David Matteo
- Spiritual Living
- November 13, 2020
- 2 views
Poem: Had Enough?
There’s nothing more to say that hasn’t already been said; Neither anything further to do to persuade disbelievers; The painful truth is that our continued fight for democracy we seem to labor in vain, Blindly amidst “compatriots” who swear by the law of liberty, but deign to uphold that very oath; Is it me? Or does the promise of freedom quickly fade with each slain body laid to rest; Every life lost through negligence in this unprecedented year at our leaders behest; What a travesty when our tragedies are mourned less especially by those we elect; Viciously ravaged by death via an “unknown” threat, was sadly only “unknown” to the people most affected… Their deceit the ultimate sign of disrespect; The blatant disregard for our intellect stripped us the ability to protect ourselves and what do we have left? Confusion and discord quickly spreading to every corner; Until the trusted are discredited and the liars faithfully adored; Well I, for one, can no longer afford to place my faith in a system that profits me nothing; Haven’t I paid enough? Haven’t we paid enough? David Matteo, Author The Freedom in Surrender
Neo Lloyd
- Spiritual Living
- August 8, 2020
- 0 views
Poem: Our ways
It’s amazing how comforting You are when I go through storms. It’s amazing how steadfast and solid you are, where we are half-hearted and hallow. It’s amazing how consistent in your love and faithfulness you are. Our way always leads us astray. Our way is always hostile and deceptive. Our way always leaves us lost in the belly of the whale. Our way always follows the “what if?” that fear presents. Our way always says, follow your heart Yet, you say the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, Who can know it? You know what is in our hearts because you search our hearts and test our minds, To give each of us according to our ways, according to our actions. Even so, in your great mercy O Lord, Knowing our hearts. Knowing our minds. Knowing our intentions. You choose to give us a greater inheritance. You gave us one who covers a multitude of sins. You gave us the grace to repent. You gave us the power to triumph. You paved The Way back to you. You put The Truth on the cross. You gave us back The Life that defeated death! That no one comes to you except through him. No words are enough to give you glory! Your name is lifted high! Your name is hallowed! Neo M. Lloyd @NeoinChrist [twitter]
- Spiritual Living , Understanding Your Faith
- July 20, 2020
- 0 views
Poem: Man-made love
People are so fickle Picking and choosing what they love. Putting conditions on whom they love. Doing the very opposite of what love is! Why are we so unkind? Why are we so impatient? When did love become so rude? When love doesn’t serve the self, it is rejected! When a multitude of faults stand before this man-made love, they are not covered! Since when does love put a list of conditions on its recipient? Is this the love that was foretold? Is this how the love of many grows cold? Is this how people become lovers of themselves? Whose example of love is this? Where is kindness, patience, and gentleness? Where is humility and selflessness in this cold love? When did love stop enduring all things? So many questions, only one solution. Jesus Christ! Lord, your faithfulness is like a mighty mountain. When man-made love abandons so easily, You will never leave or forsake your beloved. When man-made love puts terms and conditions, You love from everlasting to everlasting. You love first when love is most undeserved. You love when all conditions are undesirable. You love as a matter of life and death. You love with a resurrecting love. You love when nothing else is left. You love when nothing is offered in return. You love perfectly. You love completely. You love with your whole being. YOU ARE LOVE. Neo M. Lloyd @NeoMLloyd [twitter]
Ann Lenaers
- Spiritual Living
- July 2, 2020
- 1 views
Grief – Love Lost or Gained?
