Seeing Clearly

God let me hit bottom so I’d appreciate what He sent me.

We often wonder why our prayers seemingly go unanswered. Even while we are taught that God does answer our prayers, when we suffer, and don’t get what we ask for it appears that we are not being heard.

Sometimes we realize that even as much as we thought our prayers were not heard, that there was a reason that our prayers did not get answered the way we wanted and in the time frame that we expected. We may discover this in an instant or over time.

I went through a period of time, actually for years, asking for something that I wanted. And in a series of a few months the thing that I prayed for was presented to me and then pulled away time after time. It hurt and I blamed God, until one day I just gave up. If that’s the way it was going to be then fine, that must be the way He wanted things to go. And within a matter of hours after having let go out of frustration I was offered the thing I had been wanting.

It was, because of the timing, something that I knew was the answer I had been looking for. And had I not been in the place I was when it came to me, I most likely would have walked right past it because it did not fit the mold I had formed. I believe that because I hit bottom I was able to see this as a gift from God.

It takes what it takes to have faith. It took what it took for me to see clearly the answer when it arrived. We don’t understand when we don’t get what we want, when God has something better. And as long as we stubbornly seek what we want that doesn’t work, we will keep getting it, at least until we can’t stand the pain any longer and let God give us what we need instead.

When we hit bottom with pain it’s easier to see the answer from God.

Grow Faith not Fear

“You block your dream when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith.”
—Mary Manin Morrissey

Fear is a natural part of us; it’s an essential element, in fact. Fear protects us at times, and it helps us to be cautious, keeps us from moving too fast into situations in our lives.

But fear can also be a block. It may block us from love. It can block our success and even attempts at things. And it can keep us from growth. We must recognize fear and allow ourselves to feel it when we know that it’s a healthy emotion at the time. But what we don’t want to do is hide behind that fear.

We may have tried and failed. Perhaps in relationships we have been hurt and we are just too scared to face that again. Or maybe we’ve had a business collapse or failed at a job where we were employed by others. That’s water under the bridge, not reason to give up because we fear we might lose or fail again.

There are a few things that can be very helpful when we are afraid to move forward: prayer and talking about our fears with someone else. God will hear us and help us through and give us courage. Our friends, mentors, clergy, therapists, or family members can help us just by listening and by talking through the issues. They can help us determine what valid things to fear are and what is just an imaginary boogeyman under the bed.

Our self-esteem and confidence will grow each time we walk through our fears. We will see that fear is not something we should empower in our lives. It is there. It may be there often, but it does not have control over us. We can be stronger than our fears and come out on the other side with renewed faith and success at that which we attempted.

Fear will only grow as large as you allow it, just as faith will do the same.

Healing First

“The things you want are always possible; it is just that the way to get them is not always apparent. The only real obstacle in your path to a fulfilling life is you, and that can be a considerable obstacle because you carry the baggage of insecurities and past experience.”
—Les Brown

The older we get, the more open we are, and the more we experience, the more likely we are to have a lot of baggage to carry from these experiences. Life lessons don’t have to turn into burdens that move with us along our journey, but they often do turn into just that.

The way we avoid carrying a heavy load and living in the past is to heal from something before we start anew. Many of us have in our lives gone from a soured relationship with pain and anger and walked right into something else. It’s easy to do because beginnings are fun and it helps us to “get over” the last one. But if we didn’t feel our emotions from the breakup and heal from the pain then it just turns into baggage.

There is no time limit written in stone on when it’s the best time to move on because it varies by circumstance and what we do to heal from pain and loss. We will know when it’s right if we are honest and true to ourselves. But to move into anything new with baggage from our past is only going to cause failure in the new relationship.

This is not to say that we are ever over something completely, most likely we’re not, if that person meant a lot to us. But we do need to be able to distinguish the actions and behaviors of our new interest from those of the former so we don’t project the old onto the new.

Another thing to remember is just because a former relationship failed, it does not mean that we are a failure and that everything in the future will be the same way. We may have chosen the other person for all the wrong reasons, including getting over another person.

We may simply need to choose better and for different reasons than in the past. And we can trust ourselves in that a whole lot better when we aren’t burdened down with a load of baggage.

Shed the baggage by healing your heart and then move forward.

