complacency

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The View of an Eagle


Lifting my eyes towards the sky
Imagining I am an Eagle that can fly
With wings spread wide and head held high
Feeling that uplift can bring tears to one’s eye

The view below was sitting so still
It felt so good it must be God’s will
When looking around the clouds I could see
All puffed up big but soft as can be

As the updraft of air starts to dwindle
Down, down, down I continued
With life’s past thoughts quickly emerging
Both worlds start converging

I start to wonder just what I had seen
Soring so high where the air is so clean
Where it was easy to see and to feel so free
God’s wonderful world came in focus for me

Again I looked down with a new open mind
Treating my past as one of a kind
The updraft was back and rekindled my though
On my wide spread wings it had caught

Higher and higher I began to climb
Above the scant clouds in a very short time
The view from above I could see the earth
I really began to feel my true worth

Life took on a new meaning
A little like spring cleaning
Everything seemed so clean and so free
I just couldn’t believe it, it just couldn’t be

But God opened my eyes so I could see
All is not lost if you just believe in Me
Open your heart and let Me in
And I promise I will forgive all of your sins

I opened the door into my heart
And then my life began a new start
With God by my side I wondered no more
My life had changed right down to the core

As the Eagle flies high
With his eyes he can see
Gods wonderful gift
It’s so great to be free

By: Wm. Forbes

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Choices, Choices, Choices – Believe it or Not!


A  couple years ago, I needed to put a stake in my yard to hold a Christmas ornament from blowing away. After thinking about it just a little I remembered I had a sprinkler system. I didn’t know where the main pipe feeding that area was located, I only knew my yard was large and this water line was only 1 inch in diameter. So what are the odds I could hit it when I was only driving a 3/4 inch stake in that little spot in that large area. I told myself that it would be pretty much impossible. Yes, you guessed it. I drove it right into the middle of that pipe and never had a clue what I had done. Come spring I found I had an issue. I told myself that there was no way but there was. I guess we can say the wrong choice was made by me.

When it comes to choices we have to make vs. choices we want to make, I find that they can both get us into trouble. When we make a choice based on only our thoughts which is what I did with that nasty stake, we only have ourselves to blame. I don’t think it was the fault of the company that installed the sprinkler system and if I would have called them up and asked what they were thinking when they put that water line right where my stake needed to go, I’m sure they would have told me that they were their first. Your problem – You caused it – What were you thinking!

But what happens when I make a choice based on someone else’s guidance and it proves to be wrong? Many times in today’s world we blame things going wrong on someone else. It’s many times hard for us humans to admit we could be wrong. So we blame the mistake on someone else. Maybe we might take them to court or just make a serious threat. We might stop being friends with them even if we asked them for the advice. Many things can happen when we make choices. We make them everyday of our lives. Getting up in the morning, eating or going to bed is a choice. It maybe started by making a choice that takes little thought like being hungry, tired or rested. However, it is a choice. Maybe we make a choice to do something because it makes us feel good. We really like a special kind of desert. Then 20 years later and 60 pounds over weight we realize maybe we should not have eaten the whole thing! We realty want something that we think we cannot live without, we don’t have the money, so we charge it! Then we can’t sleep because we can’t pay for it. Must have been that sales person’s fault!

Those pesky sales people can be a bit of a pain if you are not aware of the goods they are selling. They are either there to genuinely help or they are there to make a sale. It is the one that is there just to make a sale that we generally need to be aware of. If we choose to wrap our arms around our own ability to listen, rationalize and ultimately determine for ourselves what we want to believe, we can begin to see who we really are. We can buy into things that are good for ourselves.

I believe that God also gave each of us choices to make. He made a choice and gave each of us a brain and a mind to think with and allows each of us to make our own choice about Him. The problem we all need to be aware of is that there are people out there that don’t want us to believe in God. They have their own agenda no matter what it is. The problem that happens if you follow just their advice, you could be making one of those choices that you have to repair later or it is also possible that you won’t be around to repair it and it will be too late. So we need to be careful when we are making choices about something so important and careful about who influences us and also about who we influence. Clearing our mind of all the junk that clouds the issue and making sure we understand the results of our choices and then moving forward with it is up to us. One way or the other – it is our choice!

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Driving Out Complacency


Now I know no one wants to acknowledge they have become complacent in anything. I for one can struggle with this. Everyday produces situations that if they go unrecognized we can be taking another step toward complacency involving one thing or another. As humans we can become so ingrained in our thoughts and beliefs that we miss things going on around us. We start believing we have the answer before we know the question. We don’t stop long enough to realize that there is generally always two sides to a story if not more. We jump to conclusions without acknowledging what is right in front of us. We allow our education system to educate us and we never slow down long enough to educate ourselves. We hear what we are told but never question its validity.