According to SAMHSA (Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration), 61% of men and 51% of women in the United States report exposure to at least one lifetime traumatic event. Up until the fall of 2013 I would not have fallen into those statistics. In the last roughly 6 1/2 years, that changed dramatically. There is no statistic for what came next. Pictured above are the faces of every traumatic loss I experienced in that time. 3 Suicides. 3 Cancer Deaths. 1 Heart Failure. And as of June 30th this week – 1 Murder. This image does not include casual acquaintances who passed away in that time frame. These are all friends and family I loved dearly. It also does not include close calls, including but not limited to my dad’s near-fatal heart attack or the friend I rushed to the hospital after he swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. I’m uncertain at this point whether death is following me around with a vengeance like the book of Job or if God has me following death around so I can be there with compassion when tragedy strikes. All I know with certainty is the trauma of loss has become a norm. In Psalm 23 it mentions, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.” It seems while some get to pass through this valley, I have been camped there for awhile now in a tent where I can offer hugs and condolences. Grieving loss of life is not a subject anyone wants to be an expert in, especially through personal experience. Yet here I am, and the only thing I can do is give that experience purpose. When Steve ended his own life back in August of 2014, it shattered me deeper than I have words to express. Over the next three years I spent every day burying the pain of loss and seeking every desperate way to heal. I didn’t want to let those around me down, and I didn’t feel like many people understood why I was so deeply impacted by him, so I kept it to myself most days. Nobody knew just how deeply I hurt or how each of the other losses kept reopening and deepening the wounds. I loved the few instances where I talked with his family, but they were grieving their loss of him too, and I didn’t want to make it worse for them just so I could feel better. Maybe I did anyway. I don’t know anymore, but I’m sorry if I did. In March of 2017 I finally cried out to Jesus in what you could refer to as a last ditch effort seeking truth after extensive exploration everywhere else. That was the first time the weight lifted, like I could supernaturally breath again. I still had a great deal to work through for myself, but I finally grasped that I couldn’t heal without God. Since accepting Christ into my life, I lost my employer of six years unexpectedly last August from what I will simplify as being sudden heart failure. She had…
- Spiritual Living , Understanding Your Faith
- February 20, 2020
- 1 views
Toxic Spirituality
Before I accepted Christ, I was deep in the New Age movement – crystals, reiki, medium readings, law of attraction, you name it. So do I understand the mentality of someone living that life? Yes. Absolutely I do. Then Jesus appeared and yanked me out of it by dropping a huge dose of truth on me, and I woke up from the haze I didn’t even realize I was in. One of the biggest pieces of the New Age movement that has seeped into popular culture (and many churches) is the belief that we must always be positive. Anything negative is bad. Over the years what this has evolved into is: “If it doesn’t bring you joy, get rid of it.” If someone ever hurts or upsets you, they are toxic and you should abandon them. “If you have a problem with me, it’s because of something that is unhealed in you that you need to work on. It can’t possibly be a problem with me.” Disagreement is immediately viewed as hate, judgment, or shaming. Think happy thoughts and the boogey man will go away. You are perfect just the way you are. None of those are truly healthy mentalities. Over time it inflates the ego and creates people who are so self focused and overly confident in themselves that they lose their humility and can’t accept personal responsibility for their human errors which are inevitable. They become the god of their own universe where they believe they are creating their reality in a very magical capacity, and they are equipped with excuses that make them feel justified to place all the blame for problems on everyone else. Ultimately you get detached from reality. Been there. Done that. Not proud of it. My response to those points is this: Dirty laundry doesn’t bring me joy, but I must wash it, not throw it out. People are not disposable, and if you mistreat me, your behavior is part of the problem. I can own my part in it, but you need to as well. There are at least two sides to every story, and it is most often the case that everyone involved holds some degree of fault. It’s ok as long as we can address it calmly and rationally. In objective discussion, disagreement does not have to mean hate (see previous article Who Are You To Judge?). While happy thoughts and positivity are ultimately beneficial, they don’t erase the things you don’t like. Nobody is perfect. We crucified the only one who ever was. For your psyche to be grounded with humility, you cannot be the limitless god of your own universe – there must be an authority higher than you which you must answer to. Consider that every feeling we perceive as negative exists with purpose. Pain is an alert system that calls our attention to something physical, emotional, or spiritual which needs healed. Fear can be a safety mechanism, like a person who is afraid to touch a hot stove not wanting to get burned. Shame can drive us internally to change a bad behavior that led to…
