A good path

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It’s nature

You have accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior several years ago. You are now engaged in a personal walk of faith as you daily seek to follow Jesus and to faithfully live with God as His “servant” in the role of personal service to which He called you. Right now your role may just be to worship God and to be as good of a person as you can. You believe that you have been “born again” with a transformed heart and a redeemed spirit. You have been given the gift of the Spirit in your personal heart and mind to help you to personally obey the Spirit in His direct instructive work to enable you to glorify God through your cooperative and devoted works of worthy service. You hope that your works, as simple as they be, will please God and be rewarded by Him. When you appear before Him for His judgment of your works you hope to hear His personal remarks of “well done good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:21-22). Your role of service has been expressed on a path of personal chosen works of love for God and works of kindness and the sharing of personal resources with your church and needy members of your family and the poor residents of your community. You have conducted these works of service step-by-step on your path to righteousness in Christ and eternal life with God and the Spirit in your daily walk of faithful surrender of yourself to God and the loving care that you have given to others in their time of need.

The path upon which you are walking in your life of faithful service is a “straight and narrow” one. It seems to be cluttered with various obstacles to your easy forward movement and hills, such as new roles of service. There are many bumbs and holes, like old habits, that can hamper your progress and cause you to stumble or fall in your walk. There are many distractions near the handrails, like kites or balloons or drones with blaring message that seek to draw you off of the “straight and narrow” path, ads from worldly merchants. They offer you easier ways to achieve what your heart and mind wants from moment to moment as you move through your days. Some of these ways actually take you back into some of the pleasures and comforts that you enjoyed before you began to follow Jesus on your personal path of faith. These distractions are very prevalent and appealing. While you are walking on your “narrow and straight” path, you can often see and hear the crowd of people who are easily moving through their daily lives on the ‘broad way” of available choice comforts and pleasures and safety that the authorities of this world offer to everyone. Moment by moment and step by step you realize that this “straight and narrow” and cluttered path though the world’s jungle of personal options for your life is not like the “broad” and curving and smooth highway that many other people, including some of your relatives and friends and neighbors and associates seem to be using in their journeys. You may not always think about the basic benefits of your “straight and narrow” path over the “broad” highway in your personal struggles to keep moving forward in your daily life. You may not always realize that the foundation of your “straight and narrow” path is really the gracious love of God, your creator, and the personal sacrifice of His Son, Jesus, who paid the price for your redemption from a life of sin on a “broad” highway. You may not always realize that the guard rails on each side of your “straight and narrow” path are really the transforming and enabling power of the Spirit and the dynamic wise guidance of God’s instructive words and laws in the inspired documents of the Bible. It is these factors of a strong divine foundation and wise divine guidance that enable this “straight and narrow” path to take you through the threat of nature disasters, like a tornado or a huge brush fire or a flood or a bridge collapse or an earthquake or the death of a spouse or a divorce or a serious accident or illness or a new spiritual assignment from God or Satan’s personal daily temptations. You have no control over such matters in your life. The only control that you have when you encounter such circumstances and temptations on your “straight and narrow” path or “broad” highway is how you are going to respond to the challenge.

A challenge on your path

Imagine that as you are carefully walking on your “straight and narrow” path and come over a hill, which may be a new challenging role of service in your life, or a natural disaster or a severe personal problem. You are suddenly confronted by a missing view of a surrounding forest that has been replaced by a view of a deep rocky chasm, a dark sky, and a swaying suspended bridge of planks that you recognize as your personal path of faith service. You can see that the planks rest on two steel cables with two other steel cables serving as handrails for your safety. You notice that these two cables are bound together by other short vertical cables every four feet to securely hold the bottom supporting cables and the top safety and guiding cables together, as with the Trinity and the Bible. You now see that you could cross, step by step, the one hundred feet of suspended path above the deep chasm of rock that separates its sides and serves as the bed for the stream that flows beneath the wooden planks upon which your feet must stand as you would move forward through this challenging and unexpected episode in your journey. You can see the “broad way” to you left with a wide sturdy bridge across the chasm that you face and the crowds of friends and official care givers who have come from distant places to help the victims of these disasters survive and move through these “storms” in our lives. You may have some relatives and friends who are with you on your path, particularly when you are facing a major crisis in your life, but the walk is still yours to take. You are faced with the same challenging situation that Peter faced when he was in boat with other disciples, and they saw a figure who looked like Jesus who was walking on the waters of the Sea of Galilee. When Peter asked Jesus to prove that He was Jesus by commanding him to “come to” Him “on the water”, and Jesus said “come” (Mathew 14;28), Peter fastened his eyes and heart and mind on Jesus and took a step out of the boat and began to walk step by step on the water toward Jesus on the churning waves beneath his feet on a new path. When he took his eyes off Jesus and focused his attention on the water and the new path on the water rather than the solid ground of Jesus, he began to sink beneath the surface of the Sea and he cried out for Jesus to save him, which He did.

So, what is your next step, forward toward the end of your path across the chasm or backward toward your past? You take a deep breath and move forward to the near end of your “straight and narrow” path that is slowing swaying in a breeze that is blowing through the chasm that now lies next to the toes of your shoes. You slowly look down at the stream and then across the chasm at the other end of your suspended “straight and narrow” path. You slowly and carefully place your right foot on the first plank. You are relieved when it holds your weight. With both hands on the two steel cables that can hold you up if any of the planks fail to support your steps, you slowly and carefully place your left foot on the second plank and take another deep breath of relief as you realize that this swaying “straight and narrow” path is fully supporting your weight without you having to secure your movement with the strength of your arms. This time you don’t look down, but only ahead at the far end of your swaying “straight and narrow” path of wooden planks on two steel cables that stretch across the deep chasm beneath your feet. The attention of your eyes is on the four feet of space between the two six foot tall steel beams through which the four cables pass before they are securely anchored in the rocky edge of the chasm. But, the distracting appeals of the world’s merchants and powerful agents of the Devil are always there at the corners of your eyes and only an arm’s reach away.

Your progress on your path

So you proceed to move forward step-by-step onto the planks that are attached to the steal cables that support your path. the gracious love of God and the personal sacrifice of His Son Jesus. Your initial steps seem to be quite easy as your hands slide along the guardrails of the transforming and enabling power of the Spirit and the dynamic wise guidance of God’s instructive words and laws in the inspired documents of the Bible. Occasionally you encounter a loose plank upon which you should place your right foot. It has been affected by a bad habit that you still enjoy doing from time to time although you know that its choice in your daily activities doesn’t please God. As you repent of this sinful habit,, the Spirit forgives you and secures its plank firmly to God and to His Son so that the next time you encounter this tempting habit you can step on it without fear of stumbling or falling in your faithful walk on your “straight and narrow” path. This is part of the Spirit’s forgiving and cleansing work (see 1 John 1:9) of sanctification in the life of God’s faithful servants. So you move on step-by-step in your walk of faith across holes of sinful habits and unloving selfish choices that God allows you to navigate through His grace and enabling power until you encounter a bigger barrier to your forward progress. It is a plank that has been actually abused so many times that it is no longer in one piece. It has been split in two, and there is only half of it still loosely resting on the two steel cables that form the divine foundation for your suspended path across the chasm in your life. The split in this plank represents a persistent sinful addiction that has captured your thoughts and will for most of your daily life. You have fought against it many times, but your resolution to stop it is not very consistent. You have been able to step over the gap when the broken plank was still above solid ground, but now it was slowly swinging on two cables above the empty space of a deep chasm. So you lifted your eyes to heaven, said a quick prayer for God’s support as your firmly gripped both of the guard rails of the Spirit and the Bible in your hands and carefully placed the ball of your right foot onto the five inch piece of plank that would have to support your weight while you move your left foot to the next complete and secure plank in your path. Step-by-step your moves were successful and you were able to take two more steps to get each of your feet firmly set on two solid secure planks of faith on your path to righteousness in Christ and eternal life with God and the Spirit. The successful negotiation of this challenging move marked your eternal victory over this deadly addiction, which was probably one of sexual immorality. It is the most serious sinful addiction (see 1 Cor. 6:18 & 10:8).

So you carefully continue your walk of faith on God’s divine path to righteousness in Christ and eternal life with God and the Spirit. You are able to navigate across the various holes from former bad habits that previously attracted your attention and the persistent appeals of the world for the devotion of your heart as you keep your eyes focused on the goal posts at the end of your suspended swinging path and Jesus your personal “Lord and Savior”. Your victorious navigation over the vast hole and the broken plank of your sinful addiction was accomplished with the help of the Spirit and the guidance of the Bible as you walked step-by-step on the planks that were supported by God and His Son. Jesus gave you great confidence that your effort would not be in vain, because Jesus himself is the “founder and perfecter of” your “faith” (Hebrews 12:2) and you can “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace in time of need”, as the writer advises us in Hebrews 10:16. Although your walk of faith is not yet over at your current stage in your life, you are now confident that the “narrow and straight” path upon which God has placed you for your step-by-step journey through your life is a good path. In fact, it is the best path for a person’s physical and spiritual journey through life when compared to the ‘broad way” upon which most people in the world are making their journey.

Let’s talk about this

Which path are you consistently on in your daily journey through your life? What kind of experience are you having on the “straight and narrow” path? What draws you off of that path to the “broad way” of the world? How do you seek to trust in the Spirit and follow the guidance of the Bible in your daily personal choices? How well are you doing in getting rid of your bad habits and trusting the Spirit to power you into a more “righteous” daily life? What major spiritual crisis have you faced in your life? How did you navigate your way through it? What do you recommend to your relatives and friends and associates regarding the path that they are choosing for their daily journey through life? What is there about the “straight and narrow” path that makes it a good path for you? Let’s talk about this.

A good day

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What makes it good

If you day was free of aches and pains, and you slept well, and everyone was happy in your home, and everything went well at work, and you had no persistent worries or fears, and you had a good time with some friends, you probably had a good day. Physical comfort and personal relaxing pleasure makes a day of good experiences. It is particularly good if you are able to avoid any confrontations with any enemies or unreasonable bullies or jealous neighbors. If you were positively affected by any changing circumstances in your life, that makes for a good day. If you were frequently accepted and understood by new contacts in your life, that is a particular benefit for a day’s experience. If you were able to resist repeating your bad habits and resisting the devil’s temptations to try to impose your selfish will upon others and to control your joint experiences, you probably had a good day. If you were able to share real loving experiences with your spouse or a friend and with God, that really makes for a good day!

How to develop a good day

Since what you experience every moment of every day is determined by the choices that you make for what you choose to do and how you feel about your changing situation and the challenges that you are facing for your comfort and safety on this battlefield of conflicting forces of good and evil, you must give some personal attention to the quality of your thoughts and their practical applications in your life. This statement on this website will help you to enable you to focus your thoughts on some positive forces of living that will enable you to experience a good day quite often: http://<a href=”meditate-to-feel-good.php”>&ldquo;;Meditate to feel good&rdquo;;</a> It is well to note in this process that your thoughts are the only factors that you can control. You have no control over any other factors.

As you begin this process, it would be helpful to keep the focus of your thoughts on the positive qualities of living that are available to you. One of these factors is dependable respecting and trusting friendships with other local human beings. You won’t be able to have a good day on your own. You may be by yourself for twenty-four hours, but you should not be thinking of just yourself in these hours. Recognize that no one is perfect in this world, certainly not yourself nor any of your friends nor any professional counselors, so don’t waste time on thoughts of blame for any of the challenges that you are facing in your day. But, recognize that you are the only basic person who can live the moments of time that God gives to you. Not even God Himself who created you, nor your parents who conceived you, nor your teachers who taught you, nor your employers who paid you for your work, nor your customers who buy your products or services, nor the sweetheart that you court, not the spouse that you marry, nor the children that you conceive, nor the doctors and nurses and professional care-givers, nor your bankers, can live your life for you. It is up to you to make every moment as positively productive as it can be, and you will have a good day to remember as one of God’s many blessings.

