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Loving Yourself: Are You A Caterpillar Or A Butterfly?

March 29, 2011 By 1 Comment

By Angie Lewis -

How is your relationship with yourself? Do you have a relationship with you? I encourage you to ponder into the deep side of you and meditate upon the mysteries of who you are, or better yet, of whom you can become. I firmly believe that before we can have significant and lasting relationships with others, we need to understand the person we are now and the person we can become.

I urge you to break free from your inhibitions and ask yourself, “Who am I?” “What is my purpose in life?” Answer with complete truth and honesty. Then live your life off of that foundation. Base your life upon who you are. Break free from your doubts and fears and be happy loving who you are. Once you love who you are, you will be totally free to love others.

I believe our whole purpose on this earth is to love others with complete and true love. We certainly cannot love properly if we are hiding inside our insecurities and not really loving ourselves. Hiding behind a sea of emotions or a certain weakness will keep us from growing into the person we were meant to be. Being afraid to love others because of being hurt in the past also keeps us from trusting others enough to love.

The first step in growing out from self is to understand what your purpose, goals, ideas, and dreams in life are. Believe it or not, some folks aren’t sure what their purpose and goals in life are and live in a depressed state of aimless wondering and disillusionment. But it doesn’t have to be like that!

The focus here is to grow out from self by knowing first, who we are, and then secondly working towards the substance of who we are. Who are you? What are you? Where are you going? Why are you going? Find it, seek it, acknowledge it, know it, and go after it with gusto!

It’s like a caterpillar that eventually metamorphosis (grows) into a beautiful butterfly. All of God’s creation has the ability to become beautiful butterflies. But not all of God’s creation will become a beautiful butterfly. Why is that? A caterpillar doesn’t allow himself to be free from self. Whether it is through a weakness or fear, a caterpillar must break free from what is holding him back by realizing he can become a butterfly.

A butterfly is free from the restraints of self. A butterfly has grown out from self and now seeks to love others with all the love he has while a caterpillar is still seeking to be loved by others. Unfortunately, many caterpillars do not know they have the ability to become butterflies and so remain in their cocoon until they die off.

I encourage you to come out of your cocoon and become the butterfly you were meant to become. Learn to know who you are by having a relationship with yourself by growing out from any negativities wedged within your mental and spiritual capacities.

Low self worth, fear, mistrust, insecurities, sin, and unbelief will keep you from discovering the natural and true person you really are. But when you have enough belief in God then you know He will keep you safe from those feelings that plague you or that would keep you from growing into the butterfly you were meant to be.

The fearful and insecure person is the one who hides behind negative emotions and is enveloped within a particular weakness in their life. Unbelief is a weakness. Unbelief in the Creator is the biggest and most damaging weakness a person can carry upon their shoulders.

For fifteen years I lived in my weakness of unbelief, which prompted my drinking, which fueled my addiction to alcohol. After becoming sober, I lived three more years basking in negative emotions. During those years, I didn’t know how to have a relationship with myself because my relationship was with the bottle. I was rebellious to my marriage and God.

My low self-esteem kept me living in a cocoon bound by a web of deceit that kept me from growing into the beautiful butterfly I was meant to become. I was afraid to grow out from self and get to know God. I encourage you to get to know who you are, because that is what God wants for you. Come out of hiding all you caterpillars in become free butterflies!