- Spiritual Living , Understanding Your Faith
- January 16, 2020
- 0 views
A New View
In August of this year, my life took a major turn. My primary housekeeping client passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly. She was a sweet, spunky older woman living with her husband in a gigantic home full of treasures collected throughout their epic life of wealth and travel. It was her castle, her dream home. She was also OCD, so keeping it all clean to her standard of literal perfection was my main job that paid the bills while basically giving away my ministry work. This woman was not just my employer, but over the six years I cleaned her home she was a friend who became family. Her passing forced me to reevaluate my career choices. I had a few months of employment left so I could help her husband get situated in his new living arrangement. During that time I was looking at the job market with one side of my brain and dreaming with the other. On one hand, it was nice that a traditional job allowed me to give a great deal away, but I ached to give my life to ministry completely. God had been training and pushing me toward it for many years. I created Peace Is The Road doing volunteer projects, wrote Christian books, made Bible study videos, coached clients, became actively involved in my church, and even started running groups. I kept busy being faithful in the small things, because to me the small things are the big things. As I started building momentum, there was a sincere desire to maintain the greatest integrity in the foundations of my work. I didn’t want to plaster my face all over it, because it wasn’t about me. I wanted all praise to be for the Lord and all focus to be on Him and the people who needed Him. I also didn’t want to accept money for my work, because Jesus didn’t accept money for anything he did. The Bible speaks so heavily against the evils of loving money, and I didn’t want to fall victim to it. My heart was fully focused on giving of myself freely with unconditional love, even if that meant I had to work harder to do it, which is exactly what happened. I was a working mom who used spare time to squeeze in ministry. A dream birthed from my calling and slowly grew in my heart that someday I would do ministry as my full time work. God had shown me a promise of that future with no clue when it would come. Now I was faced with a big decision – should I find another full time job to replace the housekeeping income or take this chance to focus on full time ministry? God continued sending me His peace in my heart and messages about trusting Him to provide just as He does for the birds (Matthew 6:26-34), so as the last day of housekeeping steadily crept up on me, I did my best to stay calm, trust Him, and get as much work done as I could. This resulted in my second book “Redeemable” being…
Nelson Hawkins, Jr.
- Spiritual Living , Understanding Your Faith
- January 10, 2020
- 0 views
God Who? (Part I: Intro)
Hey everybody! Welcome to 2020! Having finished that identity unit, I felt it was best to understand where our identity goes. And actually, that would be with God. But before we get into that, I want to go into the story that led me to make this entry. Have you noticed in the culture that when people refer to big spiritual breakthroughs, they often give credit to the universe? Yep, that universe. The balls of gas, celestial collisions, dark matter, supermassive black holes, and cold reaches of nothingness. When did this become sentient? Why did this become the new standard over the God of the Bible? Why do others reach to ancestral worship? Why do others reach to making parallels between God and other faiths, saying “white people” stole and plagiarized the “Judeo-Christian” God from Kemetan lore? The racist spin on Christianity as a result of Chattle enslavement, for instance. As a result, this puzzled me, because it seems very simple to me, but then I decided to go a little bit deeper. And I’m going to bring you along on the summary of this journey. Let’s take a look, shall we? But first, I want to bring an understanding on why we need the right God, and it’s deeper than “making sure that you get your prayers answered”. Well, we must have faith in the right God otherwise we will die in our sins. Turning ourselves over and loving the true God with all that we are will empower us to obey Him. Without definition, there are no boundaries. Without boundaries there is no order. And without order, comes chaos. So let’s start with that definition. Definition: Within the nature of one God, there is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Nature