Please note that Paul gives us all some very wise principles for generating positive thoughts moment by moment in our days in some words of guidance in Philippians 4:8-9. Check them out. The best way to live on this battlefield is to trust God for what is “good” for you every day and to protect you from what is “evil” in many of the forces that confront you every day. Love you “neighbor” as much as you “love yourself”, pray for your enemies, and forgive those who abuse you, and guard your heart and mind against the distracting tempting thoughts of the devil and his demons and agents. You can make any day a good day as you choose to do so.

Let’s talk about this

What makes a good day for you? Who is your best friend? How do you help each other in your different days? How do you change your thoughts from negative thoughts that only produce bad experiences in some of daily moments to positive thoughts that can give a good day and perhaps even change your life? Please note that your life can be eternally blessed by your momentary thoughts on a good day.

A worthy passion

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Its basic origin and nature

You were designed by God to become a unique human being who would be given the opportunity to live in a specially designed environment of personal comfort and safety in which your physical needs would be provided for you by other human beings, a male and a female, who conceived you through their strong passionate desire for the physical pleasures of sexual activity. You had no individual power to choose who these individuals would be or where they lived or how they would treat you. You spent the first few months, usually nine, in the comfort and safety of your mother’s womb where all of your personal physical needs were automatically supplied from your mother’s body through a cord that physically attached you together. The needs of your multiplying cells were fed by your mother’s blood as your body grew to produce its own blood and heart to pump it through your expanding systems of various organs that would enable you to stay alive and to continue to grow into a mature human being. When this process of your physical development had completed its normal series of functions, your mother’s body expelled your body out of her womb, or it was carefully removed from her womb by caring medical technicians You then had your first experience of living as a separate human being in a very different environment where the needs of your body were not automatically being immediately met by another human being. The first thing that you did, automatically, was to open your mouth and to cry for some air to bring oxygen into your lungs so that your cells would have the power to function as they had been designed to do to enable you to continue to live and to grow. You quickly learned that crying out loud was a good way to express your need for physical comfort that some painful sensations in your body were alerting your mind that something was not exactly functioning well, and you were no longer feeling comfortable or safe. When some other human being acted to give you what you needed and wanted, you stopped crying, relaxed, went back to sleep, or continued to explore your new environment to learn how to experience its benefits in your personal life. You soon learned how to physically move around in your environment and to express yourself in other ways than just loud cries for attentive loving care. You also learned that there was a difference between what your body needed to enable it to function well and what made you feel more satisfied and mentally happy. In your developing personality you began to express with passionate force the wants of your emotional heart, which became the driving force for your personal thoughts and willful personal choices. You also discovered that these dominate adults in your life are not always willing to give you what your passionate heart wants when you want it. That will become an ongoing experience of frustration and stress throughout you life until you learn how to manage or revise the personal passions of your heart. Although God created you in “His image” (Gen 1:27) with a free moral will to make your own personal choices in your daily life, your pure passionate heart was severely corrupted by Adam’s (your initial ancestor) decision to disobey God’s commandment to refrain from eating the “fruit” of the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil” or he and Eve and of their ancestors would “die” in their relationship with God for which they were all created (Gen 2:16-3:24). Adam and Eve (his wife) were expelled from the “garden” where they could have easily satisfied all of their physical and spiritual needs into the battlefield of God’s war with Satan and his rebellious band of angels. God had cast them out of heaven because they wanted the glory of His almighty power over everything that He had created. So, we live our limited physical lives engaged in personal battles between the forces of the “evil” band of Satan and his angels and our own self-serving passionate hearts and God’s loving and wise “good” will for each of us human beings. The choices we seek and make from our passionate hearts will determine the quality of our physical existence on this earth and the eternal existence of our personal souls that will be either separated from God in hell or united with Him in His Kingdom.

Its transformed nature

Our primary battle in our daily lives is within each of us. It is a battle between our selfish wants for the pleasures of our fleshly corrupted nature and our divinely designed nature as pure human beings of God. When we personally respond to God’s direct call to repent of our selfish fleshly wants and surrender our corrupted passionate hearts to Him by accepting Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior, God gives us a new experience of being spiritually “born again” with a new heart that is passionately driven by the holy love of God through the presence of His Spirit in our hearts and minds. Although the redeemed nature of our personal souls is initially justified by our faithful acceptance of Jesus as Lord, God and Savior in our lives, our complete change is a process known as sanctification through which our minds and wills are “renewed”. See Romans 12:1-2 and 1 John 1:9 for a brief biblical description of this process) into a personal expression of God’s righteous love and wisdom in our lives that will provide us with a worthy passion in our hearts. Thia is a process like that of physically growing up to become mature physical human beings, only it is a spiritual process for our minds and souls.

With new hearts and renewed minds, we are now able to implement the worthy passion of God’s personal will in our daily lives. For a very detailed description of this process and its importance consider Paul’s teachings about this matter in Romans chapters 6-8 or my statement about “the Christian’s mind” on my website. In this process Paul instructs us to set our “minds on the things of the Spirit” (Romans 8:5), and in the letter to the Philippians (Phil. 4:8) he identifies “these things”.

The first thing that we need to think about as we seek to make loving and wise choices in our daily lives is the specific appeal for our choice “true”. That denotes a quality of factual reality about what it is offering to you in contrast to what might be a lie or just a matter of opinion. The difference between these factors in your thoughts and the choices that you make from them is significant. The second thing that you need to think about in this battle of choices in your mind is whether or not it is “honorable”. This means would it be a choice for which other caring and reasonable human beings might respect and praise you or would such critics of your choice consider it to be “dishonorable”, as in a military discharge from active service. There is a considerable difference between these factors in the consequences that you will experience from your choice. The third thing that you need to think about in your choices is whether or not it would be “just”. That has to do with the standards of authority under which you make your choice as to whether or not it is appropriate to the situation or case, as in a court of law, or in a public or even a personal matter of disputes, The conflict is between what would be evaluated as being justified by the situation or being unfair to those involved in the dispute or possible action. All choices have their consequences to those making the initial choice of action and those who have to live with them after it is made. There is a considerable difference between what is “just” and what is “unjust”, what is “fair” and what is “unfair” according to some human authorities and what is God’s justice and what is God’s grace according to His almighty authority. The next thing that you need to think about as you consider different optional choices in your daily activities is the nature of your choice “pure”. That means is it free from bad corrupting factors in its basic nature that would cause damaging side effects to you or others through its implementation. Impure quality in items that you eat or take as medicine or inhale are commonly recognized as being possibly harmful, but that danger can also be present in other choices that you make that may be infected by attitudes of selfish greed or pride or anger or fear. This standard for your passionate choices is also related to the whether or not the choice could be recognized as being “lovely” in its outcome. That means could it be seen as an expression of sincere love or kindness or personal generosity or humility or personal freedom rather than being an expression of hate or cruelty or selfishness or pride or slavery to immature addictions. The next standard for your thoughtful passionate choices is will in be “commendable”. That means would it be a choice that others would accept for themselves and recommend for others as being able to provide good benefits for many individuals who needed and wanted to make some changes in their daily lives. Finally, Paul in his instructions regarding the focus of our thoughts and choices should be on those “things” that have a quality of “excellence” and are “worthy of praise”. Briefly, this means that our thoughts and choices should be more positive and helpful and “good” rather than being negative and harmful and “evil”, and they should be recognized as being expressions of praise for God’s guiding wisdom in our choices and His providential care in our cooperative service with Him in this corrupted world and its human beings. Implementing these standards in our thoughts and choices from a worthy passion in our hearts will enable us to live as redeemed children and mature servants of God in this corrupted world of dying human beings.

Let’s talk about this

What standards do you seek to apply to your thoughts and your personal daily choices? From where do you get them? What do you do when you encounter a new threat to your comfort or safety in your daily life? Are most of your choices just routine habits or the result of intentional thoughtful decisions? What kind of experiences do you have as the results of your choices? What personal choices have you made that you would recommend to someone else who was being confronted with the same issue that confronted your heart and mind? Let’s talk about this.

A time for goodness

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General principles for its determination

Time is marked by the speed of the rotation of the earth on its axis, which as you know from your daily experiences is very fast. A spot at the equator is moving through time at the speed o 1,037.5646 miles per hour. Your speed will be slower depending on the latitude of your location, but you will have no control over that speed. You also know from experience that you will have no control over some of the circumstances that confront you moment by moment in your daily life. All you can control in this process of living in this rapid passing of time is your thoughts and the choices that they lead you to make in response to the physical situation in which you find yourself in any moment of your awareness. If your circumstances are fairly normal, you will probably spend your time in the routine procedures of getting up from sleeping and getting ready for your day with its normal series of responsibilities that will require your personal attention and actions. This is what I am doing now, but this day started earlier than usual, at 4:00 AM with a mental nudge that it was a time for goodness, for me get up and start writing a timely new Post for this Blog that the Spirit of God gave to me several days ago. But I have to interrupt my writing activity to apply a special treatment to the lumbar region of my back to promote the healing of my sciatic nerve that has been damaged by a severe accident that happened to me eighty years ago. I will be doing that for 25 minutes while I am also writing this Post and getting dressed so that I’ll be ready to go to the dining room for my breakfast in about 90 minutes in the Retirment Center where I am living and being cared for by their professional staff of care givers who are available to me all of the time. This is the way my time goes by every day as I try to coordinate my physical and mental activities to find a good time to accomplish what I need and seek to do every day as I struggle to take care of my worn-out damaged body at the age of 93 while I continue to operate a personal website to help others in their daily lives.

Not only is it impossible for me to control the speedy passing of time in my days, it is also difficult for me to physically and mentally function in effective ways to keep myself relatively comfortable and safe in this world of various opportunities. I find that my physical energy varies from moment to moment during the day, and nothing that I can do about it is going to make me young again. This physical weakness and pains create changing emotions in my mind from those that are basically positive and helpful and good to those that are negative and harmful and unloving. It sometimes becomes difficult in my daily moments of activity to make time for living to meet my own selfish wants to make time to do something good for others.

Doing something good

In the midst of our daily routines to function and to complete my personal obligations, I have discovered that I can’t just depend upon old habits of thinking and working to get me through my days and have time to build good friendly relationships with members of my new family in my new home. I have to make a specific effort to change the focus of my thoughts from my selfish desires for physical comfort and pleasure to those of loving God completely and seeking to meet the needs of other local individuals in my life. Although I recognize that I am living on a battlefield between the forces of God and the forces of Satan in this world I have to make choices that will enable me to survive and to help others and to experience real peace and joy and have time in all of these good relationships as time swiftly moves through my moments. This means that I have to focus on thoughts that lift me above my current circumstances, that strengthen my damaged human systems for living, that give me hope for good moments ahead of me, and that keep me aware of God’s personal loving care and guidance in the desires of my heart and the decisions of my mind. This is a time for goodness, for positive thoughts and loving choices in the passing moments of my daily life as I trust the Spirit of God to enable me to do this according to His designed plan for my life.

Let’s talk about this

What is the nature of the time that you spend in your daily life? What directs your choices for how you spend your free time during your normal days and on holidays from your normal work responsibilities? What makes the moments of time in your days good and beneficial for you? What hampers you to make time for goodness in your daily activities? Let’s talk about this.

Winners and losers

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Our situation

It should be obvious to anyone living in the United States these days and even those who are observing what is going on in our cities and towns and offices and factories and schools and hospitals and prisons and homes and apartments or tents that we are living on a battlefield of personal conflicting choices regarding what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, what is legal and what is illegal, and what is wise and what is foolish, computer literate or digitally overwhelmed, what is male and what is female, and what is important and what is only incidental, and what is expensive and what is cheap, and what is fair and what is unfair, and what is loving and what is hateful, and who should be free and who should be managed, and who deserves to live and who doesn’t, and who should be helped and who can be ignored, and whom can be trusted and whom can’t be trusted. It doesn’t matter whether we are Republicans or Democrats, liberal or conservative thinkers, a socialist or a capitalist, citizens or immigrants, military or civilian, married or single, voters or non-voters, highly educated or just average, a prisoner or a free resident, rich or poor, well insured or not well insured, healthy or sick, strong or handicapped, employed or unemployed, colored or white, a parent or a governmental official, a judge or a victim, religious or secular, moral or immoral, a saved sinner or a lost sinner, elected or unelected, we all have to live with the consequences of these battles as winners or losers, and there are no uninvolved spectators except children who haven’t reached the age of personal accountability to their creator.

