Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneEyre
Pray for me. I don't want to harbor bitterness in my heart. I need to release some issues and allow God to heal me - spiritually and emotionally. I've been hurt deeply by some people in the UPCI and I have avoided them and said that I would never attend another UPCI church other than for a funeral or wedding. To put it simply, I was wronged. Treated unjustly and betrayed. That may sound subjective to you - but I have the facts to prove it. That is no excuse for hatred, resentment and bitterness. Pray that when I say I have forgiven these people that I really have.
Please don't tell me I am a whine baby. LOL
Thank you.
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I can relate to where you are because of your feelings of being treated unjustly. However, I can also testify to the amazing power of God to transform our feelings when we take 100% responsibility for our lives. It's a little lengthy, but I am going to share with you something out of my sermon yesterday. Read it with an open heart and know that I am praying for you.
Sermon Excerpt
The past is the past. All that matters now is that from this point forward you choose to act as if you accept 100% responsibility for what’s happening in your life. The next time something doesn’t work out the way you planned, you will ask your self,
“What do I need to do differently next time to get the result I want/”
I want to share with you a very simple, but important formula that was developed by Dr. Robert Resnick in Los Angeles, CA that will hopefully help you more clearly understand this idea of 100% responsibility. The formula is
E [event] + R [response] = O [outcome]
The basic idea is that every outcome you experience in life (whether it is success or failure, wealth or poverty, health or sickness, intimacy or estrangement, joy or frustration) is the result of how you have responded to an earlier event or events in your life. If you don’t like the outcomes you are currently getting, there are two choices you can make.
1) You can blame the event (E) for your lack of success. In other words, you can blame the economy, the weather, lack of money, lack of education, racism, gender bias, the current government in Victoria or Ottawa, your husband or wife, your boss’s attitude, lack of support, the system or systems, other Christians, etc If you’re a golfer you’ve probably even blamed the golf course or the clubs you’re using for such a poor round. There’s no doubt that these circumstances I mentioned exist, but if they were the deciding factor, nobody would ever succeed.
Jackie Robinson, a black man, would never have played major league baseball, Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington would have never become movie stars. Bill Gates would have never founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs would never have started Apple Computers. For every reason why something is not possible, there are hundreds of people who have faced the same circumstances and succeeded.
Many people have overcome limiting factors, so it can’t be the limiting factors that limit you. It’s not the external conditions and circumstances of your life today that stop you from succeeding, it’s you who stop you from overcoming. Like the 10 unbelieving spies returning from the Promised Land, you don’t believe you can conquer and so you don’t. They prevented themselves from possessing what God wanted them to have by their negative thoughts. Joshua and Caleb, on the other hand, were convinced they could go up and take possess the country, and eventually they got to enter and possess the Promised Land.
We stop ourselves from succeeding so often. We think limiting thoughts and engage in self-defeating behaviors. We defend our self-destructive habits with indefensible logic. We ignore useful feedback, fail to educate ourselves and learn new skills, waste time on trivial aspects of life, engage in idle gossip, eat unhealthy food, fail to exercise, spend more money than we make, fail to invest in our future, avoid necessary conflict, fail to tell the truth, don’t ask for what we want, etc. and then wonder why we aren’t making progress. But this is what most people do. They place the blame for everything that isn’t the way that want it to be on others and outside circumstances. They have an excuse for everything.
2) The second choice you can make instead of having an excuse for everything, is to simply change your responses (R) to the events (E) – the way things are – until you get the outcome (O) you want. You can change your thinking, change the way you communicate, change the pictures you hold in your head (images of yourself and the world around you) – and you can change your behavior (the things you do).
That’s all you really have control over anyway.
Unfortunately most of us are so controlled by our habits that we never change our behavior. We get stuck in our conditioned responses. Our response to our spouses, to our children, our colleagues at work, our customers, our clients, our students, our fellow Christians, and to the world in general. We are a bundle of conditioned reflexes that operate outside of our control.
To change who you are and where you are in life and get to where you want to be and need to be in life, you have to regain control of your thoughts, your images, and your behavior. Everything you think, say, and do need to become intentional and aligned with your purpose, your values, and your goals for you and your family.
“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.” (Prov.23:7)
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