There’s something cathartic about sipping a glass of wine. Spending that 30 minutes reflecting on your day or your week…your trials, challenges, and victories.
There’s just something about taking the time to slow down and think. How are you doing? Where are you going? A lot of that forward path is created by where you’ve been and what led you to here.
If you like where you are, you keep going and that 30 minutes of sipping is filled with new ideas and dreams. If you don’t like where you are, it should be filled with the same mindset. “How can I make things better without making things worse?” SHOULD be the question that drives our thought process. If it’s not, get better wine or get better plans.
In real estate, a quitclaim deed is something you sign when you’re willing to pass your ownership of a property on to someone else. You “quit your claim” to it. It’s used for a few reasons, but I see it mostly when a couple is getting divorced and one is keeping the house.
What I never like to see is for someone to sign one of these while they’re still on the mortgage. Why? Because that’s accepting all of the responsibility and having none of the decision making ability. The only thing they can do is pay for it so they won’t get foreclosed on. They can’t sell it, rent it, Airbnb it, sign a sales contract or even put it on the market.
So in life when people make decisions for us and expect us to accept the responsibility and consequences of those decisions, it’s a lot like signing a quitclaim deed but staying on the hook for the mortgage. That’s bad.
Before you take on the responsibility of a decision that’s being made, make sure you are first involved, able, and willing to negotiate on your own behalf. It’s when we sit back and let someone else write our stories for us that we lose traction of our own lives, our resources and energy get hijacked…and maybe we even get foreclosed on.
Have you ever heard to the purity of God’s Word through the innocence of a child’s mouth? Even when we don’t have a child or teenager living at home, we should remember that when a child speaks the word of God, it’s without being filtered through the trash from the world that we’ve been around for so many more years than they have.
We have a ridiculously powerful influence to either encourage or discourage the growth of their gifts. Speak life, listen, and add light. We are not the gift givers, but we are the habitat and we choose to pollute or nurture them.
And when we nurture them, we become less jaded in the reminder that a lot of our ill emotions and thought process come from our own bad experiences and not from our own natural God given gifts.
“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity. Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you.”
From time to time, I let my emotions dictate my thoughts and my thoughts dictate my decisions. We all do. What’s for the birds is stepping out of your emotions and wishing you’d made a “better” decision.
One emotional decision does not necessarily have to beget a string of bad decisions. When you’re feeling trapped or on the edge of drifting into a life you never planned for yourself, do not worry. Pray! Pray for understanding. Fast if you need complete clarity, but don’t EVER think you have to stay in the emotional state of poor decision making. That is a lie. God will guard your heart if you let Him.
You don’t “make bad decisions”. You made A bad decision.
“Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:7 NLT
I mostly write about women and relationships. Simply put because I’m a woman, my thoughts are largely focused on how females can love better, mother better, and how it feels to be hurt, and how I want to love when people hurt. Today I’m reminded again about leadership and how it connects men and women from a book I read in 2016.
“Men, let me plead with you. The greatest fight of your life is not lust. You may think it is, but it isn’t. The greatest fight of your life will be rejecting the passivity that has infected your heart since the fall. Your natural default, especially as it pertains to sacrificial leadership of your wife, will be to mutely witness.”
Matt Chandler, Mingling of Souls
Women are designed to be led. We are. Men, you’re designed to lovingly lead. So, fellas, if you’ve noticed you’re not the leader in your home, let me tell you how that manifested from my experience.
The word submit is broken down from Latin submittere “to yield, lower, let down, put under, reduce,” from sub “under” (see sub-) + mittere “let go, send” (see mission). This means to have a “mission” to be under, y’all have to come up with one first and then agree that’s how it’s to be done. And follow through with it, be under it together.
So men, when you and your wife decide as a team that you’re going to go to church, to have family time, to stick to a budget, to have a family mission and plan, etc., we look to you guys to help execute it. So if your wife deviates from the plan, let’s say she doesn’t want to go to church and decides to watch it online…that doesn’t seem so bad for one weekend, but one turns into 7 turns into 6 months turns into “let’s not watch it let’s just sleep in” and then you’re completely away from the plan…men, stay with the plan. Keep going to church, get those babies up and dressed and go anyway. “Are you sure you don’t want to go, honey? Ok see you when we get back.”