Complacency could be something simple such as our eating habits or possibly exercise or lack thereof. Maybe it is in our lack of desire to learn new things, explore what others find interesting, listening to other explanations and not just live in our own world. Or our desire to dig deeper into what we believe and put our faith in enabling ourselves to reinforce our convictions or alter them. Ridding ourselves of complacency does not mean doing what everyone else does. It just means being aware of why someone does something and why they believe one way or the other. It is being open to discussing both view-point and not just having a one-sided conversation or walking away from it completely.

Acknowledging complacency is critical to our physical and mental health. It can be the pill the doctor ordered. The simple task of admitting to ourselves that it exist gives each of us a tool which will allow our lives to flourish in so many ways. Stagnation in our thinking, our health, our conversation, our faith, our work, and almost every area of our lives can be exterminated.

Join me on my journey to continue stomping out complacency from my life by doing the same in yours. Make a personal pledge to always be open-minded enough to explore different avenues as they present themselves. To be open to other opinions and to discuss them sharing your beliefs and understandings. Have a want to grow your knowledge, and a wish to life healthy. I truly believe that if we would live healthier our spirit would be healthier. If we expand our knowledge our conversations become healthy allowing two-sided discussions and not just someone accepting what someone tells them. We are born with a body and a mind and we need to feed both of them with good food.

If you have an area of complacency in your life please share it here with a comment or with a friend. We all have some level of complacency we need to deal with. One of the biggest for me was believing everything I was taught in school. Then I was supposed to believe everything I was taught in church. Each contradicted the other. It was only after I decided to challenge myself on these topics that I started ridding myself of confusion and my life became stable. In this case I concluded that one belief or the other had to be correct. Either we were created or we evolved. This is truly a live and death altering question. I can tell you that I believe we were created and for really good reasons. I have tried to explain this in the book “Deceptive Influences” if you are interested in the rest of my story.

Now as we continue this day moving to the next I wish you good travels down the road of eliminating complacency from life.

 

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God’s not Dead


The movie “Gods Not Dead” has hit the screens and if you choose to go and see it (I highly recommend it), you may see the world from a little different angle even if it is for just a moment. For those of you that have followed any of my writings or even read a copy of my book “Deceptive Influences” you would know this is a passion of mine. I believe that this world was created and that it has not just evolved. I believe that if everyone would take the time or maybe better yet be given the total story via our education system, the world would be such a good place to live. People would love people, people would respect people, all people would have a real truthful purpose in life. It’s not that each of us don’t have goals, and it is not that goals are not important because they are, it’s that so many times we get the important ones mixed up and they end up on the back burner and many times we loose them due to our pushing them so far back we don’t even remember them. In todays world, actually this started back in history in the early 1800’s and we could even track this back hundreds of years before our time, the world decided that God was not so important and that maybe He just does not exist and set out to prove that they were correct. Going way back in time people added new god’s to the equation in search for something that they must have felt made sense to them at the time. Then came the evolutionary theory. No God at all. While this was a very small minority in the beginning, the momentum started to grow in the mid-1800’s. Many people credit Darwin with this evolutionary thinking. He stepped out and published what he felt was important and he did this for a reason. He did this after the death of his young daughter and also his younger son. I can only guess at what his attitude on life would have been. I have never experienced this personally outside of loosing my parents and grandparents, but loosing a child let alone two would be a bit devastating. It was after this that I believe Darwin lost his faith in God. Darwin had went to college and trained to be a minister. His faith was challenged and his desire to find a different path was set.

I believe that this is true for any of us when faced with things in our lives that make us feel uncomfortable, uneasy with what we see, upset with events in our lives, and just plain upset with God. So many people blame any bad thing’s that happen on God. How often do you hear or maybe you have even stated it, “If God was a good God He would not let these thing happen”. People struggle with these issues. I truly believe that if we could allow our minds to just contemplate the total story, we would be able to understanding that it is not God doing these things. I had an example of this explain to me and it goes like this.

“If a father and a son were walking along a path together, and the son fell down and hurt himself, was it the fathers fault? Did the father cause him to fall? Or was it the father that reach down and picked up his son and help him back on his feet or carried him back home?”

Digging into this topic I have discovered that it really does come down to a single question. It should have nothing to do with what makes us comfortable, how we want to live our lives or what makes us happy. It has to do with the truth behind who we are. Were we created or did we just evolve? You may not want to tackle this question or even explore it due to our human inclination to keep our lives comfortable with where we are. However, if we were created then it is a very real possibility that God is real and that what He created is each of us. If we evolved from something, then He is not real. It takes faith to believe in either. It is now a matter of where you place your faith. When placing it one way or the other you need to do this with an understanding of all the information out there and not just what someone wants you to believe. We live in a world that either tells us what to do or provides advertising in an attempt to control our desires. What we need to do is make that decision ourselves based on our discovery journey. Believing in God is not restrictive outside of what we should not be doing anyway and allows each of us to live a great life. If you decide to believe in evolution you should still desire to live by the same rules of life. In either case our life on earth would be so much better if we all followed these simple rules. They are called the 10 commandments.

