Month: September 2016

Life Doesn’t Happen to You, You Happen to Life…

On By Papa TonyIn Thought2 Comments

arrow-out-of-a-circle-outline-pointing-to-right-direction_318-37548Have you ever found yourself in a rut? You didn’t see it coming. You didn’t perceive the steps along the way. All you really know is that life isn’t working for you anymore. Or maybe you suffered through some negative event and now you can’t seem to snap out of it. In fact, things keep getting worse and worse. It’s like you’re stuck in some type of negativity spin cycle with each day offering another reason for you to give up all hope. Maybe, in order to cope with it, you’ve been self-medicating for so long that you don’t even know what unmedicated feels like anymore. And in your despair you ask God, what the hell is going on? Why is my life not happening the way I thought it would? Well, there’s an answer to that question you may have never considered…

The vast majority of people are convinced that life just happens to them and that they are powerless to change it. They feel as if there’s some big cosmic plan they’re unaware of, which doles out in random fashion, good things and bad things at whim. In their troubles, they search their souls looking for causes inside themselves for the hardships they’re experiencing. In high times, they call it luck and good fortune.

NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH! When we allow the circumstances of the world to move us to a negative space, we unknowingly begin to expect negative results. Tragedies, hardships, difficulties, or unresolved frustrations work first in our minds and then in our hearts to lower or even reverse our expectations for our lives. They jolt us or imperceptibly drag us into a doubtful position whereby we begin to question our views of how life truly works. They open the doors and our hearts to possibilities for difficulty we never contemplated before. And, each day honors our beliefs by presenting more information to corroborate those beliefs. Once the cycle starts, it’s very hard to stop.

God, the author and designer of life, did not devise His creation by whim. He ordered it beautifully with breathtaking precision, replete with all conceivable love and goodness. He made his man, his precious man, to have full access to His instruction book on life! He’s not a capricious God hidden away in the expanse doling out blessings and punishments by the same hand. He is only good, always, in every circumstance, every condition and all the time. He gave man complete control over his life by that which he (the man) chooses to believe. Absent the truth of God’s Word, man is subject to the circumstances of life, never conceiving that he, the man, choosing and thus believing, is subconsciously working to bring about the circumstances he is experiencing. Your life, be it blessed or frightful, is the cumulative product of your own thoughts. When you find yourself in a rut, though difficult to get out of, the rut is the consequence of long persistence in negative thoughts unchecked. The shocks and jolts of unexpected tragedy, though not part of your own responsibility, serve not only to severely or mortally wound the sufferer, but also all those associated with that person. Difficulties and hardships, never from God no matter how nobly explained, are a temptation; tempting you to come to the dark side and stay awhile. And, the longer you remain in the darkness, the worse your life becomes.

In this way, your life isn’t happening to you, you are happening to it! You’re not a victim in a grand drama playing a part you never chose. You are the lead in a play that you are writing. For this reason, you can change your character’s role whenever and however you see fit. I don’t care who you are; what you’ve done or what circumstance you find yourself in, arduous and severe or simply irritating and annoying, God has already heard your prayer! He will help you when and only when you begin to change your mind. There’s no negative circumstance you cannot escape, no situation that cannot be resolved or healed if you will change your mind. Dwelling on the darkness will not bring forth the light. The light comes as quickly as you turn on the switch! That is your one and only great power in this life; the power to choose what you will and will not believe.

Nothing about your life is happenstance. You are where you are that you may learn and that you may grow. The negatives and hardships you are experiencing are not the way it is. It’s not just life. Instead it’s life infected by darkness and like any virus, can be eradicated if the conditions are right. This isn’t a simplistic view of life, it’s the only true view of life. Truth is always simple. It’s error that’s complicated.

So how can you finally get out of the ruts in life? How can you escape from difficult and trying circumstances? How can you overcome and prevail against any challenge that comes your way? How can you live and realize your life’s dreams and endless possibilities? How can you finally become the man or woman you always thought you could be? Change your mind! Change your thoughts from darkness to light. Stop confessing the negatives and confess the positives instead. Stop looking for and living in the trouble and walk out into the clear light of God’s heavenly pastures where you will find your rest. This life is too big and too fraught with difficulties for you to go it alone. Just because something looks true and sounds true and has every indicator that it is true, doesn’t make it true. What’s true is what God says is true and you can bet your entire life on that!

Come out and join me in the sunshine where God has first place and see for yourself if your life isn’t revolutionized in dramatic and delightful ways! Everything you ever wanted in your life resides in the light where God is! Won’t you come and meet me there?