We can only watch you keep leading, sticking to the plan we agreed to with you, for so long until we catch back up. When we fall short and you fall short with us, when you follow us, you’ve turned US into the leaders of the house and we’re not designed for that. When we’re the leaders of the house, you’re not designed for that, either. We start to not trust you as the leader, you feel disrespected and unheard, and then the seed of resentment starts to root, which will intimately lead to behavior that leads to divorce.
Guys, I realize this may seem unfair and burdensome, but that’s how you were designed so take that up with God. I’ve been married and divorced so I can’t tell you how to stay married, but I can tell you how to get divorced, which is kind of the same thing.
Come up with a plan together, stick to the plan until there’s GOOD REASON to make a new plan, and be the leaders God designed you to be. This doesn’t include “mutely witnessing” and being “passive” when we want to unilaterally change the plan. It means keep going and let us catch up.
Do you think of people when they aren’t around and understand what they don’t say? When you’re connected to people, you should.
What I mean by this is sometimes people say things without saying them because they’re afraid to admit they’re struggling and sometimes people pull back when they need you to lean in. Sometimes when a friend says “Just having a case of the Mondays” or “I’m just tired” they really mean “I need a friend”. When people don’t say what they need to say it’s not always because they don’t want you to listen…
Maybe it’s part of our human appointment to help keep people connected. Maybe when a person we care about says things that don’t sound together it’s our actual job to offer support in words of hope. Maybe it’s as simple as asking if they have anything we can pray for.
Maybe. But what about when we can’t? When we’re the spent ones and the ones who are tired and feeling less than our best? What about when we need the good vibes?
Maybe do it anyway. At some point the chain of negativity will break and it won’t be because you turned someone away, it’ll be because you turned it around. And if you’re the one who brings joy and hope back to another human…there’s a lot of healing in that for your own heart.
That Marilyn Monroe quote “I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” is garbage. The first part is true for everyone, but that last part is just hot garbage. It sounds all good and clever when convincing yourself your disaster is something you want to spread around, but here’s what I think:
Your worst should be the exception, not the rule. We are all worse than our best from time to time. Yes, please, after I show you my best, care enough to extend grace when you experience the ugly and watch me correct it…. Maybe even help me correct it. But, shouldn’t we all have a reasonable expectation of being on the receiving end of effort in all relationships?
If you wouldn’t take that quote to a job interview, a custody hearing, couples therapy, or the gates of Heaven – work yourself out of that mentality now.
When we don’t have joy in our hearts, there’s a good chance we are highly affected by everything that happens around us. Or doesn’t happen, especially on Valentine’s Day.
My wish for everyone this Valentine’s Day is that whether you get flowers or chocolates or dinner or a card or even a phone call, that you find your joy from knowing that you are cherished and valued by the One who truly matters. And by your own self.
Love on yourself this day! Don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself waiting on someone to define and qualify your value. That’s not their job.
Being a codependent is real. It’s crippling and something to not get confused with being a good parent, lover, or friend.
If you give up little pieces of yourself and redirect a well thought out plan for your life for companionship, you’ve chosen the wrong company. We are meant to love, but we are not meant to have the life siphoned out of us to BE loved.
Love well, have boundaries, practice saying no with kindness, and learn to be okay with loving from afar when you need to. If that means feeling a temporary rejection in exchange for lasting inner peace, that’s okay.
“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’ If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”
So I’ve started doing a new thing with a few of my friends. Each day we actively try to take a picture of the best part of our day to share with each other at the day’s end. I got the idea online and I loved it so much I had to try it.
AND HERE’S WHAT I’VE NOTICED. Not only am I actively seeking out positive moments, wanting to capture them, and getting excited to share them, I’m really excited to see my friends’ happy moments, too. The whole process is just uplifting and has steered me away from negativity or wanting to talk about negative things.
I’ve always loved to hear about happies from my friends, but it hits differently when it’s something we’re celebrating together and for one another.
If you’ve found yourself in a negative mindset, focusing on life’s inconveniences, bumps, and bruises, I can’t recommend this enough. You can actually retrain your brain in what to look for, and when it’s looking for positivity…your whole attitude will change.…and probably your life, too. We attract what we are.
Here’s my favorite from the weekend. A picture I didn’t even take, but was sent to me when one of my best friend’s son got the Venmo I sent him for his 21st birthday bar tab. It was just 20 bucks, but his sweet reaction made me so happy.
Deeper Than a Puddle 