Our options

All of our personal choices on this battlefield have to be made under these four realms of established authorities in this world: social, economic, medical, and spiritual. Social authorities are our parents or guardians, government officials, lawyers, employers, teachers, or selected relatives or friends or advisors. Economic authorities are people who control the nature and distribution of approved currency in the world. They include national and international financial agencies, bankers, and merchants, The medical authorities include doctors, nurses, other individual caregivers, hospital and clinic boards, producers of medicine and medical equipment, and pharmacies. Spiritual authorities include God, gods, Satan, witches, evil spirits, pastors and priests and other religious leaders. Functioning and surviving on this battlefield is a matter of learning how to cooperate with these various authorities in the personal choices that you make every day in your battles for various personal benefits.

The outcome of our battles

Evey war between armies of warriors always produces winners and losers. Winners always get to establish their will and values over the losers. There may be some room for negotiations of some details in the settlement of the battles, but those details and this process will still be determined by the power of the winner.

The most powerful and effective army of warriors always wins these battles Our study of science and philosophy and theology and history clearly indicates that there are designed rules for order in the operation of every system of existence. Major wars and minor battles and destruction and deaths and wounds and diseases and stress and anger and pain and injustice and peace and joy all get experienced in our human daily lives. The ultimate victorious outcome of all of these wars and battles and personal struggles will be experienced by the army of God who has personal almighty authority over every system that functions, including the vast systems of the universe to the smallest atoms of everything that physically and spiritually exists. Winners will enjoy great personal peace and joy in the Kingdom of God in their eternal relationship with God and Jesus for whom they have surrendered their own selfish heart and minds. The losers will be banished to Hell where they will spend eternity with Satan and his agents in personal pain for their personal rebellious choices against the gracious loving and wise will of God in His created order for everything that exists. Each warrior is free to choose which commander’s, God or Satan, appealing call he or she is willing to accept which will determine their status as winners or losers.

Let’s talk about this

Whom do you trust for wise guidance in your daily struggles with personal battles? What gives you confidence in the value of their advice? Why can’t you by yourself or with the help of other human beings overcome the real damaging or deadly forces that threaten your daily enjoyment of personal comfort and safety? So which supernatural army are you going to join, Satan’s or God’s? Why? Let’s talk about this.

Good balance

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In what

I am learning from the treatments that I am getting from my Physical Therapist for a dislocated pelvic and spinal joints that I suffered from in an accident in 1945 that in order to stand up and walk normally there has to be a good functioning experience of balance or coordination between the muscles and nerves in my lower back, the lung’s supply of oxygen into my blood stream, the operation of my heart to power every organ in my body, and the center for the balance for the position of my body in my inner ear and brain. This need for balance is evident in every operation of our body’s organs and their nerves and muscles and connecting tissues and our thoughts that control what we choose to do with our body which determines what we experience moment by moment in our daily lives. Any injury or disease in any part of the body can affect a good balanced coordinated operation of the whole body. Everyone who is sick or injured functions differently than they do when they are normally healthy, and everyone who seeks to treat or relate to them in a personal and direct way must also do it in a different way than they would with a person who was in their normal state of bodily functions.

There also has to be a good balance between the moods that affect our thoughts and our feelings or emotions in order for us to make choices that will ultimately give us good healthy experiences. The presence of “bad” or “negative” or dangerously destructive or harmful thoughts or moods in our hearts and minds will hamper us all in our efforts to make good wise and positively healthy well-balanced choices in our daily lives. No one can make good decisions when they are in a bad mood. Moods of anger or bitterness or hate or jealousy or revenge or condemnation or prejudice or fear or worry can lead any of us to make unhealthy foolish choices in our daily lives. Paul advices us all to focus our thoughts on what is “true”, “just”, “pure”, “lovely”, “commendable”, or “worthy of praise” if we want to experience the “peace” of God in our bodies (see Philippians 4:8-9). Such thoughts will establish a good balance in our lives.

There also has to be a good balance between the social, medical, financial, and spiritual authorities in our cultures who control all of what happens in our lives from the personal choices that we make each moment of every day. These authorities are such individuals as our parents or our bosses or our lawyers or our friends or our doctor or our banker or our pastor or our priest. The rules that they each establish for the operation of their authority in the various cultures in which they serve have a direct bearing on the choices that each of the residents in their realm of authority can and should make in their daily life. The level of your bank account and credit rating and personal income is going to affect what you can afford to do at any point in your life. The physical condition of your body and the availability for its care will affect what you can physically do at any point or in your life. The rules of your parents and civic lawyers and personal bosses have a direct bearing on what you can socially do in the culture in which you live. And the rules that your pastor or priest or faith or gods or God proscribe for you should affect all of the choices that you personally make every day where you live, because these choices will determine the eternal destiny of your soul, either with God in a place of joy and peace or in Hell separated from Him in a place of personal pain and loneliness without any hope for any relieving changes. The choices that you make for whom you choose to hang out with or to live with in your days, and whom you choose to trust and to respect for wise and loving guidance every day, and what you personally actually decide to do in the moments of your life must be in good balance with every controlling and influencing factor in your body, mind, and cultural situation for you to have a good and satisfying life of “joy” and “peace” (see Galatians 5:22) in this world.

Conclusion

There are obviously a lot of different personal and cultural and authoritative factors in these realms of influence in our minds as we each choose how to function moment by moment in our daily lives. Each of us must develop and implement a way of thinking and acting that will establish and maintain a system for good balance or coordination of all of these factors in our lives if we are each going to experience a life of fulling joy and peace in this would. We must each of us learn how to love one another in spite of our differences. We must learn how to give and to share with each other in spite of our selfish desires. We must learn how to be kind and forgiving and humble and wise in our personal relationships. We must learn to move forward in our lives with thoughts and actions that are more positive and good rather than those that are negative and destructive in their abilities to lead us to a fulfilling life. God has designed all of the elements that are active in our living situations to be basically good for each of us in our daily lives. He has given each of us the individual freedom to choose how we want to think and to act in accord with our own will power, and good balance in these functions will bring each of us fulfilling experiences of God’s joy and peace in our lives.

Let’s talk about this

How do you regard the importance of the various factors and authorities that influence our individual personal choices every day? How do you seek to maintain a good balance between them in your life? What about this process do you find to be most difficult? What causes that difficulty? How are you going to function to improve your experience of good balance in your life? Let’s talk about this.

A good conversation

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Its basic elements

It is between two individuals who really respect each other. It is clearly focused on matters in which the individuals are each currently interested. Its vocabulary and style are each acceptable to both individuals. Its flow is not interrupted by any outside distractions as they continue to talk with each other, and it is not being rushed. The subject of their conversation is not radically changed without their mutual consent. It is being conducted in a setting that is comfortable for each individual. It has a quality of truth in the various statements that are being shared, and the responses of each individual to what is being said is personally practical rather than being theoretically hoped for. It is free from any efforts to manipulate or to control the behavior or attitudes of each other in their personal appeals. The meaning of its content needs to be as clear as the standards for communication between human beings can make it when the conversation is being conducted with the need for its possible later revision and interpretation being recognized by each individual.

Its real tone

The basic tone or quality of the conversation must be really sincere and compassionate without any false noise in it. This quality must be consistently perceived by both individuals in the conversation and those to whom they are accountable. Its effects upon each individual in the conversation must be positive and deep for their applications in their daily lives. These effects should include experiences of peace and joy in the centers of the individual’s being.

Let’s talk about this

How would you define a good conversation? What kind of experience was it to be engaged in such a conversation? What personal qualities does a person have to have in order to participate in good conversations? What difference does the channel make in the quality of a conversation? What did you think of my Post about a good conversation?

A good way

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The challenge to find one

Everyone no matter where he or she lives or how old they are is trying to find a good way to function or to live in their situation. This is not easy, because there is always a system of authorities in place who has some direct influence to apply upon our desired choices. These systems include Social groups like parents and friends and neighbors and teachers and merchants and civil officers and their lawyers. Medical professionals like doctors and nurses and therapists and counselors also have some authoritative influence over our personal choices. Financial agents who manage and control the circulation of various forms of currency make up another system of authorities with whom we each need to work in order to pay for the the various products and services that any of us would like to use to meet our various daily personal wants. Spiritual pastors and priests and prophets and gods are assumed to have some authority and influence over the aspects of our human lives that are are centered in our eternal individual souls. It may be greater than that of the other authorities who only have influence over our temporary bodily physical functions, so their authority and wisdom should also be consulted by any of us who are seeking a good way in which to function in this world.

So as individuals who have been given the power by God, our creator, to make our own personal choices in accord with our free wills, that has not been programmed by God, we each have the challenging responsibility to chose the specific ways in which we want to function in our daily lives from among the thousands of options that our cultures and its various authoritative agents present to us. Early in our lives we learn that there are different ways for us to respond to our parents or caring supervisors in our physical homes as they seek to control our behavior and attitudes through various rules that they cite for our behavior. They may cite some good benefits for our obedient choices or some bad consequences for our disobedient choices. We all have to live with the consequences of our choices, usually for the immediate time, but the consequences may have a longer time span. It could be for years until we learn a better way of living or until we arrive in our final “home” where we will exist forever. This is the process that all of the agents in the four systems of authority under which we live will use in the ways that we relate to them and to each other through our daily personal choices.

Since the standards for the ways in which any of us can choose to live are not simply either to obey those in authority or not to obey them, each of us need to decide whether the consequences of our choices would be personally good or bad for ourselves. That standard is often hard to recognize in the frame of time in which we need to chose the ways in which we are going to respond. For example, that may be when we and our spouses are in a war of words with each other over some issue in our lives . So, finding a good way to live in the midst of unpleasant forces in our lives is a matter of learning what will ultimately be good for ourselves and what would ultimately be bad. Then, we will have to choose which rules we are going to obey or which ones we will try to avoid having to obey to get what we want. Then, we will have to choose when we are going to begin to act or function in a good way that is ultimately beneficial for ourselves and those with whom we relate including our spouses, relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow workers, students, citizens, or worshipers.

Qualities of a good way

It will satisfy the standards for the behavior of each of us who come under the authority of those agents in the social, medical, financial, and spiritual systems in which we all function in this world. It should be understood that no one is expected to be able to meet all of these standards all of the time in their personal daily choices,. It should also be recognized that each of these agents should be related to as individuals who are themselves human beings who are struggling with this process in their own daily lives and authoritative functions.

It will respect the basic rights of each of us for the benefits to be an alive and free and a social being regardless of our personal race or religious beliefs. It should be understood that it is well to recognize that children and males and females should each be allowed some particularly good ways of functioning because of these distinct group features of their personal identities and roles in human life.

It should be recognized as promoting the more active participation of each of us in the activities of living rather than refraining from them. For example, a good way to function in this world is not being passive and alone, and to help those who may be sick or handicapped or too afraid to do much to meet their own needs. Here is another example: hiding by one’s self is not a very good way to function in meeting the challenges of a sickness, physical or mental handicaps or deadly or destructive forces in one’s immediate situation of living. Human beings were created by God to live in good relationships with Him and all of the other creatures that He created, including the animals in His natural order of creation and angels and other beings in the supernatural order of His creation. Active and genuine love and respect for one’s self and others are the basic qualities that God has intended for all good relationships!

It should make a real positive difference in the way we each function and feel every day, particularly if the choices are for specific medical products or services. It is reasonable to recognize that our choices to try different non-prescribed products or professional service for a short time to evaluate their effects in our lives is still a good way to function to meet our physical need to be more comfortable and safe in our daily situations of living. It may take a few visits to our chosen beautician or barber to tell whether or not they provide a good service.

