Why Should a Marriage Be Forever?
President Kennedy's mother, Rose, once decided that she had had enough of life with her high-rolling, woman chasing husband, Joe, and she walked out on him. She was so hurt and so angry that she took the first three of all those children of destiny still to come, went back to her family home, and told Joe she couldn't stand him anymore and wasn't coming back. Her father welcomed her back to the fold. For a couple of months. And then sent her back to Joe-with thesd words: You've made your commitment, Rosie."
What kind of thing was that to say to a troubled daughter who had gotten desperately unhappy with the way her husband was carrying on with other women? Why did Rose Kennedy have to be reminded of a commitment she had made before she had had a solid notion of the sort of man she was marrying? Because it was a lifetime commitment, her father said, for better or for worse. Rose was obedient. She went back to Joe, lived with him until he died, and became a legendary believer in lifetime commitments.
But why should she, or we, or anybody, for that matter, ever stick himself or herself with a commitment for life when none of us has a ducking's notion of what is in store?
About four million Americans will make lifetime commitments this year. Most of them will expect to keep their commitments; almost half of them will split before fifteen years are over. The figures dismay a lot of us. But, looking at it another way, maybe we should be impressed that half of them will stick with it through the worst and best of times.
Remember that we are talking about commitment to the most fragile, the most threatened, of all human relationships. Can any commitment compare with marriage for the pain it can bring? And haven't many of us been converted to the relaxing proposition that "till death do us part" is a nostalgic leftover from a buried antiquity no one will ever see again? So a fifty-percent survival rate may be something about which to crow.
Does a lifetime commitment to anyone really make sense today? Why not six-month commitment, with an option to renew, or a commitment to a two-year trial? Why should we start out with a promise to make it last forever?
There are, after all, plausible reasons for not making lifetime commitment open-ended, just in case. Here they are, the three of them, condensed.
We Change After We Make Commitments
Sometimes we change a lot, and two married people do not always change in the same ways or at the same pace.
I have grown a lot since we've been married, but Che just hasn't kept up. Now she is holding me back. I know that she has grown at the pace she thinks is right for her. But we cannot grow together anymore; we can only grow apart. So the decent thing for me to do is leave her.
Or turn the page. Che has changed so much I hardly recognized her a the person I married. Back then she really wanted to care for me and the kids, but now she doesn't know her anymore. She certainly isn't the person I promised to love with."
Everyone Has a Right To Repair Mistakes
We all try to cut our losses when we realize we have put our money in the wrong mutual fund. We witch jobs when we have reached a dead end in our career. We change from Baptist to Presbyterian when we find a friendlier church in our neighborhood. We trade in our car when we have a lemon on our hands. So that venerable sociologist Margaret Mead asks in her book Male and Female: "If past mistakes are to be repairable in every other field of human relationships, why should marriage be the exception? Well, why should it?
Everyone Has A Right To Stop Pointless Pain
Nobody on this earth has a right to perfect happiness. But surely we have a right to put a stop to pointless pain. If Pam's putting up with painful stuff from Paul, her angry husband, is not doing either of them any good, and is in fact doing them both a lot of harm, their pain has no purpose. It isn't leading them anywhere as persons, and it is killing their happiness and their marriage. So if Pam cannot get Paul to quit hurting her, it simply isn't fair to expect her to put up with brutal husband just for the sake of her commitment.
So we have three reasons for taking the "fatal forever" out of commitment to marriage.
The chips are down: is it still reasonable to make a lifetime commitment to marriage and to keep it in the face of these plausible arguments for keeping our bags packed, just in case?
I should tell you at this point what lifetime commitment is about. It is not about lenghf of time, not first of all, not basically. I don't, for example, think along this lines, "if I lived for another 20 years, I will have to live Doris for 240 months, or 1,040 weeks. Can I stick with her for that long? I don't think about the calendar when I think about my commitment. Nor do people I know. Not the ones who are committed. It's when we are not committed that we worry about the number of years ahead of us.
