Three Ways to Conquer Despair… December 11, 2014

  Jonathots Daily Blog

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Despair comes into our lives when the pile of what we need seems to be bigger than the pile of what we have.

It’s an issue of perception.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small child in India or the Son of God, struggling in the Garden of Gethsemane, suddenly overwhelmed by the task ahead. You still want to screech, “Take this away from me!”

Despair is hard to escape. The classic remedies of prayer, counseling, positive thinking or even medication are all limited in their scope, based on faithfulness to the process.

Let’s be honest. It is very difficult to be faithful when you’re scared.

If you’ll allow me, here are three ways to set in motion a process to conquer despair by not allowing it to wash over you in the first place:

1. Don’t ignore your moods.

You are an emotional person and merely quoting scripture, uttering your mantra, finding your yoga position or trying to ignore the problem is not going to make it go away. Our moods are powerful to us because they project the symptoms of a condition existing in our soul, which requires our attention.

Stop perceiving yourself as “moody,” and realize that you are actually symptomatic. There is a tendency in our society to try to douse the emotions and limit their value. This is the worst thing we can do.

Deal with your emotions–they are telling you something important coming from deep within your soul.

2. Find a human mirror.

You will consider yourself irreparable until you realize there are other people in your same situation, and you can see your problem or apprehension in the face of another human being. This is why rehab surrounds you with addicts instead of people who have never taken drugs sharing their insights on self-control.

We all need a mirror.

I can’t change my life if I’m looking at people who have never had a life-changing experience. Look in the eyes of someone who suffers from the same despair that you do and draw strength from his or her struggle.

If you surround yourself with people who appear not only to be stronger than you, but also let you know how much stronger they are, you will only deepen your anguish.

3. Find a friend to note your progress.

Yes, you will need to be honest with someone. For a moment you will have to stop trying to be Superman or Superwoman, and admit you’re Clark Kent or Diana.

You will make progress. You’ll have a tendency not to ignore it because your expectations are too high. Get someone who understands your pursuit and can tell you how many steps you’ve made from where you started.

There are those who want to make depression and despair an illness, and perhaps in a handful of souls, it is.

But most of us become trapped in a cave of misunderstanding and worry, and soon find ourselves nearly immobilized–unable to function.

At that point, if you will simply give place to your moods, find other human beings who reflect your need, and get a friend to encourage you in your steps of progress, you can actually win the day and bring despair under your control instead of allowing it to make you an inmate to its prison.

 

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Populie: It Must Be God’s Will … April 16, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog

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It needs to be popular so as to create a market. The lie is added to sustain interest past credibility.

A POPULIE.

And one of the most infamous populie is the destiny-driven notion that “it must be God’s will.”

• Politics applauds the assertion because it provides a scapegoat for failed policies.
• Religion pursues the concept, believing that a certain amount of mysticism is necessary to dazzle the faithful.
• And entertainment joins the bandwagon because it provides the sense of destiny that keeps false hope alive and also removes personal responsibility.

But on this Easter week, it is very clear to me that God, who created humans and placed them in a Garden where free will was intact, also found His son, Jesus, in a Garden, expressing his own free will.

 “Let this cup pass from me.”

In other words, “I don’t want to die.”

I think we misunderstand his closing thought: “Nevertheless, not my will but Yours be done.”

You might think that Jesus was submitting to a master plan of crucifixion for salvation. But actually, he was referring to the truth that God’s will is always to give human beings their free will. And at that point in history, the will of the religious elite was to kill Jesus of Nazareth.

Understanding that we are mere mortals contemplating the intellect of the heavens, I will freely admit to you that it is possible for an all-knowing God to have insights and leanings beyond my comprehension. But the opinion that a script has been written for everyone’s life, and we are merely showing up to hit the marks is absolutely ridiculous.

The facts are, God’s will seems to be accomplished more often when people give a damn about each other, and His alleged will seems more clouded and elusive during seasons of self-centered insanity.

God has a way. It is expressed in Nature.

God has grace. It is allotted to the humble.

But the will of Earth is determined in the actions of its inhabitants.

We become more sane when we realize that our sanity is essential.

Politics breeds false promises. Religion begets unnatural hope. And entertainment teases us into believing in happy endings, achieved without happy beginnings.

Let’s stop blaming God. Matter of fact, let’s stop blaming anyone and realize that the earth has a simple mantra:

What you sow you will reap.

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All Wrapped Up… December 28, 2013

Jonathots Daily Blog

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The gospel works.

