IF GOD BLESSED YOU WITH IT, HE WONT TAKE IT AWAY.

Another thing we need to unlearn is that God can and will take away something that he released to us.

The blessings of the Lord make us rich. No one can bless us like God can. Although we see the people that blessed us, it’s God that placed it on their hearts to do so. God’s blessings make us feel loved by Him. It gives us a tingling feeling on the inside that can’t be compared to anything we’ve ever experienced.

As we go throughout our journey we understand that there is nothing we can do to make God bless us. He blesses us because we are his children. As our father, he wants to see us happy. He loves to make us smile. Our works don’t make us deserving of his blessings, they just make him proud to see that we are not selfish with the gifts he has given us.

I have heard people say on so many different occasions that if God blesses you with something, he won’t take it away. I tried to convince myself on several occasions that if I no longer had the thing that I believed God blessed me with then I must have gotten it wrong. Maybe it wasn't a blessing and instead maybe it was a curse. I was reminded of Job 1:21 ‘the Lord gives and the Lord takes away.’

Job served God with everything in him. He stood on the Word of God and nothing could shake him. Then the enemy asked God for his permission to shake the foundation of what Job had always stood on. God granted the enemy access to everything but Job's soul. God allowed everything that Job had been blessed with to be taken from him. God believed in Job but Job had no idea he had been offered up as a sacrifice, but he remained faithful even when he didn't understand. In the end, God restored everything that was lost but Job still had to go through the process.

We want to only think of God as a gentle loving father. But just like we have to allow our own children to experience things to grow up, God has to do the same with us. He is not speaking harm over our lives but he will allow us to experience some of the negative things that rise up in our lives. If God can see that allowing us to go through something will strengthen us where he needs us strengthened, then he allows it to manifest. This doesn’t make him an evil God, it just confirms that our thoughts are not his thoughts and our ways are not his ways.

So the next time you lose something that you know God gave you, ask yourself how can God get the glory out of me going through this?

What are your thoughts? Leave your comments below. Let’s talk about it.

ITS OK TO WALK AWAY

As we continue this journey of things we need to unlearn we need to remind ourselves that it’s ok to be wrong, it’s just not ok to stay there. We must learn to do things differently. We must learn that sometimes it’s ok to WALK AWAY.

I grew up in a very supportive household. Both my mother and father were in the home. They both had full time jobs and they still made time for me and my sister to be involved in extracurricular activities. They always made us believe we could do anything we put our minds to. The only rule we had when pursing something new was If we started something, we would finish it. There was no such thing as quitting or walking away.

That didn’t mean that they were making us participate in things we hated. It meant they were teaching us the responsibility of our choices. So if we started softball and halfway through the season we became mad and didn’t want to play anymore, we had to finish what we started. When the season was over we could walk away but we would not leave anything unfinished. There would be no quitters in our home, but we could make a decision to do something different after the season was finished.

This built a great character trait in us. Everything I put my hands to I gave it everything I had. It helped me with my parenting skills. It helped with my work ethic. I thought it was helping with my relationships but as I got older I realized that without balance, this trait had become very destructive to me.

Many times I found myself holding onto relationships simply because I wanted to win. I didn’t want to be seen as a quitter. Other times I convinced myself that because I knew certain things about a person before I decided to commit myself to them, then I was committed to the process. Just because I was feeling uncomfortable didn’t mean I could quit. I treated everyone in my life like a lifetime partner when the majority of those people were never even supposed to have been in my life.

When does enough become enough? How do we unlearn destructive behaviors? How do we teach ourselves to walk away even when it will cause us to feel like a failure but it saves our lives? How do we work past the humiliation and judgement when everyone around us tells us just keep praying and it will change? What if it’s never going to change because it was never part of our destiny to be in that place? It can be a very long and hard lesson to learn but I want to encourage and remind you that ITS OK TO WALK AWAY!

What do you need to walk away from today? Let’s talk about it.

Is There Anything You Need to Unlearn?

As we grow older we begin to realize how many things were instilled in us that taught us how to judge more than it taught us how to love. I believe in my heart that those that taught us how to judge believed they were doing a good thing. They believed they were passing down knowledge and not judgment. What they didn't understand is that instead of setting us up for progression they were keeping us stuck in a cycle that needed to be broken.

One of the things I think about when I think about how I was taught to judge others, is wearing pants. I was raised Pentecostal and I had always been taught that we needed to look different than the world. I was told that as a Christian woman, I was required to wear long skirts, panty hose and look homely and unattractive. I couldn’t wear anything that would make a man stop and take a second look but yet at some point I needed to get married. Of course now, when I look back, it all feels so ridiculous but at that time in my life, I relied heavily on what the older saints taught.

I was given references in the Bible that said women wore a certain type of clothes and men wore a certain type of clothes. But, if you study the Word for yourself, you will begin to realize that there were men that wore skirts in biblical times. What I didn’t know at the time was that, even though it was written in the Bible, it was all based on the time in which the Bible was written. I understand the purpose of why it needed to be mentioned in the Bible (this is another conversation) but I also understand that as time evolves and generations pass, we must be able to apply what has been said appropriately to our lives.

Wearing pants will not send anyone to hell, but growing up, I believed that is exactly where I would end up if I did wear them. We didn’t serve the Lord because we had a relationship with him, we served him out of fear. As I got older, there was so much I had to unlearn. Even to this day, I am having to unlearn some things that were more about religion than it was about relationship.

I do thank God for the things I learned as a child and young adult because they taught me discipline. It took me years to feel comfortable walking into a church with pants, even if we were only there to clean the building. Although presently, I may be that person that will not minister the Word of God in a pulpit with pants, it does not give me the right to judge someone else that feels comfortable ministering in pants.

The main point about pants and the moderation of our attire was about distractions. But hey, anything can be a distraction if we are not careful. I remember finding myself in a church service where I was looking at the robe the Woman of God was preaching in. At the end of that service, I could not tell you anything about the sermon. That robe was so sharp, it had me completely mesmerized. I remember that robe to this day. It had a gold overlay between the pleats. It flared out in the right places every time the Woman of God turned. That robe had all the bells and whistles and the shoes matched perfectly. I took pictures because one day, I thought, I’m going to have a robe just like that!

I said all of that to say, distractions come in many forms but we also have to take accountability for our own actions. We must recognize when we have been distracted and correct it. We need to ask ourselves what purpose am I getting out of this distraction? Do I want to leave with some knowledge that's going to give me power to fight the enemy I'm going to meet tomorrow or do I want to leave talking about that dope robe the woman preached in? Hello somebody!

What do you need to unlearn today? Please share your insights in the comments. Let’s talk about it.