makes them one. They are co-equal, and co-eternal, and thus these three are the one God. Don’t get me wrong, the Bible ONLY discusses ONE God (and no, not modalities). His divine nature has always been the same, and His personhood has always been the same. His Membership, while always having been the same, the Members themselves have played different roles and have been introduced at different times. One God, (mentioned in the first-person plural in Genesis 1 at first), and then the oneness of God was focused on in Old Testament in Exodus with Moses, approach of God moving into time, typological theology that all led to Jesus coming back in the New Testament. Once we get to the new covenant, New Testament, Jesus carves it out further. The three Persons within the Triune God are introduced in Matthew 3 (introducing the Father and the Spirit coming down as a dove, and the Holy Spirit leading Jesus Christ into the wilderness in Matthew 4:1)…two other personalities with different roles and 4 introducing. There are more displays of the personality of God in the New Testament, which makes more sense as there is more of an emphasis on direct relationship, as Jesus introduced Himself as Way, Truth, and Light. But what say ye for the definition? Tough to digest, isn’t it? Let’s introduce this proposition real quick:…
- Spiritual Living , Understanding Your Faith
- December 11, 2019
- 0 views
The Protection of the Vine: Finding Fertile Ground as a Seed
Hey everyone! We have been going on and on about identity all autumn long, haven’t we? Hope you’re enjoying so far. This entry here is actually going to be the key to it all. Why? Because up until now we have primarily talked about the problems. Well, this week, I want to talk about the solution. And the solution is, Jesus Christ. Alright, post over. Everybody have a great holiday season. I’m kidding. Everybody who has ever seen one of my posts knows that: Now that the funnies are out of the way, let’s get down to business. Mending Broken Seeds We have talked about how many folks, including believers, are normally as adults navigating foundational hindsight damage they received as kids (again, not burying most parents…most parents just did what they could). But most folks simply don’t understand the principles of discipleship, or much less, how to overcome their pain and invest in someone else. We largely reproduce without knowing principles of reproduction, or principles of wholeness. So, as I said before, Jesus Christ is the solution, but how? Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the light, sure right? Right. But how does that work for us, who are largely broken seeds? Well, Jesus has so many other names and monikers that are associated with growth, empowerment, and redemption, the least of which not being the Vine. And we know that we are his branches, and we can only be nourished if we are connected to the Vine. It is through this connection that we are restored, grown, and brought into the fullness of our calling. After all, nothing empowered by Jesus Christ can burn out. But let’s take a look at what this looks like. Growing Your Seed, Finding the Vine So we have established finding the Vine, right? But we all need the appropriate foundation. And that is largely missing in our growth. But early in our growth, the Babe Phase, way we get to know God. And we have been coming to this for a while, but I want to talk about the Parable of the Sower. The Parable of the Sower is really interesting because the sower sows the seeds, but aren’t we the seeds? Aren’t we the ones that have various environments, only some of which produce real spiritual growth? Everybody loves a good Word; it’s uplifting and it makes us feel good. But what do we do with it? How well are we equipped to do with it? The reality is, we probably aren’t. Because history and overcoming our pain. But we all get a little momentum with change, but without the foundation, no lasting change will take place. But in order to produce the fruit that will produce true change, we have to take dominion over our issues by entrusting them to Jesus Christ (and by extension, the Holy Spirit), who truly heals and redeems all the things. That is the mark we have to press toward, that is who we have to seek, our prayers, our minds, our thought processes. This is how we produce the fruit from our…
- Spiritual Living , Understanding Your Faith
- November 20, 2019
- 14 views
A Short Discussion About Faith