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 2 Corinthians 5:17

~~~

Angie Lewis is the author of several marriage books and E-books. Journey on the Roads Less Traveled is a book about love, life, addiction and marriage. Love The Man You Married is an informative and biblically centered book tackling such issues as adultery and learning to completely forgive your spouse.

For more information on these books, visit Angie’s marriage ministry at http://www.heavenministries.com

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Prayer and Health Merge: The Best Medicine

October 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

By Chris Pellow -

A health Care revolution is under way-a dynamic change in the way individuals vision the recovering of the body. Today, health-care methods that were once ridiculed, thought to be inconsequential, fringe, strange, as well as cultish not merely are becoming embraced by the general public but in addition are being merged as regular method in the majority of health care institutions.

Consider prayer: an determined one third of men and women use prayer, additionally to traditional health care and harmonizing and alternative therapies, for wellness issues, in accordance to an article in the April 26, 2002, issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. A unique mission at Duke identified as MANTRA, headed by cardiologist Dr. Mitchell Krucoff and nurse professional Susan Crater, published findings that demonstrated heart patients who obtained prayer have 50% to 100% less adverse effects compared to those patients not prayed for.

Research published in the October 25, 1999, documentation with the exact same journal assessed the widespread use of prayer and its usage to health issues. Of the 2,055 men and women ages eighteen and older involved in the study

35% used prayer for health concerns.

75% used prayer as a way to seek recovery from a health condition.

22% directed their prayer for specific medical conditions.

69% of those praying for particular medical conditions asserted they enormously benefited from the use of prayer.

Heart patients whom others prayed for, but who were not mindful of becoming the target of prayers, had an 11 percent decrease in medical problems or the requirement for surgery or prescription medication while in the hospital, according to researchers. The authors examined the medical charts of nearly one thousand cardiovascular patients, following their health track records between hospital admission and release and noted. Today we are surprised by the distant results of prayer as Newton’s critics were by the distant outcomes of gravity. However, In the same way that the debate over gravity steadily diminished, the debate encircling intercessory prayer may also disappear with time, although our ineptitude about the mechanism associated may continue. The truth will remain, in lamp-lit of all present-day scientific and medical exploration, that prayer definitely works. If there ever was a drug to exhibit the identical amount of results as prayer, it would be the medication of the centuries.

Dr. Chris Pellow invites you to http://www.doctorpellow.com for more articles, reviews, and feedback. Just by visiting our site we are giving away a limited number of our eBook “Secret To Healing Virtually All Diseases.” I appreciate the time you took out of your busy schedule sharing a piece of your life with me. God Bless, Peace, and Health to you all.

Regards
Dr. Chris Pellow

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Leadership – The True Height of a Leader

August 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

By Mark Bowser

Abraham Lincoln was an exceptionally tall man. He stood an impressive six feet, four inches tall. That is tall even for our day, but in his era, he must have seemed like a giant. He then would wear a tall top hat made of silk. When he had it on, he stood close to seven feet tall from toe to top hat.

President Lincoln loved to stand back to back with people to measure height. One day, President Lincoln stopped at Aquia Creek, Virginia in order to review some of his troops. Almost immediately the President’s attention gravitated towards a very tall young man. This young Pennsylvania seventeen year old seemed to tower over his comrades.

The President got the young man’s attention. Mahlon Shaaber stepped forward. When the young man reached Lincoln, it is believed that the President said, “Turn around, young fellow and put your back against mine while I take off my hat.” Almost immediately, the President knew he had been bested. Shaaber was much taller than the President. This lanky young man hovered over Lincoln by two and half inches.

But what does height really mean to a leader? How does it impact our leadership lives? Well, I believe that the true height of a leader is not in how much we tower above the ground, but in how high our integrity towers over immorality. In Lincoln’s case he seemed to tower in physical height, as well as integrity height.

One time, an over night White House guest heard great groans and moans coming from another room. The guest quietly slipped out of bed to investigate the mysterious sounds. What was discovered comforted the guest’s heart and mind. The noise was the President. The guest saw Lincoln prostrate on the floor pleading to Almighty God for His help in this national crisis, the Civil War. The guest was comforted because he knew the country was in good hands because the height of its president was flat against the floor. A height that looked straight up to God. That is the height of integrity. My friends, you and I need to live lives that will tower over life’s challenges. Let us be giants of integrity.

I would now like to invite you to receive my seminar “The Keys to Empowered Leadership” on MP3 download FREE when you sign up for our Free Take Action Sales Newsletter. You can register at [http://www.takeactionsales.com]Sales Training. From Mark Bowser of http://www.MarkBowser.com Thanks for reading today.

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Filed Under: Health, Intellectual Health, Leadership Tagged With: , ,