Just some good thoughts…

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Getting Outside of your Own Head…

On By Papa TonyIn ThoughtLeave a comment

get-out-of-your-head-540Your life was meant to be lived, not analyzed. The best parts of your earthly sojourn lie beyond your capability to find them out. Love and God (which are synonymous), compassion, tenderness, kindness, peace, and joy all are experienced in your heart, not just inside your head.  Inside your head rests that great mechanism for analysis, which, if left to its own devices, will wear your ass out! So, at certain times, it is necessary to get outside of your own head…

The sphere we occupy has become a frenetic jumble of information doled out to an increasingly thirsty world obsessed with more and more gulps of information. We’ve lost the ability to just sit with ourselves absent electronic entertainment. We’re like the perpetual flicker of the television image, flashing from thing to thing in an ultra-passive state of inactivity! We wonder why we can’t sleep at night or sit for an hour with absolutely nothing to do. It’s a tuberculosis of thought minus the cough. We’re troubled and endeavor to think ourselves out of our troubles with a troubled and overloaded mind. It never dawns on us that the solution to our problem is found in our revery; in our quiet moments of clear thought. Yet onward we march down a road with a thousand forks, each promising a better existence; a nicer life.

It’s no wonder that a chance return to nature softens our harried outlook and delivers rest to our weary souls. In God’s creation we are as we were meant to be. We stand naked before the expanse of vegetation appearing random yet carefully placed. The innumerable trees ask for nothing but for our thoughtful observation. The majestic mountains with their symmetrical yet asymmetrical peaks or the shimmering sun lowering itself onto the gray, bubbly ocean speak to us in words we cannot form. They abhor our analysis and seek only to be enjoyed. All of life follows this sublime, experiential effect.

There is, of course, a time for our analytical thought, but that time has an end point. Otherwise we remain at work; a different work without break or lunch or shift’s end. We imagine we are accomplishing so much, but like the machine that runs around the clock, we finally seize and die. Our tasks have no conclusion, our thoughts never rest. Yet it is in rest and inactivity that we recharge. When we recognize, at last, that there is nothing we so urgently have to do, that we are finally free to accomplish.

It’s by no mistake that we feel the ever pressing urge to recognize the danger that may come our way, but our minds are too hurried to discern the real signs. We run from this and hide from that, never seeing what we were meant to see, but instead seeing everything else. We have an ideal that we fantasize, yet cannot reach it amidst the clamor! We want to love and be loved but have no time for it. We seek for peace but look for it in gigabytes of electronic mumbo-jumbo. We promise ourselves a rest after the yard is done, the meat is cooked, the house is cleaned and the final tasks have been wrapped up. Yet, to our dismay there is always another task, another job, another beckon for our immediate, rapt attention.

The most profound example is found in our children, who are really younger forms of ourselves before the information got to us. They have not yet lost the ability to turn on and off their thoughts in the spur of the moment. They can be engrossed in the Xbox one moment and lost in the fun of the playground the next. They are sure of what pleases them and pursue it wholeheartedly without worry or fear of some pending doom in the future. They don’t seek to arduously analyze their trouble, they simply ask for help. They haven’t yet falsely assumed that it is their lot in life to know everything that is going on at every particular moment. They simply exist with a joyful, exuberant confidence that they are always going to be okay. They have no factual basis for their belief, they choose rather simply to believe.

When you find yourself trapped in your own head, buzzing about from thought to thought, give whatever is eating away at you to God. Toss it away from yourself like you do when you accidentally discover you’ve grabbed something you’re not supposed to touch. The grasshopper that lights on your arm with his prickly feet and his foreboding tobacco filled tongue, must not be run through your high-powered processor, but clutched and discarded with all vigor! (smile) Neither would you spend an hour pondering why he chose to land on you. You simply dismiss the thought and return him to his natural habitat. You, being solely responsible for you, must also always seek to be returned to your rightful habitat.

Get outside of the confines of your own woefully limited thinking and look up or outside of yourself. Stop dwelling and rehearsing and ruminating and move on. How many of us have laid paralyzed in the morning, unable to sleep while being haunted by the possible disasters of the day, after finally deciding to get up, are immediately encouraged and blessed by the sanity of real experience? We look back upon our waking fits with a sort of embarrassment and shame. Getting up simply got us out of our own heads and worries and fears. So get up from the frightful, illogical horrors of your own mind and live. Get out there and see what is all around you. Know that wherever you are, God is there and that there’s nothing too big for Him!