Committed people don't hunker down before the terrors and tedium of time to come. In fact, many of us make our commitments by the day. We choose each day to put someone else's needs ahead of our wishes. We chose each day to care for someone.
Then what does the lifetime in commitment mean?
Life times means " unconditional."
A lifetime commentment is about not having exit routes along the was, just in case things don't work out the way we had expected. For instance, a lifetime commitment would never sound like this: "I'll stay with you unless you get stomach cancer. "Or " I'll be with you as long as you remain thin." Or "I'll stick with you until somebody better comes along." A lifetime commitment doesn't have escape clauses in the fine print.
So lifetime commitments are simply commitments intend to keep, no matter what.
Most of us seem to believe that marriage entails this sort of commitment because of the sort of thing marriage is. For instance, we still get married only when we are ready for commitment.
Isn't this why we need ceremonies? Let it be a high sacrament in a sacred chapel or a flat formality in a civil chamber, we want a ceremony of some sort. The reason we need a ceremony is that we want to make vows for everyone to hear, vows to live together until the sharp blade death slices us apart, vows spoken in a festive setting, vows we celebrate afterward with our friends and family.
Someone asked Jane why she and Rick did not get married; after all they had been living together for a couple of years and they seemed to hit it off well.
This was Jane's answer: "We are not sure we are ready to make the commitment. The way things are now, Rick is free to go whenever he wants to go, and so am I, and we want to be able to split without any guilt-soaked fuss about breaking a commitment. When we are ready to make the commitment to each other, we will get married."
Jane senses a difference between a choice to live together for the time being and a commitment to stick together no matter what. So do most people.
But why does it make such sense to us?
The reason must lie with deep human needs that we all share, needs intimately tied to marriage, needs that only a lifetime commitment can meet.
What we need most is TRUST.
There is probably no other person in the world we need to trust so much as we need to trust the person we marry. And nothing creates trust like knowing that the other person is unconditionally committed. Legalities do not help much. Would it help, when we felt specially insecure, if our partner said: "You've got a marriage license, isn't that enough for you?" Would it help if our partner offered us a contract that guaranteed us a fair share of things in the event that he-or-she-should leave us? Not really.
It takes a personal commitment to create TRUST. Not just a vow spoken a year, ten years, a lifetime, ago. But a commitment reborn everyday by our reliable presence, renewed by acts of care, resurrected by generous forgiving. Our commitment to someone in caring love is the only guarantee we can give, the only basis for TRUST.
But why do we need to trust each other so completely?
Let me count some ways. There are probably more, but here are some needs that I sense and I mention them because they seem to be universal.
We Need To Trust Each Other With Our Gift
We need to trust each other so much because we give each other so much. Think of commitment as a gift-the gift of one self to another. Quite a gift! The Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier talks of it this way in his book The meaning of gifts. "The I do' is a gift,"he said, "total, definite, unreserved...a personal and unchangeable commitment." Quite a commitment!
We give a big chunk of ourselves, the most vulnerable part the part that gets hurt badly if it is let down or betrayed. And trust is the way we have of coping with the risk of such extravagant giving.
Maybe the supreme moment, or at least the most sensitive symbol, of giving and trusting is the moment of making love. At least if there is passion in it (which is certainly not always the case). But when we do give love as well as make love, we give a gift that we cannot take back again. And giving it leaves us exposed, open to joy and open to pain. The sadness of being left alone after we have given such a sensitive part of yourself away can be chilling. How we need to trust each other with our gift!
It's something like the way we once trusted our mother. We become like the children we were when we trusted our mother to stay with us, to give us her tender touch and her soothing hum, to come back again whenever she left us, to be with us even when she would rather be somewhere else.