Giving it Away

“The miracle is this — the more we share, the more we have.”
—Leonard Nimoy

One of the Twelve Step recovery slogans says that you have to give it away to keep it. Thus by sharing what we have learned, by giving love and compassion, by just being there, we help others.

Holding on to our wisdom and knowledge won’t help anyone else. And while we can’t learn a lesson for another, we may keep them from having to go through certain things and from falling into pitfalls and traps. After all, Alcoholics Anonymous and other programs using the same formula, have found this approach successful for many years.

Often what we need is a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on. Perhaps just a hug. There are things we cannot do for our self, but we can do it for one another. As much as we do these things for someone else, the favor will be returned to us. It may not be from the person we gave to, but it will come to us from somewhere.

The universe, our Higher Power, gives us what we need when the time comes if we are open to receive it. It’s up to us to give what we have to others in need and we can be sure that what we have will not run out if we are helping others.

You have to give it away to keep it.

Communication Requires Listening

“The value of persistent prayer is not that He will hear us, but that we will finally hear Him.”
—William McGill

How many times have we thrown up the same prayer and not heard an answer, yet seemingly out of the blue something we prayed for was answered? It’s most likely that the answer came when we finally listened. And sometimes the reason we finally listened was because we were at the end of our rope and let go.

Just as communication with people requires both speaking and listening, so it is with our Higher Power. We must stay open for the answer we pray for or we won’t see it when it arrives.

As the saying goes, “Be careful what you pray for … you just might get it.” It’s necessary for us to consider first what we are asking and then to be ready to receive when the answer comes. If we are praying for a situation to get better and the answer is for us to take an action that is frightening for us, we still have our answer and we must proceed.

Sometimes when God says no the yes comes immediately and at other times we may not get a yes for quite some time, if ever. But if we are going to trust God and ask Him for things, we also must trust Him enough to give us the right answer.

God is love so what He does is always in our best interest when we allow Him to run things in our lives. No matter how much we may think we want something and keeping hitting a wall, we keep praying that God’s will be done and it will. He’ll put those people in our lives who can teach us the lesson we need at the moment. And He will use us to teach others.

When you pray be certain you want what you are asking for and listen for the answer.

Things Happen for a Reason

“When God closes a door, he opens a window.”
—Unknown

One of the most difficult things to understand is how we can desire something so badly and not get it. No matter how many times we pray, no matter that we feel we deserve something, we still don’t get it. And we get frustrated with God, maybe people too.

Every once in a while we have an experience where that door just will not open for us, or if it does it gets slammed in our face before we know it, but we realize quickly that it was a good thing that we didn’t get “it.”

That’s when we understand the quote above. And maybe while we realized why we didn’t get “it” we also noticed that there was at least one other “it” waiting for us, or suddenly seemingly out of nowhere something better presented itself. A thing we didn’t have to beg for; something for which we didn’t have to sacrifice quite so much.

These are moments in our lives that bring wisdom. They are the experiences and events that nobody can really teach us, but that we learn through the suffering of not getting and the surprise of receiving something else.

Often we are so busy looking at the closed door that we do not see the open window. When we pray for something we ought to pray that we can have wisdom about a thing so that perhaps our desire for something we aren’t going to get will fade more quickly and our eyes will not be blind to that other thing that’s there, just waiting on us to notice it.

If you just look past that closed door you might see an open window.

Anger Release

“Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.”
—Harriet Lerner

Human beings get angry. There are justified and unjustified reasons we become angry, but to deny that we are will never solve any issue.

When any negative emotion is within us, it causes us to see that something is not right. We may label a feeling anger that is more correctly defined as hurt or some other issue, but whatever it is we need to allow ourselves the time and energy to feel it and release it.

Feeling our feelings is how we move on. Suppressing our feelings, especially anger, is how we find ourselves in the middle of a big mess emotionally. To deny a feeling does not mean it doesn’t exist. To justify it does not determine that we need to hold onto it. Even if we have reason to be angry it’s still our feeling and one that is not conducive to love, joy, and peace.

We get angry for a reason. It may have very little to do with the situation at hand, and a lot to do with our baggage and unfelt and unexpressed anger from the past. Sometimes anger is telling us that we need to make a change in a situation or get out of it completely. Anger in itself is not bad. Anger can cause inertia to make big or small changes within and around us.