The information age has certainly taken its toll on us, but it cannot overtake us, if we so choose! Make time for real things with real people in real life and escape from its electronic counterfeit. Turn off the news. Refuse the Facebook debate! Stop filling your head with predigested information and read a book instead. This life, no matter the age we live in, ever has the promise of new possibility, hand in hand with your God and mine…

Experience love and joy and peace and bliss. You can, you should!

Just some good thoughts…

Understanding God’s Perfection…

On By Papa TonyIn God, knowledge, life, love, ThoughtLeave a comment

God-Is-LoveIn order for something to be perfect, it must be absolutely and completely free from all faults and errors. The smallest amount of defect renders a thing imperfect and though the shortcomings be minute and even imperceptible, if they exist, the thing in question cannot be considered perfect. God is perfect. He has no downside, no shadow of turning and no requirement for any give and take. Thus the things of God must also be perfect, free from any admixture, free from darkness, and free from any heartache and pain. We speak of a perfect day, but what we refer to is a day that went well, though imperfect in many respects. Being able to begin to comprehend God’s perfection, has the power to put us in touch with the right to every wrong; the elixir to any sickness; the solution to each and every problem.

There are more opinions concerning who God is than there are grains of sand on the seashore; than there are stars in the sky. Every group reports to know Him and are more than willing to share His will with you. Yet often that so-called will is fraught with illogic and puzzles pieces that can never fit. Truth cannot be one thing today and another thing tomorrow! God does not change His truth for the times or the circumstances. Truth is truth in every day. You can find it in a tulip and in a sparrow. It exists in and permeates the creation. It is complex, yet breathtakingly simple. It speaks to your heart in a poem. It soothes your soul in a song. It jolts and awakens your mind by both friends and your enemies. It has to, it must, because it is perfection. When you hear it, you already know it is true, though you don’t know why you know it’s true. It escapes your mind yet pre-exists in your heart.

Naturally, the whole system of God is also perfect. There is no whim, no injustice, no wrong in any form. The truth of God must then exist without contradiction, just as light has no darkness in it at all. Love works no ill to its neighbor because it cannot work ill. There is no fear in love because fear is the antithesis of love. Thus, the system of God, if it be of God, cannot work ill, make ill, or be ill. Nor can it promote fear, make fear or be fear. If fear exists, like it’s counterpart darkness, then it must be absence of truth or light in some capacity. Trying to reconcile perfection with imperfection is impossible. Yet how many good men declare God’s abounding love and with the same breath dole out His threatenings on unsuspecting mankind? Prayer to God for healing of a sickness He gave you is like begging the slave owner to stop whipping you. The question is rather, why the hell is he whipping me? What greater purpose could be found in such an act? An unjust beating is an unjust beating and ascribing something good to it is insane. Yet, men entertain this with God in every day. Hurt is hurt and pain is pain. Calling pain good and hurt necessary might send you to the crazy house, but apparently never in the name of God.

So, you may now be wondering what it is I’m trying to say! What I’m saying is that once you begin to discern who God really is, you will axiomatically begin to love Him with all that you are. He is only good always and seeks goodness and love in all that He does. He doesn’t punish people for their bad behaviors, evil takes care of that. He does not follow you around day by day waiting for you to slip up. He is not your conscience making you feel guilty for the mistakes you have made. Sure you’ve been taught that but it just isn’t true. God says, my people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. It’s what you don’t know or what you “think” you know that has been killing you. You don’t go to God for help or when you do by chance go, you enter in sheepishly with your mind chock full of all your sins and errors. So you ask without believing and in doing so ask amiss. I don’t blame you for this because this is what you have been taught! The church did it to you. The Sunday school did it to you.

You read the Old Testament and it scares you. You see a vengeful God wreaking havoc on mankind. What you don’t realize is that in the Old Testament, the snare of evil had not yet been revealed. God never wanted all of the laws and commandments. The laws and commandments came because of the people and preserved for people a future opportunity for redemption. Jesus Christ could have never completely set you free if there wasn’t something he could set you free from. The justice of God demanded it.

At the end of the day, there is only one True God, and He encompasses all that you could ever hope for and dream of in life. He is your sunny, perfect day. He is the love in the eyes of your grandchildren. He is the healing behind your doctor. He is the Miracle Gro for your flowers. He is the spring in your step and the smile on your face. He is indescribable joy and love and peace for a suffering and downtrodden world. He is who you thought He was when you were just a child!

If you can break yourself free from all the dogma and throw off the heavy shackles of religion,  you will find Him, though He be not far from any one of us. You will discover that this life is worth the living and that there is something fantastic behind this world waiting for you to tap in… Ladies and gentlemen, God is love!

Just some good thoughts…