It should not be so expensive that it puts any of us in a financial position that makes it very difficult to handle any of our daily responsibilities. A good way to live each day is not to create financial debts that are seriously going to threaten our prospects for a good comfortable and safe future. None of us should use our credit to take an expensive vacation or to buy a car that we can’t afford to maintain or to buy a house that is too expensive for our monthly budget.

Finally, it should meet the standards that our creator, God the Father and the Son and the Spirit, has determined for our personal relationships with Him through our eternal souls and the passions of our hearts and the free daily choices of our wills in our minds. We should each understand that not all of the spiritual agents that are available to individuals in different areas of this world will agree on the standards for what is a good way to spiritually function in this world of different religious and philosophical and psychological principles for living each day. So, we are each going to have to be very thoughtful and careful regarding whom we choose to trust for spiritual guidance in our personal daily choices. These choices can be made through conversations that we have with such agents, their books and teachings that we consult at various times, and the gatherings of them with their fans that we can attend in schools or churches or other religious facilities or public or private halls or club houses for the spreading of their advice. The best way for each of us to make good spiritual choices in our lives is through our personal contact with the person of God’s Spirit in our private prayers with Him every day. As our relationships with God is deepened and strengthened by these prayers and the surrender of our free wills to the loving wisdom of His will, we each will be greatly blessed in our daily lives and in the eternal existence of our souls with God, the Father the Son and the Spirit in the Kingdom of God.

Conclusion

A good way to function in our daily lives is to give timely attention to how we are each handling the various circumstances of living in this world that threaten our physical comfort and safety and moods. As we each think about this in regard to any particular matter of concern, we each will need think of a way that will best meet the standards of the authoritative agents in the various systems of influence and control over our behavior in our daily lives. These are social, medical, financial, and spiritual in nature. Most of these agents whom we are free to consult for advice regarding our possible choices are themselves individuals who are also subject to these influences and the limitations of just being imperfect human beings who are trying to function in a corrupted social order that is somewhat “crazy”. So, their advice is not going to be perfectly good, and none of us are going to be perfectly disciplined enough in our willpower to implement it in our daily lives. Therefore, our best choice for whom to trust for loving and wise advice regarding a good way to live each day in this world is the person of the Spirit of God who exists and functions in the spiritual realm of God’s authority over the systems and creatures that operate and occupy every thing that exists. The best way to choose a good way to live in our daily lives and for our souls to spend eternity with God is to surrender the selfish passions of our hearts and the foolish decisions of our corrupted minds to the loving and wise and powerful personal influence and authority of the Spirit. He is the Person who knows what is really good enough for each of us and who is powerful enough to protect any of us from all of the forces that would destroy our relationships with God who created each of us for an eternal experience of joy and peace with Him. God is so loving, wise and powerful!

Let’s talk about this

What are your experiencing as a good way to live in this world? Whom do you seek for advice in regard to your personal choices? Why do you seek that person? In regard to the timing of your choices, do you usually make them in accord with your good habits or will you give those that come with serious consequences more thoughtful attention? How does the cost of a possible product or service that might help you to meet a current want influence your choice? How do your regard the various rules for your behavior that the agents in the different systems of authority under which you live seek to impose upon you? How do you regard the various spiritual agents who are available to you? Let’s talk about these matters of how to choose a good way to live in this world.

A good experience

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A good experience

comes when you…

  • 1. are in the presence of relatives and or friends who really love you and are willing and have some authority to help you to get what is really good for you.
  • 2. are in the presence of people who have the authority and the will to enable you to pay for the product or service that you want to get for yourself or someone else.
  • 3. are in the presence of people who have the authority and the will to provide you with the medical products and treatment for a painful and distressing condition that you are experiencing in your body and mind.
  • 4. are in the presence of God through your personal choice to worship Him and to offer your prayer to Him for His personal blessings in your life for which He has the authority and the loving will to give you or to withhold from you in accord with His right timing.

A bad experience comes when you…

  • 1. are in the presence of people who do not personally care for you or even respect you and who have some authority and intent to harm you and to destroy your supporting relationships with other human beings and even with God.
  • 2. are in a situation in which you have few or nor sources of personal financial income and no one who has the authority or the will to loan you any money to pay for the products or services that you need for your daily life or to care for you,
  • 3. are in a situation in which you physically and mentally do not feel well enough to function in your daily life and you have no personal resources to gain access to any medical products and services that could give you some relief from your physical pain and mental stress.
  • 4. when you have reached a point in your personal daily struggles to be physically comfortable and happy in your daily life and you are spiritually felling little hope for any relief from any supernatural source of relief.

So what do you do?

  • 1. Try to find a different group of relatives or friends who might have some authority and willingness to help you in your personal struggles for comfort and happiness.
  • 2. Go to a charitable agency that can provide you with some temporary shelter and meals for your daily needs for comfort and a calm mind, or seek and secure a better job that provides you with an adequate income to meet you daily needs for comfort, safety, and a relative peace of mind until you can secure a better job or get a working spouse or committed partner who can provide you with a joint income.
  • 3. Go to the emergency room of a local hospital or medical clinic where you can get some professional care for your physical and mental problems as you try to pay for them or benefit from their charitable services.
  • 4. Fall into a spiritual depression in which you frantically search for some supernatural source of relief from your pains and stress in the books that are written by popular religious teachers and psychologists who offer your various spiritual and mental procedures that they propose may help you. Or you may go to a church or synagogue or a cult or a small group of other individuals who are or have been suffering from your depressing addiction and seek their advice or help. Or you may turn your attention to Satan or demons or witches or weird expressions of magic in order to get some relief from your pain and distress. Or you may humbly turn the attention of your depressing thoughts to the God who created you for a good eternal relationship of joy and peace and providential care What He wants you to do is to surrender your own selfish wants and will to trust His Spirit. God will provide you with what is basically good for you and to protect you from all of the evil and powerful authorities of this world who in their rebellion against God want to destroy your loving and fulfilling relationship with God.

Conclusion

  • If you a seeking to have a good experience on this battlefield of powerful authorities over you, you will need to surrender your own selfish willful choices to God and His Spirit and build a personal relationship with Him by trusting the Spirit, whom He will give you as a Helper, to guide your personal daily choices as you forsake the other authorities of social, financial, medical, and spiritual influence in the thoughts of your heart and mind.

Let’s talk about this

  • What do you think of this Post and my perspective on this matter? Have I fairly considered all of the basic options anyone has for their personal choices of products, services, or providers that they need or want in this world? If not, what ones have I missed? How do you have a good experience in your daily life? Your testimony could help each of us fellow struggling disciples of someone. Bob

    Good health

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    Your situation

    You are alive and you are either enjoying the benefits of your good healthy body or you are wondering why you get sick and tired so often. The vitality of young bodies is great, and it is exciting to experience and to develop new physical and mental skills and insights into living in various sports and classes and through your personal relationships. When you are feeling good, your daily life is a pleasing adventure, but when you are sick and tired it is a painful drag.

    But your body and your spirit were designed by God who created you and gave you a life in this world that He also created. He has basically supplied you with all of the basic resources that you would ever need to grow up and to engage in fulling experiences of personal expression from the free will to make your own personal choices for what you want to do with your body and mind in the particular place in this world in which you were born. You did not have any choice in that matter or the physical genes that you inherited from your parents. But, as you grow, you have discovered that you do have a lot of options for various personal choices that you can use to bring you the experiences that you desire in your life. And one of these experiences is to enjoy the benefits of a good healthy body.

    But in this process of living in this world you have discovered that there are some forces that may cause you to feel physically sick and mentally troubled by their elements and authority in your situation that do not seem to want you to have many pleasant and fulling daily experiences. In your life as a child you depended upon your parents or another adult to take care of you and to give you something that would relieve you from your personal distress. As you become more independent in your personal choices, you search for and employ other professional care-givers to help you to get some relief from your various experiences of physical pain and mental stress that are hampering your pleasant experiences of good health.

    Your design for good health

    But in this process you may come to realize that God has designed your body and mind with some physical and mental functions that can enhance your experiences of good health even in the midst of any pain and stress that you may experience from time to time. These include a nervous system that warns you of any part of you body or mind that is not functioning for your good health, and organs and chemicals and an internal immune system that are designed to rid your body and mind from any harmful toxic elements or thoughts, like unnecessary fear and worry, about some factors in your current situation over which you have no personal control. But you can choose whom you select to help you in your efforts to get some relief from your current pain and stress and what diet of food and medicine and positive thinking will restore good health to your body and mind.

    The process for good health

    This process is implemented and maintained by putting the focus of your thoughts on the good resources that God has provided for you. These include the good daily nourishment of food (fruit, vegetables, meat, and herbs) and medicine for the vitality of your body and the peace of your mind from His protective authority over any evil elements that would destroy you. But these choices are not easily made, because the focus of your thoughts is often on the pleasures that this world offers and the selfish driving motives of your heart. They can keep you from consistently experiencing good health in your life apart from your temporary circumstances that may be full of pain and stress. For further guidance in this process see my statement about meditation and feeling good in the Pages of this website.

    Let’s talk about this

    What do you think about and do when you are sick and tired and you want to experience the benefits of good health again in your daily life? Whom do you seek for caring treatment and guidance to get some relief from your pain and stress? Why do you have any confidence in their ability to help you? What is the difference between the treatment and advise that you would get from anyone in this world and what you would directly and personally get from God? How should you change the focus of your thoughts to enhance your experiences of good health in your daily life? Let’s talk about this.

    A good idea

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    What is it

    A good idea is a thought that includes a motivating action to implement it for an anticipated personal benefit for its actor. That benefit may be one that is anticipated as being positively beneficial for the actor himself or herself. That would make it somewhat selfish. The anticipated benefit would be better if the choice to implement it included someone else other than the actor in it. It would be better if that person was the spouse of the actor, another relative of the actor, a particular friend of the actor, a neighbor of the actor, an associate of the actor, or just a person that the actor has spotted who needs some help to function effectively in his or her personal daily living situation. The anticipated benefit would be best if it included a benefit to the actor’s personal relationship with God.

    How to cultivate a good idea

    Make sure that the specific idea is clearly identified in its citation in your mind and that its anticipated benefit is to be directly applied to a specific person in your life and not general group of individuals. It will be very difficult to get the benefit of your thoughtful choice to be applied directly to a general group of people, like all of your relatives or friends or neighbors or associates. Each of them will be different individuals with particular personal needs that could not be well met by a single dose of positive benefits. I believe that only Satan or God have the power to effectively influence a group of individuals with their sets of preferred benefits or blessings. In most cases the idea for a particular course of action to establish and to maintain its intended benefits to a specific group of individuals will be given by God to a particular individual like Abraham or Moses or Joshua or Samuel or David or Isaiah or Amos or Peter or Paul or by Satan to a self-serving individual like Saul or Judas or a materialistic idol worshiper like Solomon.

    Make sure that the idea in your mind with its anticipated benefit for a specific person has been directly approved by God for you as its actor to have God activate it through His Spirit in your role of personal service for God’s glory in this world. Your ideas are part of your called role of service as you share with God in His authority over the creatures of this world (Genesis 1:26-28). Make sure in your prayerful effort to implement a good idea with its particular benefit and assignment that it has been anointed in your mind by God and that it is not just a personal idea and project that you have generated in your personal efforts to help others for your own glory and not that of God’s. This is in keeping with Paul’s instructive guidance to disciples like us that we need to “guard” our “hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” and think about those ideas that are “true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable …think about these things” (Philippians 4:7-8) rather than the “things of the flesh” (Romans 8:5). God will never anoint an idea with its intended course of action with His transforming power and love that comes from our selfish “flesh” rather than from our redeemed and renewed hearts and minds that have been “set free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2).