That’s why we call it “good news.”

On the other hand, our culture is not nearly as efficient. It is often a cult of cop-out convenience.

I don’t wish to become brash or harsh, but I do want to say that there is an ongoing danger of people wrapping the culture of our country in the pretty paper of the Bible, tying it up with the bow of “God and country.”

Let’s make some distinctions:

1. The gospel teaches “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Our culture, on the other hand, promotes the idea, “do unto yourself while including others.”

2. The gospel teaches that “NoOne is better than anyone else.” Meanwhile, back at our culture, it is promoted that we are all unique, and therefore different.

3. The gospel: “give and it will be given unto you.” The culture: “get what you can and give to others as you can.”

4. “Don’t judge others.” There’s the gospel. In the culture, we preach, “Don’t allow yourself to be judge.”

5. Continuing on with the gospel: “to he who is given much, much is expected.” We have a three-word cultural mantra: “cut yourself slack.”

6. And finally, the gospel teaches that “whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.” Yet the popular philosophy in our culture is, “After we reap, we will get around to sowing” with a sidebar of, “It’s not my fault.”

So in an attempt to hold people in a church, we create a surrogate–impregnating faith with our culture.

• Our sermons are laced with grace, absent any responsibility or guilt.
• We teach that God has “a wonderful plan for our lives” in order to stay hip with all the fantasy and Hobbit movies.
• We insist that “God will supply all our need” without warning people that He does expect us to show up and be involved.
• We pretend we can love the sinner and still hate the sin.
• We literally screech that God’s salvation and grace is free to all, leaving us with believers who are bound to a culture, habits and lifestyles that are not fulfilling.

I don’t see anything wrong with wrapping the gospel up in what is culturally pleasing. You can use all the technology, all the music stylings and all available data to sparkle the message in a contemporary way. But when you start preaching the culture in the name of the gospel, you are flirting with disaster.

So how do you know when you’re in the presence of the gospel?

You’ll hear a message that teaches us to believe in God … while taking personal responsibility for your hunk of the kingdom.

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We Are Not Malala… October 13, 2013

Jonathots Daily Blog

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Adequately enraged by the story of a fifteen-year-old Pakistani girl who is shot in the head by a religious zealot on a school bus just one year ago, the American public has, this week, welcomed the brave lass into our hearts while simultaneously expressing disdain and indignation for the treachery. People all over the globe have begun to respond, uttering the mantra, “I am Malala.”

It’s one of the things we do best in this country–put a spotlight on injustice.

Of course, unless it is our own.

Do I think it’s possible for a young girl in this country to be shot in the head by a fanatic simply because she’s pursuing education and trying to gain some footing in her generation? Probably not.

But we do fail to give equal pay to women for equal work. In so doing, we create a backlog of single mothers who struggle to maintain solvency with their children, who are often cruelly abandoned by the men who had the testosterone to father but no will to parent.

We also willingly foster and fund an ongoing gender bashing via our movies, television shows and comedians, who preach the implausibility for the male and female of our species to get along in any way, shape or form. May I ask who, generally speaking, receives the major amount of blame for this feud? Is it not the female?

Hundreds and thousands of churches in this country refuse to allow a woman to speak in the pulpit–to preach a sermon about the goodness and mercy of God, who by the way, is no respecter of persons.

We have taken the nastiness of pornography, which used to be relegated to small shops on the side of the road, only open for a counterculture which indulged in such activity, and now have turned it into art–acceptable behavior for everyone, even though it is used to abuse women and place them in a painful, subordinate position.

In the course of one week of prime time television, nearly a hundred women are beat, abused, raped, murdered and dismembered, as the plot for detective shows or any program that wants to sensationalize cruelty to the daughters of Eve.

Yet we will pause in the midst of this ongoing revenue of insanity to posture ourselves as a civilized culture that would never think of shooting a teenage girl in the head because she was on her way to school.

Again, perhaps not.

But there are many other ways to mutilate the spirit of a human being other than creasing the brain with a bullet.

The only way we can become Malala is if we “take the log out of our own eye” on this issue of gender equality, and set an example for the world of how human beings are meant to be treated, no matter what their sexuality.

For I do not know the difference between gunning down a young girl and raping her spirit by using rap music to call her a bitch, a whore and then turning around and refusing to allow her the chance to stand toe-to-toe with her brothers.

