The Desire to Change

No choice will determine the success of your attitude change more than desiring to change. When all else fails, desire alone can keep you heading in the right direction. The geratest motivation fo all is when we realize we can change.

Life is changing process. With all of its transitions come new opportunities for growth. What is a limiting factor yesterday may not be one today. Accept the following statement for your life: " The days ahead are filled with changes which are my challenges. I will response to these opportunities with the confidence that my life will be better because of them. With God all things are possible."

No one but you can determine what you will think and how you will act. That is good! Now, take control and begin the exciting journey of attitude improvement.

IT'S UP TO YOU

         If you think you're a winner you'll win,
        If you dare to step out you'll succeed.
        Believe in your heart, have a purpose to start.
        Aim to help fellow man in need.

        Thoughts of faith must replace every doubt
        Use words of courage and you cannot fail.
        If you stumble and fall, rise and stand ren feet tall,
        You determine the course that you sail.

        You've been given the power to see
        What it takes to be a real man.
        Let your thinking be pure, it will make you secure.
        If you want to, you know that you can.
    
       
        

No more Mr. Nice Guy

Where did the idea originate that Christianity is all about being “nice”? It is an irrational progression from Jesus, whose very arrival on Earth threatened to overturn everything: the Roman Empire, the Jewish religious powers, and most significantly, the lives of every human on earth.

Essayist Annie Dillard noted the dissonance between “American Christianity” and that of its Founder, describing contemporary Christians as “cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute.” She said. “Does anybody have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?”

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not just about comforting the afflicted; it is also about afflicting the comfortable. Being Christian is not just about being nice.

(Commentary:) Jesus was a revolutionary, who didn’t come to bring “niceness” and peace (Matthew 10:34–36), but rebirth and revolution—and He made available the full power of God so that His disciples could do the same!

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.” [Matthew 10:34-36]

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

" Commit your work to the Lord, and then your plans will succeed." Proverbs 16:3

Psychologist John Gray, who's been a marriage counselor and lecturer for the past 20 years, has summed up his findings about human relationships in a wildly popular bestseller. His book has been translated into 29 languages. Mr. Gray says that men and women in contemporary society, where most women work outside the home, face greater emotional stresses than ever before. He says women no longer spend as much time in the company of other nurturing women and men have less time to relax with other males. So, the two sexes expect more from each other. John Gray says that because men and women have very different needs, they have enormous difficulty first in understanding and then in meeting one another's needs:
"When a woman's talking about problems, what a man will do is to think that she needs solutions because, when a man's upset and he's talking about what's bothering him, he's generally looking for a solution. So, when a woman is sharing and talking about her feelings, a man mistakenly assumes that she's like him, and he starts offering her solutions. Generally solutions are not what she's looking for. And she ends up feeling like he doesn't care, he doesn't want to listen to her, her feelings aren't important to him.

"So, a woman will tend to feel like her husband is really ignoring her when he's under stress, whereas a man will feel like his partner is a bottomless pit of problems when she's under stress. He doesn't understand that she doesn't need all those problems solved in order to feel better. She just needs to talk about them and have someone listen and empathetically understand. Another woman will intuitively do this for a woman. And a man doesn't instinctively understand that, because talking about all his problems will many times just overwhelm him and cause him to feel worse."
"Women will tend to use many parts of the brain at a time, whereas a man will tend to use one part of the brain at a time. And again, that's that tendency that men have to focus. And the greater stress a man is under, the more focused he becomes. To cope with stress, a woman needs loving, nurturing relationships where she can share freely with people who care about her, whereas for a man to cope most effectively with stress, he needs to have free-time activity to do things he enjoys doing, and he needs a nurturing relationship. And this is a difference between men and women. Whereas the man will tend to extend himself, reach out to his partner, open up to his partner once he's recovered from stress, a woman goes to the relationship in order to recover from stress."

So when we start understanding how completely different we are, then we can make very small adjustments in our approach, and we see dramatic benefits. … Instead of assuming, ‘well, we can't get our needs met,’ we learn new skills. We learn how to get our needs met by studying what those differences are.