    Let’s talk about this

    So what good idea have you conceived in your mind that you would like to implement in your life? What makes it “good”? How could it be improved? Has it been anointed by God for implementation by Him in your life? What personal benefit are you hoping to experience from this good idea? As you think about developing a good idea for implementation in your life, give your attention to this message in this site:

    Good sense

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    What it is

    Good sense is the ability to recognize what is important in your life and how to get it. It is a quality of acquired knowledge and practical decisions that enable you to avoid making decisions in your daily life that would subject you to consequences that would harm your body, spirit, or soul for a period of time or even forever. Good sense is the acquired ability to make personal choices in your daily life that will enable you to be safe from permanent harm and comfortable in any situation in which you find yourself. Since it is your thoughts that determine that focus of your decisions and your will that enables you to make personal choices, good sense is a quality of your stored mental body of knowledge and your committed pattern of behavior. It is a basic factor in your total personal identity and not just a set of good habits.

    How you get it

    Your parents, as they are committed to your welfare, will try to teach you some of the basic principles of good sense that they hope you will apply to your personal choices as you become more independent in your personal life, but their efforts will be conditioned by your personal thoughts and will. Some of the principles for good health physically and mentally that you may learn in school or from books will be principles of good sense, but they will only get applied to your thoughts and decisions as you accept their authority in your life. In accord with your freedom to make personal decisions in your life, you will always have the ability to reject the wise and loving guidance of your parents, your psychologist, your doctor, or other teachers or your pastor regarding the personal standards that you are going to apply to your personal decision. No one will or can prevent you from being foolish in some of your personal choices as you grow up. It is evident now that there are some powerful authorities who are committed to indoctrinating everyone and particularly the young generation with their particular agenda for the acquiring of what they want for their safety and comforts in life. They will use the authority of civil laws and public curriculum to establish and to maintain their selfish agendas, and their authority is not easily apposed or overcome, because their agendas are often very popular with many adults and youth and choosing children. The standards for your choices that should be applied in accord with your good sense are very different from those that you might apply from the popular authorities in the culture in which you live.

    The best source for good sense

    Since it is evident that acquiring the ability to act in accord with the principles of good sense in your life is a process of learned behavior in making personal choices, it is well for you to be careful in regard to whom you choose as your basic teacher for how you should seek to live in this world. It is the authority of that teacher that you accept for your personal decisions in the course of your life that will determine your basic personal daily and eternal experiences. Basically you have three options for your choice of this basic teacher: yourself, Satan, or God. You may think that another human being could be wise enough to serve as your basic teacher, but he or she will have the same limitations on his or her ability to learn the principles of good sense and how to apply them as you do. So choosing another human being as your basic teacher is not going to enable you to acquire a dependable level of good sense in your personal choices. You have to go outside the realm of human teaching authorities to find one that has the ability to influence you outside of the realms of human knowledge and willful choices. Satan and God are the only super-human beings who have that power to influence your personal choices in your life. Each of them want to attract the devotion of your personal willful choices to them and their agendas for your personal spirit and soul after your body has passed away or been changed for your personal state of existence in eternity beyond the time dimensions of this world. Satan’s agenda for you is to bring you into his realm of active battle with God for personal rule over all that exists in the spiritual realm of heaven and the physical realm of the universe. That agenda is basically marked as being “evil”, and will subject you to eternal personal suffering apart from God. God’s agenda through His influence in your life through His Spirit is to bring you into a personal relationship with Him that will be marked with freedom from harmful and uncomfortable experiences and be filled with His quality of peace and joy and security in the Kingdom of God. That agenda is basically marked as being “good”.

    It was the knowledge of these two realms of authority and their different agendas that God wanted His two initial human beings, Adam and Eve, to avoid acquiring for their personal human hearts of wants and minds of wills in the “garden” where He had placed them. He gave them this specific commandment: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17). In giving Adam and Eve this specific commandment regarding how they should use their freedom to make personal choices in the environment where God had placed them, He was instructing them to refrain from seeking the “knowledge of good and evil” for themselves but to trust Him to personally guide them in their particular choices regarding what they should decide to consume or otherwise do in the presence of so many options in His “garden”. Trusting God and His Spirit for guidance in these choices is really good sense, because God is really the only being who really knows what is “good” for the human beings that He created and whose agenda it is to give it all to them as they accept His authority over their personal lives with their devoting trust.

    If you would be interested in reading a more complete biblical historic record of this matter, you can check out this statement on the website of which this blog is a part: https://www.christianityetc.org/God-has-a-unity-in-his-will-and-messages.php. Note the specific list of individuals who have benefited from God’s good sense in their lives and ministries.

    Let’s talk about this

    When in your daily experiences have you become aware of the influence of good sense in the choice that you were making? What do your credit as the authority for that influence in your choice? How did you come to accept that authority in your life? How would you evaluate your use of good sense in your life?

    A good friend

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    Scarce

    Every one will probably recognize that it is very helpful in this life, no matter where you live, to have a good friend whom you know is going to be there for you in a time of personal need. This person is very special in your list of contacts on Facebook or other social platforms, and you probably contact him or her frequently, not just in case of personal emergencies, but just for some personal fellowship with someone that you knows really cares for you. I am sure that you have discovered that it is not easy to find and to create the appropriate connection that will result in the development of a good friend in your social network. The connection has to be deeper than one of just liking you. Many contacts on social platforms will say that they “like” you without getting to really knowing you or making themselves available to you at a moment’s notice. You may have discovered that a good friend cannot be bought or otherwise manipulated into becoming your “good friend”. Such a person cannot be legally required to be your “good friend” even if he or she is a blood relative or even your spouse or a dependent or your boss or a working associate or even a team member. Neither you nor this person are required to be morally “good” persons in order to be a good friend, so personal goodness is not a requirement for being a good friend. These qualities of personal relationships and your inability to apply them to anyone in your social community means that a good friend is probably scarce in your network of contacts.

    Qualities

    In the above statement I have described some of the basic qualities of a person whom you might choose to become a good friend of yours, but there are some more. This person must be free enough and mature enough to be able to make his or her own personal decisions in his or her personal relationships. Coercion or childish foolishness should not be a part of his or her decision making procedures. He or she must have a high level of respect for others and for law and order in personal and civic business and have a good reputation among the respected leaders in your community. A good friend must love himself and herself and basically know how to love others in unselfish ways. A very selfish person cannot really be a good friend to anyone. A good friend should be humble and practical in his or her standards for living. A good friend should share a lot of the personal values for morality and spiritual believes that you have. Severe differences in these values will not enable a good friendship to develop. A good friend should have some free available time in his or her personal daily schedule of responsibilities to be able to respond to you. A person whose time is already committed to other responsibilities is not going to have much time to give to you and your needs, although sometimes short conversations with a friend can be encouraging and prayers will always be helpful. A good friendship takes time to develop and to operate. A good friend should have some personal resources that could be beneficial to you in accord with your needs. Available funds can be helpful, but they are not absolutely necessary to be a good friend. A person who does not have any such resources, does not have anything to share with you. A good friend should be able to understand you and to feel your needs. Without such personal qualities in his or her personal experiences, he or she is not likely to be able to be a good friend. Your expressions of concern and requests for his or her help would be constantly encountering walls of confusion that would only produce experiences of mutual frustration and disappointment.

    Becoming a good friend

    This process will take a lot of time for you and the person with whom you would like to develop such a relationship. Becoming a good friend will require a lot of patient and genuinely loving exchanges. Mistakes and poor expressions and actions will have to be forgiven, and both individuals will have to be willing to humbly work together to prevent them and to overcome their effects in their efforts to become a good friend to each other. Some good friendships have been permanently broken by unresolved simple misunderstandings. Becoming a good friend to others will require some personal changes in yourself that are not quickly or easily generated or maintained. Most of us human beings are too selfish to easily give up our preferred wants and habits to be a good friend with someone who is different from us.

    Let’s talk about this

    I think that the above statements have clearly expressed the challenges of finding and being a good friend in any personal relationship. What do you think of these challenges? What do you find to be difficult in this process of being a good friend? What do you recognize as being essential to becoming a good friend with another person? Who is your good friend, other than your pet dog? What makes him or her so good?

    A good website

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    Basic features

    A good website provides its internet viewers with these details:

    1. A profile that cites who you are in regard to your personal identifying features: legal name and nick name, gender (male or female), year of your birth, birth place, marital status, current country of residency, basic language, race, religious preference, and perhaps a good head-shoulder photograph
    2. Education
    3. Basic work experience and skills
    4. What you have to offer to your interested viewers, its costs, and how they can get it
    5. How you may be contacted for further information and personal help

    Organization

    Edit these details and arrange their display in your website so that everything taken together in the content of your website states a clear and friendly message of invitation to your viewers regarding how you would like for them to respond to you and what you have to share with them. You can be clear and complete in your message without it being perceived as being too aggressive or in some way insulting. Answering all of their anticipated questions about you and your material in a polite and clear message should enable you to avoid any real negative responses.

    Design and Style of your displayed website

    You may pay for the services of a company who can offer you a basic template that would be suitable for the display of the content and its particular features of your website on the internet. If you choose to use such a service, they would have their technicians available to help you with the various options that they provide for your material. Or you can choose to create your own set of files for the display of your website. These would include the basic CSS file of codes that would determine how each specific element would be displayed in the basic blocks that you have set up for the display of your material on the pages of your site. These blocks would include one for the Header that displays the basic subject of your website, a block for links that take your viewers to specific elements of your content, a block for the display of those selected elements, and a Footer block that would include closing details regarding your message. Then you would need PHP files for the display of each particular Page of content. The actual content would be set in HTML files that would be displayed in accord with the CSS codes and those in your PHP files. You can get printed guides that can instruct you in the development of these different coding languages. Once you get the basic CSS and PHP files set up, it is easy to use a WordPress editor to configure the file of code for each new or revised Page in your website.

    Conclusion

    A good website gives viewers on the internet the basic address of your Home base of operation, who you are, and what you have to offer them from your personal years of training and experience in this world. What you have to offer should be helpful for anyone regardless of where they live. Factors of gender and marital status and age would normally affect how individuals would use your material and your personal advice, but the content of your website should basically be global and practical in its use by your viewers.

    Let’s talk about this

    Let me know if you have any questions about my perspective regarding a good website and its creation. I do not claim to be an expert in this matter, and I have created a website that has attracted some followers on the internet. I would be glad to discuss your questions and comment with you in this blog about a good website.

    A good plan

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    Historic plans

    I advise you to recognize to that you are living and experiencing your life in accord with a plan that has been put in place for you by God. Even secular scientists now affirm that the physical universe in which we all live has an intelligent plan as its operating controls that give it order even in its smallest and frequently implemented details. Nothing happens in our lives by any random accidents. The initial plan that God put in place for the implementation of His authoritative will in what He would reveal about His nature and glory is known as Creation. The report of its implementation and operation is contained in the documents of Genesis 1-2 that are available to us human beings in various printed versions of God’s verbal work of creating and controlling this universe and our world in which He placed His human beings who were commissioned to cooperate with Him in its operation (See Genesis 1:28 and 2:19-20) When that Creation plan was hampered by Adam’s choice to disobey God’s commandment against seeking the knowledge of what would be “good” or “evil” in their daily lives (See Genesis 3:1-7 and 8-24), God implemented a new plan for His work of Redemption that He put in place that would implement and control the operation of the physical universe and its human beings in their daily lives. You can learn about this plan and study its details by going to this statement on this website: https://www.christianityetc.org/redemption.php. I will be glad to answer any questions that you may have about this Redemption plan in this Blog or in personal email inquires to me.

    My historic plan

    When I became independent enough in my own personal life, I decided that it would be “good” for me to have access to a female human being who would give me sexual pleasure when I wanted it, regardless of any laws against such activity in the Redemption plan that God had in place for my life. I was able to bring such a female into my life. We produced a family of three sons and engaged in good jobs of secular and Christian service for twenty five years. That went on until I decided to divorce her because she was not giving me the sexual pleasure that I wanted when I wanted it. So I continued to implement my very selfish plan for marriages with females who would satisfy my addiction for sexual pleasure. I was able to do this with three other women over the course of the next forty-one years. The first two marriages in this series of relationships ended in rather quick destructive divorces by the women. The last marriage with a very special woman, Betty J., lasted for thirty-one years, and it was ended by her peaceful death in the living room of our home. It provided many experiences of God’s blessings in our lives, but we also experienced the consequences of our human selfish wants in our marriage. This only demonstrates that none of us human beings are wise enough or strong enough to implement a consistently “good” plan for the operation of our daily lives in accord with God’s standard for what is “good” in our personal choices.