We Need To Trust Someone To Care For Us
We need to trust someone to care for us during the low ebbs, when life's energy bottoms out, and we are too weak, too tired, to take care of ourself. We need to be able to trust another to care for us when we fell down and can't get up by ourselves, when we cry out for help, when we make bad mistakes, when we are afraid. Within us all beats the heart of a needy child. So we need a commitment that sets no advance limits to caring.
Care and consistency are point and counterpoint in the music of marriage. They are played in a delicate duet of mutual need. And we have got to be forever improvising on the score of who cares for whom and who is cared for at any given moment of need. Each of the players trusts the other to move in to take up the slack when one of them misses a beat.
Living out of commitment is more like New Orleans jazz than a classical Haydn piece. It is improvising on theme called promise. If we can't improvise we have we a bad problem.
When we care deeply for each other, we gradually get linked into each other's lives, woven into each other's being. We may love each other with mild and, once in a while, if we are lucking, with, desire, and even hate each other for a little while. But we keep on improvising new ways of caring through the undertow of passion and the overflow of commitment.
Our need for caring does not stop; we neved outgrow it. So when two weak and needy and flawed persons share their lives, they need a commitment that does not have any options for quitting whenever one person requires too much care.
I've been saying that we have two basic human needs that make a lifetime commitment crucial to a marriage. We need to trust someone with our gift. We need to trust someone to care for us. Now we must think about the needs that a third party has for both of us.
Our Children Need To Trust Us
Our fathers and mothers had a hunch that a marriage wasn't complete without children for whom to care. Something in me feels that they had a point.
I become tuned in to my own feelings about this when Doris and I decided to adopt our three children.
Why did we do it? I'll tell you why I think we did it: I think we were following an impulse we couldn't resist, an inner nudge to give our marriage a deeper meaning than we could give it by ourselves. The gift of love we gave each other motivated us to want to give the gift of life to others. And adoption was the closest thing we could come to it.
We were not being noble at all, as if we were giving these three kids a break. We knew that. And, to be honest, we didn't offer them that great a deal anyway; there were other couples waiting to adopt children, and they might have been better parents for them than we were. Anyway, we adopted them for our own sakes.
Children are one reason why a commitment to a spouse is different from a friend. Commit yourself to a friend, and you make a promise to a single person. Commit yourself to a husband or a wife, and you are making a commitment to your children too. To the third and fourth generations. They are grafted into our commitment; they have their own claim on the commitment we make to each other.
Our children are not waiting in line for a free ticket into our marriage, they don't knock on our door and beg to be part of the deal. We sneak them inside of our commitment to each other without consulting their references. We tuck them inside of our own coupling. And when we do, we endow them with an inalienable right to have us both around as long as they need us.
Children get anxious if they so much wonder much whether their parents really intend to stick together. They feel double-crossed if their parents actually leave each other. When two parents cannot keep the commitment they once made to each other, they fail a commitment to the kids. And it hurts them; there seems to be no way of getting around it.
I will take a cue from what psychologist Archibald Hart says in his book "Children of Divorce", and run through some of the hurt most children feel when their parents get divorce.
GRIEF: When children lose one of their parents to a divorce, they feel it the way a parent feels a death in the family.
CONFLICT: When children are forced to choose between two people they need, they feel caught and wounded in the conflict.
FEAR: When children feel their secure family structurtrembling like a bridge in an earthquake, they tremble too, for fear of what will happen to them next.
GUILT: When their parents can't stay together, their children have a guilty hunch that it is their fault.
DEPRESSION: When children lose someone they need to fill out the meaning of their lives, they are programmed for depression.
ENOUGH. It isn't the end of the world for children of divorce. They are not dammed to some inferior status ever after. They usually survive and often succeed, but their resilience does not take away the hurt when it happens. It is a blow. No child who feels it ever deserves it, and none forgets it.
So when we ask why unconditional commitment still makes sense for marriage, children are part of the answer. A commitment to each other is a promise to them. They have a right to trust us to keep it.
