365 – Page 44 – Watch. Stand. Pray.

302 – God Doesn’t Need You to Know How He’s Growing You

The great grace of God toward us exists our growth. He is the One Who is responsible for our maturity and progress.

God doesn’t see us mostly as “forgiven”, though we ought to pause and see ourselves that way once in a while.

God doesn’t see us mostly as “immature”, though we ought to pause and see ourselves that way once in a while.

God sees us as His beloved children. He’ll protect us. He’ll help us. He’ll teach us. He’ll provide for us. He even died for us. All this because He will do whatever it takes to master and mature us into the most beautiful craftsmanship Heaven knows.

Unlike the angels having been born into Glory, God grows us into Glory. This happens with our cooperation and perseverance, but God is at the helm the whole time.

That’s the message of “grace”—God is at the helm, growing and guiding us. We didn’t ask for this. We didn’t invent this. We couldn’t even dream of this. God has great plans and if we simply don’t give up, if we lean into Him and take some initiative to get steady droplets of Bible and conversational prayer into our regular habits, we throw fuel on the fire of our inner growth that God already kindled in our hearts.

Don’t ever misunderstand “grace” as permission to return to a mundane version of so-called “morality” nor as permission to amuse ourselves with the boredom of a life lacking the power of morals from above. Likewise, never think that you need to know your problems in order for God to deal with them. God will deal with your problems. He already knew your problems before you were born. You can’t even comprehend your own problems let alone their solutions; God has all that under control.

“Grace” means God is at the helm, growing us.

Move forward and know that God has you. You need initiative and momentum, effort, and the confidence that God will gladly forgive you when you fail from getting out into the world to try. So, don’t stay home to guarantee sinlessness. Get in the game and know that God holds you in His hand.

Psalm 139:10, Isaiah 41:10-13, John 10:29, Ephesians 2:1-10

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.

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.

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.

306 – Stages of Results on Your Path

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.

307 – Wealth & Society

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.

308 – Law of Sowing and Reaping

There is a metaphysical reason why seeds grow. Even before seeds and plants in our natural universe, there existed in the spiritual plane, and even the plane of the soul, the principle of sowing and consequence—seeding ideas and events. Seeds grow according to their kind because this follows a law that already existed in Heaven before Earth was ever made.

Part of “proper seeding” includes a stage of semi-death. Seeds “die” in a sense before they can grow. If they are planted before “dying” and drying, then the may rot. But, a seed can be cooked or ruined with poison to a point where it has a “second death” from which it can never recover. A seed that has died its “second death” won’t grow, neither will a seed that has not died it’s “first death”.

Ideas can be “seeded”. We often wait to gain our desire to pursue, learn, or get involved with a thing until after we feel as though we have “missed out”. While many things we might be able to enjoy if we maintain an early work ethic and don’t take opportunity for granted, some things we will never want to pursue until the seed dies its “first death”, making us want to spring up from the ground in pursuit of restoring what came before.

This is all part of the Law of Sowing and Reaping, which existed in Heaven before it governed the chaos of farming in the earth.

Whatever is properly killed and put into the ground will grow back in kind, multiplied from what it was before—it’s the Law. This is why persecuting Christians causes Christianity to spread—not by elementary arithmetic, but in powers of ten. Many governments have faced this dilemma of trying to stamp out Christianity, but only failed because true Christianity—without walls or bureaucracies—is the embodiment of the Creator of nature’s chaotic order.

The Law of Sowing and reaping causes luck, both good and bad, wealth, poverty, joy, sorrow, opportunity, emptiness, and it was even at work during Jesus’s crucifixion just as much as it will be at his valiant return with the resurrected Christians who died their first death.

John 12:24, Galatians 6:7