    My new plan

    When Betty died on the last day in December 2022, I was left to choose a plan for the operation of my life that would be ultimately “good” for me and protect me from the “evil” consequences of my selfish personal choices in my daily life. One of the blessings that I received from God in my marriage with Betty was that I could live in a “good” satisfying relationship of marriage with a female partner in which I did not require the pleasures of sexual activity. Her devotion to me and my ministry enabled God to free me from my addiction for sexual pleasure in my human relationships. This means that I can now give the attention of my thoughts and personal choices to the qualities of “good” loving that are present in God’s Redemptive plan that operates on the holy principles for unconditional (“agape”) love that God is now seeking to activate in my life.

    This means that I am now seeking to build a network of personal friends in my life after being a shut-in with Betty as I tried to take care of her in her helpless condition in our home for the last four years of her life. I have resumed to participate in the fellowship and service of a local church where I am being blessed by encouragement of these “brothers” and “sisters” “in Christ as I learn how to trust the Spirit in my heart and mind for His wise and transforming power in my life. The details of this operation of trust are being expressed every day in my personal choices, even as I write this Post in my blog in the platform of the website that the Spirit has given to me. I am amazed by how this new Plan is working in my life! I am finally learning how to love God with all of my heart, , soul, mind and strength and to love my neighbor in the same way that I love myself (Matthew 22:37-38 and Mark 12:28-31). The process of implementing this Plan in my life is not easy or automatic. There is a battle going on in my heart and mind between God’s will for His Redemptive plan in my life and the ongoing selfish wants of my “flesh” that are still present in my mind. I am encouraged in this process, because I continue to experience the transforming wisdom and love of God in my heart every day, so I know that God is not yet through with me. I am really excited to clearly see what God has planned for me in the next role of service that He is preparing for me at this “old” stage in my life. I do not think that it is going to include any more marriages to any female human beings, which is fine, because I’m still not wise enough or strong enough to handle such relationship very well.

    Let’s talk about this

    What Plan are you seeking to implement for the daily operation of your life? Whom are you seeking to trust in your personal thoughts and choices every day, the Spirit of God, your own selfish will, or the Devil’s “evil” temptations? How are you changing the nature and operations for your personal relationships in your life? What is really most important in your list of personal accomplishments for your activities each day? Let’s talk about this. We can do that through a discussion of your comments to this Post.

    Being positive is always good

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    Why

    Being positive in your comments regarding personal concerns or projects that you are seeking to handle in your daily activities with your spouse or partners or neighbors or friends is always a good approach to effectively dealing with the matters, because it enables you all to avoid the problems that are created by having to deal with the effects of the negative comments in your relationships and work together. Everyone tends to take negative comments personally, which means that they apply them to themselves as criticisms of them and not just comments about their behavior. So the efforts of the individuals become those that are intended to defend themselves from the personal criticism rather than to find a way to effectively deal with the personal concerns or to fix the problem that is the focus of their joint work. This shift of focus from common concerns for good teamwork to deal with common problems in one’s daily situation to having to deal with personal negative criticisms regarding the nature and quality of the individuals themselves who are seeking to work together can be so judgemental and so bad that they can permanently destroy the relationships between the individuals who are so caught in such negative verbal exchanges.

    The words that we use in our comments with others are very important expressions of how we regard them and how we want to relate to them in our daily lives. If they express the qualities of mutual personal respect and caring for each other and the sincere hope for some positive benefits from the joint work that is free from any efforts to manipulate or to control the behavior of others, then they will always produce good benefits in their teamwork otherwise they may damage the relationships. Perhaps some of you have experienced the destructive effects of negative comments from others with whom you were engaged in personal relationships that you treasured and enjoyed. It is never easy to forgive others for such abuse, and sometimes the broken relationship can never be repaired. That is why it is always good to focus the points of your comments to others with whom you are working on common concerns on what you intend to do with your resources and personal abilities to express your personal responsibilities in regard to the matter without seeking in any way to control or to manipulate what they choose to do as individuals in the common situation. Every individual in any relationship with another human being is always unique and his or her resources and insights and wants and emotions will always be somewhat personal in regard to how they are invested in expression of joint work in their daily life. That is why keeping your comments regarding matters of common concern and teamwork positive is always good.

    Let’s talk about this

    How have you seen the positive qualities of your comments with others in your teamwork with them on common matters of concern and work made a beneficial difference in your relationships and work together? How did the expression of negative comments affect your relationships and teamwork in your situation? What is the most beneficial comment that a person can make in his or her efforts to promote good relationships and teamwork with others?

    Additional help

    Here is a link to a statement on my website that may help interested viewers to select very positive words for the comments that they share with others in regard to their teamwork with them: https://www.christianityetc.org/meditate-to-feel-good.php . Do not brag about what you intend to personally invest in your teamwork. Stay humble, because you are only one individual in the team, and such words of boasting may be interpreted as your efforts to manipulate the behavior of others.

    What is good for you?

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    In this blog

    I try to make the focus of this blog and the various topics that it presents on matters of personal secular and social interest and concern. It is written to generate thought and discussions about these matters and comments about this in this platform. These Posts don’t seem to produce many comments in this blog, but I trust that they do produce some good thoughts about these matters in our daily lives. My focus in these Posts is to be practical on what can really work in your life rather than just being theoretical. I have lived a long time (now 91 years) and gone through a lot a different personal experiences, some successful and many failures, including lost jobs and several broken marriages. I have many years of formal education in the fields of liberal arts and several career specialties that have enabled me to function as a preacher/teacher and writer in various private services. I continue to write, but I no longer need to sell anything that I write. I write to try to make a positive difference in my reader’s personal lives. I invite you to think about this Post and the many others that I have published in this blog to evaluate what good benefits they may have provided for you.

    In my website

    The focus of the material in my website, christianityetc.org, of which this Blog is a part, is on matters of spiritual interest and concern, like what my readers believe about theology and practice daily in their moral choices and spiritual habits. This means that the particular focus of the statements and resources in my website are on the issues that influence the cultivation of my reader’s personal spirits rather than just their personal social lives. This gives them some significance for their time in eternity rather than just for the duration of their physical lives in this world. Again, my objective in these statements and resources is to provide some material that can have practical positive benefits rather than just theoretical benefits in their lives. Since I do not often get personal feedback from my readers regarding their responses to my statements and resources, I am not sure about the good qualities that these statements and resources actually provide to my readers. I invite you to review some of this material and to give some thought to the benefits that you receive from it.

    The source of what is good in your life

    You may not have previously recognized this before, but I would like to remind you that all that you experience and receive in your daily lives comes from what you choose to think about in the moments of your daily lives and whom you decide to trust to provide you with what you want. These possible providers are either yourself, Satan, or God. You will never be wise enough or mature enough to know in accord with your own insights what will ultimately be “good” for you out of all the possible options that you have every day. The options that Satan will offer you will never be “good” for you, because they will be designed and applied to you to make you into his slave, which will have deadly consequences for your physical and eternal lives. God is the only source of what is “good” for you, because He knows very clearly what will be “good” for you and He alone has the power to bring it to you over the foolishness of your own selfish options and deadly options of Satan, and He loves you more than any of your other possible providers. Your best choice for what is “good” in your daily life is to trust God to provide you with it as you surrender your selfish will to His loving and wise directions.

    Let us talk about this

    What is basically being good for you in your daily life? From whom are you getting it? How long does its effect last? Is it worth the cost that it takes to get it? What are your practical options for getting what is ultimately “good” for you in your current daily life? Are you only expecting it to come from what you can experience through your five senses or could it come from a source that is outside of these senses? What changes are you willing to make in your daily thoughts and choice to get what is “good” for you? Finally, is this Blog being well displayed in your online device? I will be glad to publish your comments about this matter as attachments to this Post.

    Emotions: Good and Bad

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    What are emotions

    From my study of psychology and theology and my personal experiences of trying to learn how to survive and enjoy my personal daily experiences in this world of thousands of options for my personal choices, I have recognized that the emotions that I feel in my mind are the God-given chemical or electronic tags that God has designed into my brain to help me to evaluate the quality of the choices that I make each day as to whether they are coming from sources that are either “good” or “evil” and whether the experiences that they bring to me will be either beneficial or harmful. These sources that I choose to trust are either God, my creator, or Satan, my enemy, or my Self, who has been created by God in His image to make free personal choices and to reproduce myself in generations of children and personal relationships in accord with whom I choose to love with my heart and mind.

    God warned my initial parents, Adam and Eve, about the possible dangers of this choice for whom I would trust in His commandment not to eat the fruit of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” that was in the “garden” where He had placed them or they would “die” (see Genesis 2:7-24). But, when they chose to disobey God and to seek this knowledge for themselves in response to Satan’s appealing lies, their physical bodies became subject to death and they became separated from God in their personal direct relationship with Him in this world that had now become corrupted by their “sin” with its selfish and Satanic influences were now to be inherited by all of their children, including me (See Genesis 3:1-24). So now I have to struggle in my daily choices with my emotional feelings and the various tags of evaluation for the personal experiences that they produce in my life so that I can experience what is “good” that comes from God and avoid what is “evil” that comes from Satan and not get distracted by my own selfish passions and wilful choices.

    How to manage different emotions

    Some of my emotions mark experiences that brought me personal pleasure and comfort and peace and joy that made me feel “good”. Other emotions mark personal experiences that were “evil” and made me feel abused or harmed my personal relationships or made me very uncomfortable and frightened about my daily and eternal safety in relationship with God, my creator, and my family and friends. Some emotions that were produced by my selfish choices were mixed in their qualities and were “bad” making me feel sad or bitter or angry or sorry or anxious about the experiences that they influenced me to make although they were initially made for the “good” benefits that I thought that they would produce. That is the nature of selfish choices; they are always mixed with “good” and “bad” experiences.

    My mind is full of both “good” and “bad” habits of behavior that have produced both “good” and “bad” daily experiences from the thoughts and subsequent choices that I have made in the moments of my life. The quality of the experiences that my choices bring to me in these moments of my life will depend upon whom I choose to love and to trust, God or Satan or Self, in my daily choices. These choices will depend upon the quality of humble repentance that I offer to God, my creator and Lord, for my rebellious and selfish sinful choices against His loving and wise will for my life and my willingness to surrender all of my heart and mind to Him and to trust Him and His loving powers to protect and deliver me from the “evil” lies of Satan and his tempting appeals to my worldly comforts and security and selfish pleasures.

    Although I have surrendered my heart to God and am trusting His Spirit for His personal guidance in my mind, the battle between Satan and my selfish desires and my Spirit-directed choices continues moment by moment every day because God has not completely finished His redemptive and transforming work in renewing my mind in accord with His perfect love and will for me. So I have to constantly decide in my thoughts moment by moment every day whom I’m going to choose to love and to trust for guidance in the personal choices that I make, God or Satan or Self, and I’m thanking God in these moments for His grace and wisdom that He gives to me through the presence of His Spirit in my heart and mind who helps me to make choices that are personally and eternally “good” for me. Here is a statement from my website that describes this process: https://www.christianityetc.org/meditate-to-feel-good.php.

    Let’s talk about this

    What are the primary emotions that you constantly feel every day? What are you choosing to do about them and their influence in your daily life? Whom do you recognize as the sources of these emotions in your life? How do you expect to experience inward personal peace in your daily struggles between these “good” and “bad” emotions and habits in your life?

