooms to keep clean on a plot of land too far from work. Then, between the longer commute and long-term debt, they have time for neither family nor profitable hobbies. By the time they retire, the kids grew up without the parents being there to see it.

A little patience would have told the family to build a home big enough, but close to work and easy to maintain. Even when our wallets can afford larger, our schedules often cannot. Waiting for results while homing in on strength in the beginning leaves time for family and those other projects that improve the future.

You can’t short-cut results; no one can, though everyone tries. Work toward your goals, but don’t try to get the harvest earlier than seasons and hard work allow. Companies, organizations, families, governments, and nations implode because they over-build their infrastructure. They pay dearly to build tomorrow’s dream today. The mansion comes later, though everyone wants it first. Large highways come after a thriving economy, not before.

Results come a certain, specific way. Each path is different, having its own obstacles, beauties, hazards, and rewards at their end. But, no path has the end before the end. Even if we could rewrite the sequence of events along any path, that would make the path no easier to accept. Life’s Creator made Life to happen in a sequence and we must welcome and accept that sequence in order to enjoy any path to its fullest.

Life won’t be outsmarted nor circumvented—Life won’t allow it!

The only way to know if one is on the right path is by what occurs at steps along the way. Some things happen sooner for different people following different paths correctly. Celebrate the right results at the right stages of your own path.

No one’s pockets are infinitely deep except God’s. Any country, government, business, or family, no matter how wealthy, will lose its money if it spends more than the prosperity it generates. Two main groups of people have difficulty understanding this: those who make a living from public funding and those who spend more money than the prosperity they generate.

The only way to understand that money’s supply must be generated, not bestowed or merely redirected, requires that one generate prosperity in one’s personal life. This could include an innovative or “sales” job or being a strategy decision maker for a business. One way or another, we only understand the laws that govern life—including that money must be generated from somewhere—if we know how to harness those laws for the better.

Humans have the ability to create springs of prosperity, fountains of funding that spill out to all people. Society needs that prosperity to be generated—humanity as a whole depends on individual humans living up to their potential, including to generate more than we take.

It always seems insignificant, nickeling and diming away money. Any animal, no matter how large, can be eaten one bite at a time, like ants on a dead rat. Even the most wealthy people and institutions can never be exempted from the potential to be eaten. Foolish is the one who eats himself, even if he does so one bite at a time.

Sharing, charity, and compassion are good, but sharing beyond what one has is suicide, not only for oneself, but for future sharing. Even giving must be done responsibly. If you give all your money away, then you can’t give away your money anymore. The other harm is becoming the “public funding”, dolling out the rewards that normally one must learn to earn by figuring out a way to be personally prosperous.

Children and family should always be welcome in the house, but this should be an invitation to use the family estate to learn how to generate. We are entitled to our family and country, not prosperity. No one is entitled to prosperity, which must be earned through stewardship. Overlook this and it’s game over.

What things God created us for is unimaginable. Eternity is a long time and it’s no stretch to suppose that if we don’t eventually cooperate with God to create our own galaxies that we will be doing something much more splendid. And, that still won’t even be the beginning.

Jesus’s appearance to John in his Patmos vision showed us that Jesus wasn’t only being figurative in his time on Earth; the eye is the literal lamp of the body. His eyes were like fire, his feet glowed, and his face was the brightest part of his body. The eye is the lamp in a glowing, luminescent body.

That’s what most of our future time will be like, in a glowing body just like Jesus had when John saw him on Patmos.

The more in touch we are with the future God planned for us, the more we understand our potential right now. It wouldn’t seem like it to look at what’s around us, but that’s the same with everyone as we grow up. We start as babes unable to even feed ourselves, then we grow up, able to do anything we set our minds to. Don’t think for one moment that we stop increasing our abilities once we cross over into the next lifetime. It only gets better.