No one is perfect on this issue. Each one of us has grown up with bias and prejudice, but because I love my country, I would ask for us to do less chest-thumping of superiority, and more gazing into the mirror, to find our soul on an issue that plagues the world.

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The Presence of Absence… August 23, 2013

Jonathots Daily Blog

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I am annoyed with the void.

• “I don’t believe”
• “I don’t care”
• “I don’t forgive”
• “I don’t change”
• “I don’t take crap”

I hear these statements screamed–a sociological rattletrap which is puttering down the highway towards a conversion to nothingness.

In the pursuit of personal freedom and individuality, we are completely abandoning the commonality and joy of being part of the human tribe.

It is the presence of absence.

It is the extolling of a vacuum, portraying that we are intelligent by having stumbled upon this emptiness.

God seems to be gone. Compassion is optional. Mercy is conditional–usually limited to those of our own household. Repentance is a joke because it requires that we consider our own lacking. And humility sucks–especially when we can blare our own horns to scare away the critics.

What I want to ask, very simply, is: do you really WANT to live in a world that is Godless, lacks compassion, is unmerciful, never-changing and arrogant?

I understand there are flaws in every system existing that is man-infested. But at least in the realm of spirituality, we will allow weakness to wheel its way through the front door of the sanctuary and sit in our midst without demanding that the person involved completely conform to some sort of mantra created by the intellectual elite.

I am tired of watching television or movies and being told that life sucks.

There you go. I should put that on a bumper sticker and slap it on the back of my van.

• I am frustrated up to my gills with the ocean of ideas that look on the dark side of life, contending that we’re being innovative.
• I don’t want True Blood. Matter of fact, I don’t want any blood.
• I don’t want Breaking Bad. I would like to hear about people who have the guts to do something good in the midst of insanity.
• I don’t want to hear about a Boardwalk Empire, where murder was the way to advance commerce instead of coming up with innovation and letting it play out.

I am weary of ill-doing.

Call it out–don’t critique society around you because you think it would make Jesus cry. Jesus is pretty resilient. But he does demand that we keep our hope for life instead of giving up and insisting that absence is our presence.

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Two Busy People… March 5, 2013

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On Mondays, I stop being Batman.

Well, actually, I’m never Batman, but I do use Monday mornings to leave my cave, buy a box of cereal and wash out my super-underwear. I guess what I become is “Bitman“–a bit of this and a bit of that.

Yesterday was no exception. Well, there was ONE unique aspect to it. We were running just a little bit later than usual and had a deadline of 11:30 A. M. for Janet to do a radio interview. So perhaps there was a bit more “hurry” in our steps.

We had finished all of our activities and were heading back to our lodging, deeply engrossed in conversation, feeling pretty good about our progress and enjoying a sunshine-filled day in Houston, Texas. Cruising through a green light at about forty miles per hour, I suddenly viewed a pickup truck, making a right turn on red, completely and totally oblivious to my presence.

Even though it all happened in a split second, I could see inside his cab and realize that he was turned to his right, involved in an animated conversation with a woman next to him. I had no time to think–no time to slam on the brakes. I had to rely completely on reflexes.

But the problem is, reflexes are often hampered by exhaustion, exasperation or especially, the sense of being busy or in a hurry. I took a quick peek in my left mirror and saw that God had granted me a free lane. I swerved into it, barely missing the truck and scooting by him in a breath of time–on down the road.

I do not know if he ever saw me. He obviously was in a hurry and had forgotten to take note of oncoming traffic.He was seconds from being plowed into by a three-ton black van. The situation was out of his control, and his life and vehicle, for that moment, were placed in my hands.

I didn’t honk at him. I didn’t shake my fist. I didn’t stop and ask him why he was so careless. I rolled on.

I was so grateful that I was not on my way to a hospital and thankful that I did not have to call insurance agent and talk about repairs. Mostly, I was glad that God has granted me the serenity and teeny-weeny bit of wisdom to know three important things:

1. Find out what you can do and relax in it. I don’t know why people worry. You can’t do more than you can do anyway, can you?

2. While you’re doing it, stay focused on what you’re doing. Multi-tasking is a great way to plan your own defeat.

3. If you’ve got an extra moment, watch out for the other guy. Maybe he hasn’t learned the first two points. Maybe he deserves a break. Maybe next time … it’ll be you.

So in this world where we all think we’re so busy, let us temporarily escape the mantra of reciting our crowded schedule and remember these three points. It’s so much more relieving.
Actually, it’s a great way to remain accident-free.

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