    Good Teamwork

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    Its nature

    Good teamwork is recognized as being necessary for any winning athletic team. It is also necessary for every successful business, non-profit agency, governmental body, military unit, family, or other social group. A team is a group of individuals who are committed to working together for the achievement of a common goal that they believe is worthy of a high level of their personal effort. It is different from a group that just gets together to discuss topics of common interest. They expect to have to work hard to achieve their objective, and to submit their personal incentives to the task of being trained in the personal disciplines of behavior that are required by the particular tasks that are required for the effective achievement of their common objective It may be winning athletic contests, manufacturing and selling a good useful product, providing a necessary personal service for others, making wise political rules for the conducing of personal civic operations, getting along with a spouse in the raising some dependent children, defeating an enemy in violent military conflicts, or just achieving a worthy objective with a group of associates.

    It is usually assumed that a good team has a specific coach, or boss or supervisor, chief executive officer, or ranked military officer, or family head, or chairperson. But, the operation of a good team cannot be managed by one single person. It must be done by each of the team members sharing the functions that are required for the achievement of their common objective in an ongoing process of shared leadership that involves every member of the team, not just its stars or most talented individuals or most experienced workers, or even the owner of the business. Good teamwork cannot be purchased with a big budget, and it cannot be commanded by a line of officers or supervisors. It is a quality of cooperative work in which each member of the team automatically implements the appropriate function that will enable the team to achieve its objective and to maintain its organized effort. This is a process of shared leadership that is the mark of any successful team and a demonstration of good teamwork.

    Task functions

    These task functions are specifically designed to enable the team to clarify and to solve any emerging problems that they encounter in their cooperative efforts to achieve their common objective. The first task is one of initiating, which is proposing subsequent tasks or goals, defining the problem, and suggesting a procedure or ideas for solving a problem. Then next task is one of information or opinion seeking, which is requesting facts, seeking relevant information about team concerns, and asking for suggestions or ideas. The next task is information or opinion giving which is offering facts, providing relevant information about team concerns, stating beliefs, and giving suggestions and ideas. Then the next task is one of clarifying or elaborating, which is interpreting or reflecting ideas or suggestions about the team’s concerns, clearing up confusions, indicating alternatives and issues before the team, and giving examples. Now someone can provide the task of summarizing, which is the function of pulling together related ideas, restating ideas or suggestions that have been discussed, and offering a decision or conclusion for the team to accept or reject. Then someone can provide the task of consensus testing, which is sending up “trial balloons” to see if the team is nearing a conclusion or how much agreement has been reached. Finally someone can implement the task of testing feasibility, which is applying suggestions to real situations to examine their practical ability to work in their situation. It should be evident that these functions have a natural sequence to them in the work of a team, and they are best implemented by the automatic cooperation of every member of the team rather than being implemented by any single “leader”.

    Building and maintenance functions

    These task functions are designed to enable a team to maintain the productive way in which its members work together and to enhance their loyalty to each other and the team. The first task is to be encouraging to each other by being friendly, warm, and responsive to them for their contributions and giving them more opportunities to be recognized for their helpful participation in the team’s work. The next task is one of expressing team feelings that express the ongoing moods of the team regarding the relationships that are being established between the members of the team. Then the next task may be one of harmonizing any emerging disagreements by reducing any tension between members and getting them to explore their differences. The task that can do this is one of compromising by getting members to admit any personal errors when their ideas were not apparently helpful in achieving their common objective and their status in the team became one of conflict rather than one of mutual cooperation. The task of gate-keeping, which is working to keep the channels of communication between all of the members open and facilitating the participation of each member rather than falling into the pattern of having one member take charge of the team’s work. The task of setting standards for the member’s work together as they seek to achieve their common objective will help them to build and to maintain the positive qualities of their teamwork. The final task in this set of functions is one of following, which is just agreeing to accept the decisions of the team by listening carefully to contributions of each member and the decisions of the team that are being made. These functions should enable the team to preserve its identity as a group of cooperating individuals rather than just the expression of one “star”.

    Non-functional behavior

    This is self-centered behavior that is focused more on the achievement of individuals on the team than on achieving its common objective. The first of these behaviors is that of blocking, which is interfering with the progress of the team by going off on a tangent, such as one’s personal experience that is unrelated to the team’s objective or arguing too much on a personal point that the teams has resolved or even preventing the team to take a vote. Aggression is acts of behavior that are critical of other team members without relation to what has happened in the work of the team. Other acts of behavior that are non-functional are seeking recognition to one’s self by excessive talking, suggesting extreme ideas, or boasting about one’s accomplishments in an unhelpful way. An example of this is special pleading that one’s idea or suggestion should be considered by the team because it represents the opinion of a recognized larger popular group of individuals. Another non-functional type of behavior is personally withdrawing from the ongoing discussion or work of the team by just becoming passive to its work or whispering to other team members or giving your attention to more personal matters of concern.. Dominating the work of a team by attempting to manipulate its discussions by “pulling rank” or constantly interrupting other team members in their efforts to participate in the work of the team is very non-functional behavior in teamwork. Unless these expressions of non-functional behavior are eliminated from the ongoing work of the team, they will destroy its efforts to accomplish its common objective.

    Conclusion

    Good teamwork is basically the cooperative effort of various individuals who are personally committed to the achievement of a common goal to which they will give their thoughtful attention and selfless energy and personal insights and skills. It cannot be ordered by any authoritative leader or purchased by any wealthy “boss”, but all of its task functions and building and maintenance functions must be implemented by members of the team as they work together in the process of shared leadership to eliminate any non-functional behavior that will destroy their efforts to accomplish their common objective.

    Let’s talk about this. What is your positive and negative experiences in working as a member of a team? Which of these functions do you recognize as being most essential in good teamwork?

    Good therapy

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    What it is

    Good therapy is the application of physical, medical, and spiritual treatments for the relief of those who are suffering from an injury or illness or spiritual disability. Such treatments would including the use of physical activity, the administration of appropriate drugs, and the use of such spiritual disciplines such as prayer and Bible reading and spiritual counseling by a trained Christian therapist. These treatments would be designed to provide relief from the physical pain of the person’s affliction, the mental stress of his or her disability, and to enable the person’s body to return to its normal condition of good functional physical and spiritual health. The therapy would be continued until the patient’s physical and mental and spiritual condition has been sufficiently improved to the point that the patient is feeling well enough to manage his or her daily activities and responsibilities without feeling an abnormal level of physical discomfort or mental stress or spiritual hopelessness.

    Its ongoing personal necessity

    One’s physical body has been basically designed to be functionally healthy, although some disabilities and sensitivities to harmful items may be inherited and require regular care to prevent serious harm from them. God’s initial design for human beings was for them to personally exist in the world where He had placed them in personal relationships with Him that would provide them with what would be “good” for them physically and spiritually and would enable Him to protect them from any “evil” or harmful elements that could destroy them. But this relationship of loving care was broken and severely corrupted by the initial choices of Adam and Eve, God’s initial human beings, to disobey God’s commandment to not seek “the knowledge of good and evil” for themselves, but to trust Him for His care in regard to these matters in their existence. So all humans beings have inherited the deadly spiritual disease of “sin” that hampers their personal relationship of loving care and health from God their creator. And they may not be sufficiently motivated to consistently practice the necessary physical and dietary activities of exercise and balanced nutritional meals along with daily periods of refreshing sleep and positive mental attitudes to keep them healthy and totally free from the germs and other causes of sickness and stress that hamper their normal conditions of functional health. There are too many “enemies” of good physical and mental and spiritual health present in the human situation to make the maintenance of good health an easy process of personal management.

    My recent experience with good therapy

    I recently experienced some very helpful sessions of good therapy that saved my life from the possible deadly effects of a blood clot in my lung, the stress of my poor physical condition, and the spiritual crisis of my selfish choices in my daily life. Physical and occupational sessions of therapy have enabled me to improve my ability to move around without extreme pain in my joints, medicine has opened up my lungs to the proper flow of air and blood through them, and some spiritual guidance from a Christian guide has enabled me to experience God’s forgiving grace and transforming love in my life as I dedicate more of myself to Him in my personal choices. I am very thankful for the good care that I received in the hospital, the ongoing care of therapists who came to our home to continue to help me to improve my health, and the prayers and words of spiritual guidance and encouragement that have been expressed for my welfare by fellow Christian servants and friends. How have you experienced good therapy in episodes of physical and mental and spiritual crisis in your daily life? Let us talk about this. Your experiences may help some of the readers of this Post in my Blog. Good therapy is designed to produce the benefits of good physical, mental, and spiritual health in us human beings who live on this battlefield in which we are frequently engaged with powerful “enemies” who are constantly seeking to destroy us or to inflict us with physical, mental, and spiritual conditions that will hamper our efforts to function as healthy individuals in this world. Let us talk about this.

    Cultural healing

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    Issues that divide us

    The people in these United States are practically divided by their personal issues of politics, race, gender, age, religion, work, education, and bank account that tend to establish their personal culture for their behavior. . Individuals experience various levels of “abuse” from others in their communities, neighborhoods, work places, schools, home, and public places that they expect the laws of this nation to protect them from. When these laws and their enforcement by various legal authorities fails to protect them from being “abused”, they live each day with an undercurrent of anger and frustration from this persistent culture of personal behavior and “abuse” that they face every day.

    Laws are limited

    The passage of new laws and even the enforcement of existing laws often doesn’t seem to relieve these feelings of being “abused” and frustrated, because even when their abuser are brought to some level of judgment for their behavior, it is not practically perfect or complete or enduring in its benefits, because the underlying personal quality still remains in the life of the individual who can’t change his or her race or gender, and the changes that he or she makes in the other issues don’t seem to make any practical difference in the personal level of “abuse” that he or she experiences every day. Laws and protests cannot force individuals to love, to respect, and to be kind and considerate of others who are “different” from them. The best benefits of law are to define what is illegal behavior, but they can’t do anything against abusive attitudes and even speech, like name calling which is a very popular strategy for dealing with personal feelings of anger and frustration that come from living in such a divided, abusive, and unjust culture.

    Only love can heal our abusive culture

    Jesus states a basic law that we should “love our neighbors as we love ourselves”. The acceptance of this law of behavior and attitudes in our daily lives would go a long way in healing our culture of personal abuse in this nation, but such love in our personal relationships and attitudes cannot be legally established. It can only be established by the sacrifice of our selfish desires and prideful attitudes. It can be taught in our churches, but it has to be modeled by our parents who are initial and primary teachers for the formation of loving character in the culture of our personal lives. Love cannot be required in others. It can only be implemented and demonstrated by one’s own choices. Let’s love our neighbors and see our culture become healed. Let’s talk about this.

    Online security

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    It’s Necessity

    If you do any online shopping or work from home on your computer, you recognize the necessity of having some software for online or internet security installed on your computer to protect you from possible invasions of viruses or spyware or malware into your computer that can steal personal data or hamper the operation of your computer or cell phone. Maybe you have already experienced such an invasion, so you really understand the problems that they can create with your computer, phone, and your sources for your personal financial funds, like your bank account and credit cards. Some of these problems may have cost you some funds that were stolen from your financial accounts or the costs of professional repairs to remove the intruders and to fix the problems that they create.

    Possible resources for online security

    Your operating system for your computer and phone probably come with some basic software for online security already installed on these devices. They are usually well designed to protect your devices from the basic online threats. There are many others that you can choose to add that could create different levels of protection or protection against specific threats with their specific filters for your chosen fields of operation. You just need to make sure that all of the installed programs will work well together without creating new problems. Another thing that you can do to prevent such intrusions is to carefully handle phone calls from strangers who may call you about some possible problem with any of your online financial accounts or business. If any of these callers ask you click on the key “1” to get connected to another clerk to help you with the possible problem, hang up. Such a simple action on your phone could give them remote access to your computer and control over its files and access to your personal data, unless it is well protected. It is a good policy to never give any personal and particularly any financial data to any stranger over the phone, even if they claim to be from a legitimate business or financial or government agency. Such businesses or agencies will usually not expect you to conduct such business over the phone

    Your experiences and recommendations regarding online security

    If you are willing to share some of your personal experiences with us regarding online security and the problems that you have encountered from intruders to your devices, your reports of these experiences might be helpful to others. Please share any recommendations that you may have, in addition to those above, that you may have for effectively dealing with online security. This is a very important personal matter for many of us these days. Your help with online security will be greatly appreciated. Let’s talk about this.

