Tag Archives: context

Keep life in perspective – Blog No. 45

perspective

Finding reasons to treasure your life is one of the best ways to ensure that you are capable of keeping it in perspective.  When perspective spins out – which it can do from time to time – it is fair warning that your treasury is nearing empty.  No matter who you are, an emptying treasury is not a good sign.  The way to manage a deficit – when you become aware of it – is to deal with it, for starters.  That means looking first at the problem, and then solving it.  There are times when an awareness of this nature is valuable, even though it can be painful.  It is a stark reminder of what an epic task it is to fill our treasuries in the first place.

Life was created to be lived.  It can be a beautiful experience, but you have to be open to it.  Open means open.  It does not mean 80:20.  It does not mean 50:50.  It does not mean 180°.  It means a full circle, 360°.  In other words, it requires total acceptance from you, the liver of it, the giver of it.  If you cannot find it in yourself to accept the life you have chosen for yourself to live – and a very important distinction to be made here is that YOU have all chosen your lives, i.e. you are neither random happenings and nor are your projected experiences – then you are not only betraying your pure self, you are contributing to the façade behind which a truer humankind once thrived.   The understanding of that particular point is an important lesson in accountability.

Keeping life in perspective means keeping yourself in perspective, too.  That can also be tricky, given that most people have no clue who they are or what they want to be.  However, that is not the biggest problem and can be overcome with some self-discipline and a bit of forethought, hindsight and intuition that you can trust.  If you cannot trust your own intuition, find someone whose intuition you can rely upon.  You cannot go through life being entirely mistrustful, it is important at times to take people at their word, whatever the consequences.  When you believe that a person will honour their word, they will often be more inclined to do so.  Of course you can learn about being too trusting and you can learn about extortion and racketeering, but those kinds of things you need only learn once.  Once – in that context – is enough.

 

 

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Reformation – Blog No. 30

reformation-day-serviceIt would seem that the Church has been reforming itself – at the request of the people – since before the 16th century.  People have been skeptical about the Church for a very long time.  We are now in the 21st century and it would seem that it is time again for the Church to reform itself.  I can understand that any long-standing tradition will have difficulty in accepting that a shake-up is necessary.  Too bad – it is.  The point that the Church needs to understand is that people are not the same as they were.  You cannot apply an ancient set of rules (which were perfectly feasible, perhaps, at their time) to the now generations.  Abortion is not guaranteed to send you to whichever hell you think is real.  Neither is sex.  If you abort children because you are too lazy to use contraception, that is a different story.  That is why contraception exists.  Parenting is not something everyone is good at doing, and it is not something that everyone should do.

Reformation is always for the better.  Always.  To reform old ideas is exciting – especially with the evidence the sciences work very hard to produce for this ‘seeing is believing’ world.  Modifying your ideas is not supposed to be humiliating.  Everyone believes something wholeheartedly at some point in their lives.  Grace comes into play when you admit (however grudgingly) that there are facts you didn’t have before – that you now have –  that change the way you think about things and the way you look at things.  It is said that you will only see what your mind can conceive of.  That is very true.  That is why a reformation is necessary.  It is better to procure the facts and feed them to the people so they can make informed choices.  It is possible that because of what the Church is protecting it cannot change its mind on certain core issues.  That is to be expected.  However, the Church has a huge responsibility because it has a huge following.  A lot of people devoted – totally devoted – to God are praying every day for salvation.  I hope the Church can save them all.

You can reform your life any time you need to.  With – or without – the Church.  If you should want reform, that is up to you.  Want and need are relative in this context.  A reform is no defeat.  A concession, perhaps.  It is not a failing.  It is an admission that things could be better than they are, that the way you are working isn’t working.  That admission is where you begin to see the reason you need to change your thinking.  It is fairly easy to understand that if you cannot change your thinking – things cannot get better.

 

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