Okay so you have one life, one shot, one go round, one opportunity to live your life. Your life here on earth has an expiration date and each day that passes brings you that much closer to your end date. Once you reach the final paragraph of your story only one question remains. Were you for or against yourself? Did you vote for you or did you vote with the public opinion? Did you consistently think the best of yourself despite your foibles and absurdities or did you regularly draw the wrong conclusions and come up short because of those conclusions? Who you think you are in the depths of your heart is who you are whether you choose correctly or not. Your limitations, your failures, your struggles are largely self imposed, not because of fate or God or life, but because you failed to recognize a vast array of assumptions you have been making about yourself. Are you for or against yourself?
It is incredulous to me, amidst the same weaknesses and foolishness I likewise entertain, how easy it is to think poorly of yourself. Something your dad told you a hundred years ago frightfully maintains the power to live on in your thoughts long after your father has departed. Some early failure or difficulty somehow casts a spell on your future existence forever etching in your mind what you can and cannot do. Once you were labeled insecure or shy or weak or dumb or average, persists despite a thousand pieces of evidence to the contrary! In that I submit to you that those things continue only because you allow them to continue. You have failed to challenge the false beliefs and as such drawn disastrous conclusions about who you are and worse what you can accomplish with your life.
Us humans are thinking machines, running a myriad of things through our heads every day. Much of what goes on in our minds is pure nonsense heavily influenced by the things we see and experience around us. And like sheep that have gone astray, we sort of fall in line with the story. We blindly accept our thoughts as if they contain some type of magical truth serum from which we cannot escape. It’s no wonder we think this way as we have long heard erroneous idioms preaching the heart knows all, implying truth preexists in our hearts. That could not be further from the truth! Your heart knows only what you have been feeding it and if you’ve been feeding it lies about yourself, that becomes your truth. And though it be miles from the truth, it still becomes your truth…
Your defeat and mine comes from a failure to recognize the hundred-fold falsehoods assaulting our minds from sun up to sun down. Our human conclusions are completely devoid of logic. Stealing some item once or twice does not make you a thief any more so than making a good play on the sports field makes you a premier athlete. If you could add up the time encompassing your life, you would see that your mistakes; your lapses in judgment make up a fraction of your total life. Yet, we can spend a lifetime assigning ourself future misery for errors that occurred in milliseconds by comparison. And, we are quick to breeze past our successes though they took many years to produce. Any scientist would quickly point out the illogic of those conclusions. This alone should reveal to you that there is something behind our thoughts, ever working to bring us down to some fate or shame.
Your responsibility (and mine) is to recognize and confront those wrong beliefs. In other words, when you hear the tape playing that says you will never overcome that weakness or will never have any money because all your relatives are poor, or you will never amount to much or you cannot maintain a good relationship, or what the hell ever else, challenge those erroneous assumptions! It doesn’t matter if you have been failing in that area for 50 years, it’s your job to rewrite the tape! It’s not who you are for God’s sake, it’s what you have been believing and you can always change what you believe, that is unless you’ve assigned yourself some harsh fate and refuse to stop voting against yourself!
In the final analysis, you have only one life with which to succeed or fail. You have only one heart, one mind, one shot at this thing! Make the decision; one of the best potential decisions of your life, to cease from being your own worst enemy! Stop telling yourself and rehearsing all that stupid, awful shit! Stop dredging up the “long-dead” past! Stop allowing the terrible things people have said about you, even the people you love and respect, to define you or forever entomb you in negative self-judgment. Some sad people have been carrying around some dreadful thing someone said about them 25 years ago. Back then you may have been a complete jackass. You may have been selfish and self-centered and even caused a tremendous amount of pain, but you don’t have to be that person today! You are not defined by your past, you are defined by what you think about today…
I’m certainly not casting judgment on you or implying I’ve got it all figured out. Like you, I can get caught up in mountains of self-doubt and insecurity, but I thank God for the days when I can see it all so clearly. I thank God for patiently teaching me and shining the light so brightly that I can finally recognize what I’ve been saying to myself and to stop it in that very moment. That same God will do likewise for you if you want it and trust me, you want it!
It’s not selfish or self-centered to vote for yourself! It is simply acknowledging that God gave you the same privilege to control your thinking as He gave to everyone else. Think and say things to yourself that you would say to someone you deeply love because after all, before you can love others you have to love yourself! Love yourself… Vote for yourself!
I love you…
Just some good thoughts…