There are healthy ways to release anger: pound a pillow, punch a bag, run, take a fast walk, meditate, pray, ride a bike, any number of things can help us to feel and release the anger. Holding it in will only add fuel to the next situation where anger exists.

Anger can help us know when something is not right, but we ought to never hang onto it.

Keep On Keeping On

“Don’t give up before the miracle happens.”
—Unknown

We have choices about things in life. When defeat, rejection, loss, and other negative events happen in our lives we can give up, or we can forge on with hope of a renewed strength for the future.

Even when we lose at love, or think we cannot face that thing again that keeps bringing us pain, or that we just cannot take one more step. Do it anyway. Keep going. Don’t give up; because sometimes we may just give up before the miracle.

What if we quit and that thing we so much desired in our life was just around the corner? If we had just struggled one more day, or held on one more moment, or maybe let go just one last time we might have made it. We won’t know the answer to those questions if we give up, if we quit before the end.

It’s hard. Life lessons are difficult. Pain and loss are not fun and sometimes we just don’t care that through all those troubling times we grow spiritually and mature. It’s still icky and we don’t want to experience any of the down times. And there are times in our lives when it seems those painful events just start to pile on top of one another until we feel buried beneath them so deep we honestly don’t know if we can dig out.

But we need to do it anyway. We must move forward, feeling all the painful emotions along the way so we can move past them. Not feeling things and just girding up and moving on won’t really make things any better or easier. We’ll just get struck with the feelings later on down the road of our journey.

So keep on keeping on, feel what you feel, cry and vent as you need to, but don’t give up. What you want may be right around the next turn and if you stop now you will miss out.

Don’t give up because you might be inches from that thing you want.

Trusting

“We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone — but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.”
—Walter Anderson

Some of us have trust issues. They may go all the way back to childhood when we had parents who lied to us, who never did what they said, and we never knew what to expect from them. They may still be acting out these same behaviors with us as we have grown into adulthood.

And now that we are all grown up, we deal with even more situations that require trust. Sometimes, for me anyway, it seems that the situations where trust, or rather distrust, becomes an issue happens in phases; as in, over and over in a period of time where it makes me question even the most trustworthy of people. I begin to doubt every word that is spoken by people who interact in my life because others have lied and broken my trust.

But to not trust means we cannot have real relationships. And those of us who work on recovery issues of all sorts want real relationships. We want trust and truth. We desire the best life and love has to offer. We cannot give up on people and live a full life.

It’s difficult though to continue to open ourselves up to knowing that we will be hurt again. We will go through the pain of someone walking out on our relationship. We will experience the loss of trust again in our lives and we will hurt from it as long as we continue to have relationships that mean something.

Being vulnerable means we have lives full of intense emotions, both joy and pain. We must learn to handle the disappointments when others are not true to us, when they lie or walk away for no reason, so that we may experience love when it does come. And it will. Sometimes when we least expect it and from places we never dreamed it would appear. But we won’t have love or joy if we are not willing to take the risk of trust.

Trust that God will give you what you need when someone is not true to you.

Integrity

“Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”
—Spencer Johnson

When we seek to improve our self-esteem and grow in self-love we must be true to ourselves. We must love ourselves fully, without judgment. Honesty with ourselves is where we start the process.

We do not lie to ourselves about who we are. If we do things that we know are wrong we don’t justify that, we stop doing it. We don’t pretend to be someone or something that we are not if we choose to love who we are.

Trust is an important part of any relationship. To have trust, all parties involved must be honest and true to their word. Integrity means we are who we say we are. We do what we say and say what we mean and life goes a lot more smoothly than when we don’t tell the truth.

If someone says they are going to do something time after time, and they never do it, eventually we know that the words are hollow. They probably intend to do what they say, or perhaps they just say what they think others want to hear. Most of the time what anybody wants to know is the truth in a situation even when the truth hurts. Whether or not others are honest does not justify us to be dishonest. It’s still our integrity that we are responsible for.

We cannot be honest with anyone else if we cannot be honest with our self. It is not possible to be dishonest in one part of our lives and not have that carry over into other areas. Honesty and dishonesty are either part of us or they are not.

Our integrity is vital to both our self-image and what others in our lives see. We ought to be honest about the smallest things in order to be honest about the big stuff as well.
Honesty starts with me or I cannot be truthful to anybody else.