I welcome any comments and thoughts from either side of this discussion. It is an exciting journey we are on and to share and explore is what makes this life so interesting. Thanks in advance for your support and too each and every explorer that decides to jump aboard this discovery journey with me.

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What happened to all the people?


A Think Tank question:

Have you ever had a time when you were looking at something to purchase and when comparing the difference in cost of new vs. used and having checked out the available statics, you determine that new is the best way to go? However, down the road what you purchased new no longer worked while your friend with the used one was still using it and it was working just like yours did when it was new? The world of statistics can be fascinating and generally can add credibility to most any thing if they exist, if true information is utilized with no hidden motivation in their compilation. Summing this up we really need just the true facts to draw a solid conclusion.

Looking into our world population and the current numbers that everyone agrees exists today and moving backward based on the proven and statically agreed to population growth formula, we find that when we reach all the way back to the first two people – a man and a woman living on earth – it would be around 4500 years ago. I find this quite incredible since we are continually educated that this earth is many millions and billions of years old. That we are told that it takes millions of years for something to evolve into something else. That a man and a woman would have evolved just in time – at the same time – just to start the population of our earth is quite mind-boggling.

What is wrong? Who is wrong? Is anything wrong? Think about it!

 

 

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The Migration Season


Northern Michigan at it Best!

Each year as fall and winter approach, the animals and birds start their journey to their winter homes. Some of us will do the same thing, moving to a warmer climate to avoid those cold winters.

It’s interesting how this approach to life also impedes our daily thoughts. How we tend to migrate to what makes us comfortable. Some of us like to curl up on a sofa or favorite chair and read a book or watch one of our favorite movies. Some will throw on running shoes and hit the trails. One might dispute that they are not the same. Some people I know that get such great joy out of running would argue they are. The big difference is that for the runner you must first work at it until your body starts looking for that rush you get. It becomes our mental state of mind. One might have a glass of a favorite wine, lite the fire in the fireplace and sit back letting our mind and body slide into deep relaxation. We have trained our brains in a way that fits our desires, what makes us comfortable, and what we feel gives our life stability, and in many ways purpose.

Running, walking, reading, participating in a sport ( I personally enjoy golfing), or just meditating is great. We should desire some level of this in our lives. It’s also important to realize that becoming content with our daily lives, we have allowed some level of complacency to settle in.

As a runner, we enjoy that rush we get, but as our body ages, we need to recognize that maybe it is time to take brisk walks instead. As a reader, we need to explore new authors gaining new perspectives. Maybe it is examining the other side of a topic that we feel strongly against. We should not allow complacency to inhibit our ability to look outside the box. We should look to reinforce our current beliefs or possibly alter our position just a little.

Opening one’s mind to things outside our comfort zone is difficult. Our subconscious mind drive our feelings. Many times we dismiss thing around us just because we didn’t see them or we dismissed the thought before we took the time to think about it. We didn’t agree or thought it was a waste of time.

It truly takes a conscious effort to eliminate complacency from our lives.

I once asked myself the question: What is this life all about anyway?

Allowing myself the freedom to explore this thought, raised a key question. Did I evolve from something or was I created by someone? Logic would say of course I was created by my mom and dad. But what came first? The chicken or the egg? How did this all start?

Watching the discovery channel, I’m told that it all started millions of years ago. That my great, great————, great grand father was really just a single cell that randomly happened.  If this is the case than I guess that we are only on this earth for what we call our life time. Once this is over we just decay away too nothing but a memory in someone’s mind.

But how could this cell be randomly started with the built-in DNA requirement to make me into a human complete with brain and mind to think with? Is it then possible that I was created? If so, then I do have a real purpose. Maybe there is more to this life and possibly even death.

Exploring these questions is something each of us should attempt to do. We should not just accept what we are told on TV, in our museums, in our schools, and even in our places of worship. We need to decide for ourselves what is true and to do this we have to overcome the complacency of our mind. Directing our lives and not allowing someone else to control our thoughts and beliefs can be difficult. The satisfaction of expanding our knowledge, allowing ourselves to stand firmly on our beliefs, never hiding from a discussion, and always being able to have open dialog with those who have a belief different than ours, is the key to a full and robust life.

So until tomorrow when the sun comes up again, I will continue my quest. Please feel free to join me on my adventure and chime in anytime. Your thoughts and ideas are welcome.

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