Your life isn’t wasted. You’re not useless. God sees your entire future Eternity, even now. We don’t have glowing bodies yet, but this is not from any lack of potential; it’s because God is preparing the virtue in our hearts first. Before our bodies glow, our hearts will grow first.

In this potential, there is no limit to the skills we can acquire. You can do anything. Reject the limited lie that we have “a passion” in the singular sense. Once we decide that life has given us the excuse we need, we can learn almost anything that we put our minds to. Most trades and skills are not inborn talents, but abilities and knowledge learned through time. Our DNA doesn’t so much limit what things we can learn as much as it empowers us to learn many more things than we may give ourselves credit for.

Beware the two snares of propaganda for knowing your direction in life: Chase whatever head-in-the-clouds, childish whim you feel like or be “realistic” and get a boring job doing what you hate because “that’s the way to make money”. There are options other than these, though it wouldn’t seem like it, given the free advice in plenty. Don’t chase your dreams; chase your skills and follow whatever doable path you are most passionate about.

A thirteen year old stood out at the skate park. He would coach and coax rookies into quickly reaching higher levels and attaining new skills. He asked me the probability of being sponsored. I told him, with his skill level, fifty percent. But, why would he want to be sponsored? “So I can skate all day,” he said. He can get rich and do that, but what about after he retires? What will he do then? “Teach skating.”

I answered, “You’re already doing that. Don’t look for a sponsor to boss you around. Do what you love now, then sponsorship won’t matter, then companies are more likely to line up to sponsor you.”

Another friend asked me if he should quit his stable job for a risky job as a teacher—his dream. “No,” I said. “Teachers love learning; your job is still teaching you. That’s your answer.”

There are different types of dreaming: worthy and silly. Following one’s childhood, passionate dream is different from following one’s childish fantasy. As long as a dream is doable and has a non-artificial time table, go for it. Jeremy Lin and Will Smith had that “see how it goes” conversation with their dads, but they didn’t spin their wheels, practicing for hours without good coaching.

Hotly pursue whatever you can do that makes you come alive, and learn effectively.

Maybe you have a knack for a craft, art, science, or sport from an early age. Do it, whether for money or hobby. Maybe you love your family or know that you need to pay old bills, so a special grace falls on you, empowering you to work in a factory you otherwise hate. Whatever tigers you can grab by the tail, go git ’em!

Everyone needs calm, strict enforcement of rules. If we don’t get punished to a point of pain, we become self-royal brats who think the world has appointed us the new ruling bloodline. Punishment is different from rage and anger.

Some people refused to give calm, sober, plain punishment to quickly deter children from destructive behavior later in life. These people have no mercy, no matter how much they claim to. They neither have mercy on the society, which criminals destroy, nor on those criminals who live unhappy lives. The main reason most criminals are criminals is because they weren’t disciplined to be good and happy early in life.

In the very early years, good parents swat with the hand on their child’s bear bottom, leaving no mark or injury, only some redness that passes after thirty minutes and a sting to teach the child about controlling personal choices. That’s it. There is no need for rage or hateful words, leather whips or beating with a belt. Swift punishment, enforced with a rigorous work ethic, in the very earliest years of disobedience will raise a child to become an adult who is safe and sober. Don’t wait or argue. Spanking through clothing is either too light and becomes a joke or must cause bruising to have any pain, so don’t do that either. If disciplined correctly once a child can walk and understand “obedience”, psychological punishments—like “time out”, writing sentences, or lost privileges—will be effective in the later years of childhood.

Having Asperger or ADD is not misbehavior, but it isn’t an excuse either. Everyone has a different psychology and no parent becomes an expert merely by having a baby. Understanding our different frames of mind and learning styles takes time and experience. Talk to someone who works with children and volunteer in a nursery during junior high and high school.

Whether you are a parent or not is beside the point. Society at wide derives its discipline from childhood. Discipline merely instills self-discipline. The key is to remain calm and happy, forgetting the punishment the instant it has been served. “Abuse” comes from rage and forced love. Love and discipline use open hands.