Question: Why are you so convinced God actually exists? Answer: That’s hard to answer quickly. In short, I have seen Him work countless real, tangible miracles in my life (click to see my testimony video) as well as so many others (click for playlist of other testimonies). I pray, and He answers. He changed my life completely! I have also seen countless historians, scientists, and people of other faiths try to disprove His existence or discredit His scripture, and all the ones who are truly rational in their approach always end up finding Him instead (click for an apologetics playlist). They realize He is real and the Word is true. The evidence is beyond substantial. Question: OK, let’s say that’s all true and He is real. If God is so good, why does He allow evil to exist? Answer: Free will or be a robot – those are your choices. Which do you prefer? Free will is a gift God gave us out of love. We are meant to steward that gift with responsibility… We don’t. Question: OK I choose free will, but then if He loves us, why does He send people to hell? Answer: He doesn’t send people there. They deny Him, choosing with that free will not to have a relationship with Him. Hell is the absence of God. He is light, hell is dark. God is good, hell is evil. God is love, hell is fear and hate. God is healing and comfort, hell is pain. He is still present in this life even if you deny Him. He is not present in hell, honoring your final decision. Question: OK so maybe I want God in my life, but don’t all paths lead to God if you’re looking for Him? Answer: No. Just like a navigation system gives you directions back to your house when you’re out of town, if your destination is God, Jesus is the way, and the Holy Spirit gives you the directions. One destination – one straight and narrow path. God made it simple that way. Accept Jesus and you will be guided home to your family. No other faith claims/offers that or teaches such great love, forgiveness, and peace. Question: OK, you’ve convinced me enough to try, so what do I have to do? Answer: Cry out to Jesus with your WHOLE HEART inviting him into your life, declare him as your Lord and savior, and leave your old life at his feet. Repent and ask to be forgiven and guided. Then follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit (which you receive as a gift) and the instructions laid out in the Bible. One foot after the other. You’ll get there. Question: Wow, is it really that simple? Answer: It starts that simple, yes. You’re life won’t instantly become perfect, but you’ll have His love and grace supporting you, His truth and wisdom growing you, and His power strengthening you through any hurdle. He will slowly help you feel whole and unshakeable, and the only reason you will want to look back is so you can deeper appreciate who He has…
- Spiritual Living , Understanding Your Faith
- October 30, 2019
- 0 views
The Fragile Seed: The Perils of Developing Identity
Hello everyone! I’m back again my friends, and I want to continue our study on identity. First, let’s review. Well, we first introduced/defined identity, and then we took a session on identity in the context of spiritual growth. Well in that last session, we talked about how folks are fixated on the flower, but not giving credence to the journey of the seed. But why is this important? Simple. While you have heard the term that bruised flowers still bloom, what do broken seeds do? We have heard about us being the salt of the earth, but if the salt is no good, it is normally no good for its intended purpose. And what would you do with a trampled seed? More or less the same. Connecting to Identity So let’s talk about identity. Because whether we like it or not, before we connect to the identity with being made in God’s image and likeness first, we have to build the other elements of our identity. And this time we are going to talk about heritage. Most of the Pauline epistles have passages on how to engage the family, and I myself was jarred by 1 Timothy 5. Why? Because it says that it is the job of the family surrounding the widow to take care of the widow. For those of you who have widowed parents, you may understand this struggle. But for the rest of you, let’s take a look. Remember last week when I said “Our parents are giving us everything (or should be, but that’s a discussion for the next blog)”? Of course you do. But what does the everything look like? It should look like fathers preparing their offspring for the world, mothers nurturing and laying the foundations on how to love and express. The problem is, we live in a world where a phenomenon called generational hindsight damage exists. Identity and Generational Hindsight Damage We have heard about “generational curses”, correct? Well, you can think of generational hindsight damage as the wounding that passes down generationally from these curses. Or rather it is the familial and societal input that disrupts families. And many of us have stories on this, some more vitriolic than others. Sadly, abuse comes in many forms, and while an emotional truth is that we all want someone to love us for who we are, what that looks like specifically in each of us is different. Some parents lack the ability to love appropriately, others lack the ability to love specifically, and some still have declined to attempt to love at all. All of these can be damaging in their own way. Okay parents, I’m sure some of you are like “I’m doing my best!” And if that’s you, great, I believe in you. This “Jack in the Box secret sauce” is for you too. While many scholarly journals talk about your struggle, I’m going to provide a perspective. So, whether you have children or not, think about your experience growing up with your parents. Nobody’s is ideal; still forgive (that’s a future entry). And to some extent, our parents have not only…