Archive for My Life

Playing The Victim

// May 4th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // My Life, My Thoughts

Lets face it… all of us are whiners sometimes… everybody is to some extent given some grace when they complain about how things are going for them… in fact, its better to be honest about your feelings that to pretend that everything is going fine. I spent years whining about my divorce and how bad it was… and how much I was paying for it… call it the stages of grief or whatever you want… at some point everyone gets tired of you playing the victim. There is some kind of dysfunctional human mechanism that feeds on attention and sympathy and it can really sabotage our lives! Constantly playing the victim wears on friendships and sometimes exhausts them completely… There has to be some point when you recognize the problem for what it is… Your perspective is skewed! If your life is constantly a train-wreck then you should be taking a look at what is going on.

If you are in debt up to your eyeballs then get drastic… get rid of credit cars…get a much smaller house… or sell a car… get rid of your “stuff” live more simply… Last Christmas I can’t count how many people were complaining about how they couldn’t afford Christmas gifts… but almost without exception each of them bought a 40″ or larger flat panel TV… sorry but I do not understand the logic there! No wonder you are miserable!

I see so many people walking around complaining about health problems… yet the single solitary thing that they should do they simply ignore…. eating unhealthy, living lives filled with stress… drinking alcohol… popping prescription drugs like candy…smoking…

One simple word…. QUIT! just quit quit quit! I am sorry but it is just that easy… if you are fat because you over eat… quit! your life will be better for it… if your job is stressful figure out a way to do something different! God gave us free will for a reason… we can choose to make a difference in our lives…

and if you think I should practice what I preach… here is what I have done in the last few years..

  • I was suffering from anxiety attacks and decided to quit a stressful job and found a new one… and accepted a cut in pay and benefits including a company vehicle to reduce my stress
  • I realized that I was very unhealthy and began eating healthier and smaller portions… consequently I lost 60 lbs, and several health problems completely went away!
  • I realized that being in debt was making me miserable and frustrated so we decided to rent the cheapest apartment we could find so that we could get out of debt.  and we are only 4000 away from being debt free (waiting on the income tax check)
  • I realized many things that I never had time to do was because I was addicted to video games … so I sold my Xbox 360 and now I spend  lots more time with my family
  • I realized that my relationship with my wife had become strained so I decided to be more responsible and helpful… things are much more on track now.

The point I am trying to make is that the sum total of your life is affected by the actions  you take on a daily basis… the bible says… “do not be deceived, God is not mocked whatever a man sows that he shall reap” Gal 6:7   if you continue to wallow in self pity you will end up years from now wondering where your friends have gone… and why you feel so abandoned…when the reality is that you abandoned yourself a long time ago…  Take hold of your life and live it to the fullest… Make bold and righteous choices… live radically and do something about your problems… exhaust all options,  find your joy in simplicity and wholesome-ness  step away from the world that you have created for yourself and ask yourself… what are these things adding to my life…if the answer is nothing… well then you know what to do… whatever you decide… stop playing the victim…

Tags: debt, depression, Faith, life, stress, struggle, victim mentality

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Pipeline

// May 1st, 2010 // 4 Comments » // My Life

My dad has always been a bit eccentric in my opinion…I love him to death but sometimes I just had to cock my head sideways, wondering exactly where he was coming from. One of the things he did pretty often (if not every night) was step out side and walk on his “pipeline”. We actually lived right beside a natural gas pipeline and the clearing ran right along the side of our property, which happened to make a great driveway…. a 300 foot long driveway! but I digress… Dad would quietly step outside just about the time the evening chatter had grown to a dull roar. Sometimes one of us would notice and look out the window to see him… just standing… or walking slowly… kicking rocks… or kneeling looking down next to a clump of grass. We might watch him for a while… and wonder what he was doing… He said he talked to God out on the pipeline… I often wondered if Dad thought maybe if he “walked with God” out on the pipeline enough God would just translate him like he did Enoch in the bible… Sometimes we walked with him on his pipeline… we would chatter and talk… and play… and he would walk… and point out little things… like bugs busy with their little lives… As I got older I had some walks on the pipeline with him… and a few times I tried by myself… when he had a really bad spell of depression and would hardly come out of his room. For some reason the pipeline just wasn’t the same experience for me that it was for Dad… I shrugged it off as part of his “eccentric” nature.

This evening I went to the new home we bought to work on some plumbing repairs that I wanted to have done before we moved in… as I finished up, I closed the house and walked outside… It was about 12:00 and would have been pretty dark if not for the huge full moon glowing over the freshly plowed fields behind my house. I stepped out to the driveway… suddenly noticing the noise of the city far in the distance… like an annoying mosquito hovering around one ear. I walked out to the south side of my property… Ironically enough a long driveway runs along the side of my property for access to the fields behind it. I took a few steps as I breathed in the cool night air… gazing at the huge full moon sprinkling silver over the tops of the fields. The sky felt like it wanted to just swallow me up it looked so big… the stars seemed close enough to touch… I ambled along just drinking in the quiet… and suddenly I was talking… to God… and walking… and laughing… and crying… wondering how I could be walking so closely in my father’s footsteps… even being hundreds of miles away… I was filled with amazement that all along I had been thinking I was buying a house with a yard and great trees and all that good stuff… when all I was really doing… was finally buying… my very own… Pipeline.

Tags: Family, home, life

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Home

// April 27th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // My Life

I have rented for longer than I can remember… and honestly I didn’t mind it much.. I liked the lack of responsibility and no yard work… to me renting just made sense in some odd way. As I have gotten older though a weird need to kinda “stick” somewhere started taking hold and we started looking for a house… we looked for months… found a lot of nice stuff way out of our price range but nothing that fit us… I wanted something just outside town on an acre or two and a single story ranch with an open floor plan. finally after months of looking we found the perfect place… we loved it… we tried to get a loan… and our credit was just not good enough…the last vestiges of my messy divorce was still on the records. we went back to the perfect little house and looked at it… how could this not be it? Suddenly I was struck with the need to talk to God about it… “God… we love this property… this house… these trees…it fits us… we really want this house… can you please save it for us until we can get things fixed? Amen.

We started working hard to rebuild our credit… cleaning up things with the credit bureaus is a tough job… but we just stuck to it… paid off a lot of debt… found some debt we didn’t know we had… paid it off too! a year and a half later we realized we really needed to be more aggressive and we rented the cheapest crappiest apartment we could fine…we have been shoved into this thing for over 6 long winter months…

Last week we closed on our first home… a place just outside town, on an acre, single level ranch, with an open floor plan. As we stepped out onto the grass in front of our new home… I stopped… standing right where I prayed 2 years ago… “God… you are awesome… and forever faithful, thank you for saving this home for us… and may we always share it with others so that they can see your provision in their lives also… Amen.

Suddenly… in a little town in Kansas…we were finally Home.

Tags: Family, home

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