    A bad back

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    My accident

    In 1945, when I was a freshman in high school, I suffered a severe fall in a gymnastic practice in the gym after school. It knocked the wind out of me, but I was able to stand up and move around without any severe discomfort or limitations. When I went to a orthopedic physician to be checked for my condition, he put me in a girdle for several weeks just to give my back some support. I was able to return to my gymnastic team and to engage in their practices and displays and contests for the remainder of my high school years.

    My early years of life and Christian service

    I was able to proceed with a normal daily life of further education and work after I graduated from high school. In 1950 I chose to enlist in the navy, after I had completed a year of college, and was able to pass their physical examination, excepted that it was noted that I had asthma, but no other problems were noted. I persuaded the examine board to accept me, which they did. When I arrived in boot camp, I had at usual attack of asthma, which I had often had in the course of my childhood and youth, but they hadn’t kept me from being very active in swimming and other athletic activities. Anyway, I was discharged from the navy in two weeks and was free to pursue other interests in my life at the age of 19. Before I returned home to continue my education in athletics for a career in aquatic management and safety, I received a call from God to become a Christian minister and my asthmatic disease was miraculously removed from me. I returned home to complete my education with a new emphasis on preparing to become a minister. I got married in 1953 and began preaching in a local Baptist center that year after my local Baptist church had licensed me. I graduated from college in 1960. During these years of further education and work I had not experienced any severe discomfort in my back or limitations on my mobility in my daily activities. I was puzzled that my right leg appeared to be shorter than my left leg when I was dressed in pants, but I didn’t know why. I graduated from seminary in 1960, was ordained by the American Baptist Convention of churches for service in their agencies until in retired in 1996 from my professional ministries. I then developed a personal ministry of service through a website of Christian resources for other ministers and children of God and those who seek to relate to Him, which I continue to manage every day on the internet through the Spirit’s enabling power and guidance.

    Discovery of my severe spinal injury and its early treatment.

    Years later when I started having some pain in my lower back, I went to a chiropractor for some treatments for this discomfort. The X ray of my back discovered a severe dislocation of the lumbar vertebra that was causing the pinching of some nerves. I continued with his regular adjustments for several years, getting relief from the minor pain in my back with the help of some minor pain pills from time to time, as necessary. Eventually I was able to discontinue the treatments and even able to stop with the pills through some supplements that kept the nerve damage under control so that I could move around every day without any severe discomfort or limitations.

    Recent increase in pain and immobility in my left leg and lower back.

    About the beginning of August 2020, I began to experience pain in my lower back, so I decided that it might be helpful to resume the chiropractic treatments to get some relief. But before I could arrange to start them, a new pain was experienced from the tighten muscles in my left leg that was now being caused by the damaged nerves in my dislocated lumbar vertebra. So in addition the chiropractic treatments I am getting, I am now getting some medicine from a orthopedic specialist in the treatment of joint pain.

    Current condition and concern

    As of the middle of September, 2020, my pain levels are less as long as I don’t try to move around very much or walk without a walker. The medicine is helping to reduce the swelling and inflammation in the tissue in the lumbar area of my back to relieve some of the irritation on these nerves which should enable me to resume some normal mobile activities for my daily responsibilities. But I’m not sure that these present course of treatments and medicines are going to be able to give me the relief that I need in order to take care of my severely handicapped wife and myself in our home and to continue to operate my personal website with its spiritual resources and guides for Christian ministers and God’s children and seekers around the world. I don’t think that I could manage my website from a small room in a long term assisted living care facility. I can operate my laptop from a small table, but I need more resources of books and files of papers to assist me in this service that would have to be moved into my our living space. I don’t have a personal partner who is able to take over the management of my website and this special ministry, so unless I get sufficient relieve from these physical problems in my back and leg to allow me some range of normal mobility in my daily life, I will probably have to close down this website and remove these resources from the internet. I know that the Lord can heal individual cripples from their particular problems, but I’m not sure if He through His Spirit is ready to give me the relief that I need in order to continue with this ministry. Your prayers for the Spirit’s guidance in my ongoing efforts to treat these problems in my back and leg and to continue with my website ministry will be greatly appreciated. I will keep you posted regarding the Spirit’s work in my life and ministry regarding these matters. I know that God is good and that God has called and gifted me to conduct a very special ministry, and I’m willing to trust His Spirit for the enabling strength that I need to continue to serve Him from day to day. Amen

    It’s a good time to

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    1. Avoid any personal close association with any possible sources of infection from the coronavirus or sinful attitudes and choices of behavior.
    2. Give your serious attention to any symptoms of a physical disease or a spiritual condition of personal sin.
    3. Repent of your poor choices and seek immediate help from health professionals or the Lord Jesus, who has secured the resources for your spiritual salvation.
    4. Make your home where you and your wife can protect you and your dependents safe from this virus by daily habits of cleanliness and spiritual righteousness through the enabling guidance and transforming power of the Lord’s Spirit who can radically change your daily lives.
    5. Begin to have your wife and the mother of your children to home school your children in the basic courses of personal knowledge and skills for them to be able to effectively function as independent persons in this world. I’m sure that the resources for this educational service are readily available from appropriate publishers after decades of such service in thousands of homes.
    6. Make your home a center for the worship of God and the encouragement of your relatives and neighbors and friends in healthy living and spiritual faithful daily living. You don’t need a professional “pastor” to do this for you in some distant facility.
    7. Tune into the wise and loving guidance and instructions of the Lord’s Spirit through a personal discipline of daily prayer and meditation upon the goodness of God in your life rather than upon your fears and confusing personal opinions and foolish choices. Turn off your TVs and cell phones and open your Bibles.

    Let’s talk about this, particularly how we should respond to the deadly effects of sin in our world. The coronavirus is giving all human beings a wake up call regarding the possible deadly effect of a single unhealthy organism, which is very similar to that of sin in our communities and jobs and schools and homes in this world. And it is not too late to make some radical changes in how you respond to this disease of sin.

    Good help

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    What it is

    Good help is providing practical assistance to someone who is requesting your help in order for them to meet a current need or want in their life. You may be a relative or a friend or a stranger to the person requesting the help, but you seek to provide the requested assistance as soon as possible with sincere compassion for the person making the request.

    What it is not

    Good help is not a request by someone to evaluate the cause of their need or them in regard to their situation. Regardless of who you are in your relationship with the person, you will probably not know them well enough to really understand what is causing them to request some immediate help from you. If someone comes to you on the street of a city and asks you for directions to a local site, good help will not be provided by you seeking to evaluate what has caused them to get “lost” or disoriented in regard to where they are and where they want to go. Good practical help cannot be provided to another person by seeking to evaluate or to make judgments about the cause of that request or the person making it.

    Summary

    Good help is seeking to provide someone else with immediate practical assistance without making any judgments about their current situation or person. It would be OK to ask them questions in order to clarify exactly what they feel that they want in their current situation. Once the specifics of the help that they are requesting has been clarified, it would also be OK for you to indicate that you cannot provide them with any guidance or resources that you feel would not help them in their current situation without making any judgement about their situation or them as you sincerely care for them in their situation.

    Let’s talk about this

    When have you requested some practical help from someone else? How was your request handled? How do you usually respond to such requests? How do you define “good help” to others in our daily lives in this world?

    Feeling good

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    The basics

    You have been designed by God, your creator, to feel good all of the time. All of the systems in your body and spirit have been designed to function in harmony with each other in order to enable you to be comfortable and to feel good in the circumstances in which you live.

    Your nerves are equipped with sensors that will create feelings of pain to alert you to the fact that some of the cells in specific parts of your body are not working in harmony with other related cells. You are then faced with some options to take steps to enable your body to fix the problem. If something in your situation doesn’t seem to be working in a way that contributes to your comfort and sense of well being, sensors in your emotional center will alert you to this condition by creating feelings of stress or worry or frustration or depression or sadness or even hopelessness in order to motivate you to take steps to take some course of action that might be good for you.

    How these systems work

    As you grow up your mind is programmed with pathways of learned skills and mental abilities that give you various levels of control over what you subject your body and your mind to that you have learned produces various levels of comfort and pleasure and satisfaction from what you are experiencing. The basic tool in your mind for starting your learned steps of action in your body and spirit is your thoughts. Your thoughts are the basic “links” to your choices that you have “tagged” with various adjectives of priority for the benefits that you have come to expect from the course of action that is implemented in your body and spirit. These “tags” will indicate in your range of thoughts what choices are apt to be most “helpful” or “wise” or “loving” or “right” or what ones are your “favorites” or “easy” or what ones are “momentary” or what ones are “risky” or “expensive” depending upon the condition that they produce in your situation and your resulting feelings about it. So you are confronted every day or even moment by moment with a series of choices that you must make to determine what you do in your body and spirit in order to remain comfortable and safe and at “peace” in your situation, and the “link” or trigger to your range of choices is in your thoughts. And you have a lot of control and freedom over those thoughts. You have not been designed as a robot, even for your own good.

    Wise choices for feeling good

    Since it is not always easy to know confidently what is going to make you feel good in your situation, and some previous choices have proven to produce less than comforting and good results in the experiences in which they place you, you are faced with the frequent challenge of trying to figure out which thought (link) to activate to take you to the experience that you hope will be comforting and good for you.

    In God’s creation of your initial parents (Adam and Eve) He warned them not to seek the knowledge of what was “good and evil” in their own mental abilities, because to do so would produce results in their nature and physical situations that would be fatal, not good at all, and would severely corrupt their natures with “evil” influences and severely break their direct and personal relationship with God. They refused to heed God’s warning, and they claimed this knowledge for themselves and they and all of us human beings since them have inherited the deadly consequences of their rebellious choice (the account of this episode in our history is recorded in Genesis 2:16-3:24). Part of those deadly consequences is experienced in our inability to really know what is basically “good” for us and to be wise enough in our mental options to make choices by our thoughts that will be free of the “evil” influences of the devil in our hearts and minds and our own self-serving passions and rebellious attitudes against God and His authority in our lives.

    Paul, an early apostle of Jesus and teacher of God’s loving redemption for us rebels and the wisdom of His will in our lives, has taught us that in order for us to live in daily experiences in which we are really comfortable and feeling good that we need to give our attention in the thoughts of our minds to choosing those courses of action in our lives that are in keeping with God’s almighty powers to supply us with desirable comforts and eternally lasting good gifts in our daily lives. We can make these choices by activating thoughts that are “true” and “honorable” and “just” and “pure” and “lovely” and “commendable”, trusting God to provide us with what is “good” rather than depending on ourselves or the devil to do so (see Philippians 4:7-8 in the New Testament for Paul’s teaching and citation regarding these thoughts).

    Securing these choices

    Like learning any new challenging skill or sets of new bits of information that you can activate with new thoughts and choices of actions, learning to trust God and the guiding wisdom of His Spirit in the challenging moments of your daily life will not be easy. The process will require that you spend concentrated moments in the repeated mental exercise of these good thoughts and healthy choices of trusting God with Bible study and prayer so that your mind will become programmed to enable you to harvest the “fruit of God’s Spirit” throughout the days of your life. Focus the attention of your thoughts on the personal blessings that the Spirit has already given to you in your relationship with God, and make your choices in accord with His wise and loving will that He has already implemented in your life. The devil is going to persist in trying to distract you with thoughts of previous sinful pleasures and “bad” choices of conduct and remind you of all the times that you fail in your efforts to trust God, but part of your efforts of exercise in this process is to trust God and His Spirit to engage the devil in these spiritual battles so that you can continue to live and to function with His blessings of “peace” and “self-control” in your daily life. Changing your thoughts and choices through this process of trusting God will give you many experiences of feeling good in your daily life.

    Let’s talk about this

    For an additional explanation of this process, I invite you to check out this resource Page on my website: https://www.christianityetc.org/blog/meditate-to-feel-good.php. What do you think about the possible benefits of this advice? What might hamper the reception of those benefits in your daily life? What could you choose to do to prevent or to hamper these negative effects in your life?