Our Community Needs To Trust Us
Each of us needs a community of people to be supported by. We can't make it hanging on the thin, quivering branch of our individual, lonely existence. But a human community is a delicate web that is knit together with the invisible thread of personal commitments.
It isn't our laws, or our licenses, or our contracts that keep a community human. We need these legalities to hold each other accountable. We need them in our political and business organizations. But they are only supports we contrive to strengthen the network of personal commitments.
Real community, a sharing, caring community, is created by the trust we have in each other's personal promises. The trust we have in the free commitments we make to each other-with or without contracts.
The stronger our personal commitments are, the stroger the whole community is. If too many of us renege on our personal commitments, we weaken the web that holds a society together.
Marriage is one if the pivotal commitments in any community. When a lot of marriages break up, especially if a family is broken too, the thread of the web wears thin.
So our communities need to trust people to make lifetime commitments and to keep them.
We need to trust each other because we give each other so much. We need to trust each other because we have a need to be cared for; we have a child inside of us that never grows out of this need. And the Children we are committed to care for have a need-even a right-to trust us to stay together. Our community needs to trust us stay together; and because we have no life expect life in community, our community has a right to trust us too.
Our many-sided need to trust each other shows us the point of lifetime commitments, commitments without conditions, commitments without escape clauses.
But it is one thing to say that marriage needs a lifetime commitment, and quite another to assume that everyone can make good on that commitment, or even should.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Commitment Give Friendships a Longer Lease On Life
We all want a FAITHFUL friends. That is, we want friends who are committed to us. We want the sort of fiends who stick with us even when being our friends cost them something.
What sort of commitment is right for friendship? What kind of commitment should we make to our friends?
Recall that we don't usually begin friendship with a commitment. The commitment comes to life gradually. We commit ourselves to each other in snippets, in all sorts of little ways, over a long haul.
We hardly notice when we have first made a commitment to be a friend to someone. But when our friends have special needs, or get into tough situations, we discover that we actually have made a commitment to them without thinking much about it. What sort of commitment is it? I think we make three sorts of commitments, and these are fundsmental for lasting friendships.
Commitment is About Loyalty.
We don't betray friends, never treat them the way people treat enemies: for instance, we don't tell their secrets to other people. And we don't desert them, we don't treat them like strangers even when they are in a lot of trouble.
Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state, went to visit his friend Alger Hiss in prison, convicted traitor though Hiss was, bad politics though it was to visit him. When more prudent politician condemned him publicly, Acheson simply said, "A friend does not forsake a friend just because he is in jail." That's LOYALTY.
When Richard Nixon was at the lowest ebb of his presidency, at the nadir of Watergate, he got a letter from Harold Macmillan, the former prime minister of England. The letter read, in part, "I feel impelled, in view of our long friendship, to send you a message of sympathy and good will. I trust that these clouds may soon roll away."
When Macmillan died a while later, Richard Nixon wrote a tribute to him in "The Times of London. Among the things he remembered about the prime minister was his letter of friendship. " What you learn when you fail," Nixon wrote, "is that you hear from your friends." Your Loyal Friends.
Loyalty is the heart and soul of any commitment friendship. This is probably why it seems so much more horrible that Jesus was betrayed by a friend than it would have seemed if a stranger had turned him in. So much more monstrous that Caesar was stabbed in the back by his friend Brutus than had he been stabbed by Cassius, whom Caesar did not trust anyway.
LOYALTY is the consistency that gives friendship a toughness to survive when it costs a person something to stick with a friend.
Commitment is About Caring.
Caring for a friend is the heart of commitment. To care is to invest one's self in a friend's fortune. If I care for you as my friend, whatever happens to you happens to me, when sadness hits you it hits me too, when tragedy wallops you it wallops me, when something terrific happens to you I celebrate no matter where I happens to be. What happens to you matters a lot to me, it concerns me, it makes a genuine difference to my own life. This is what care is about: investment in each other.
Caring is a concerto with infinite variations, but consider two of them.
To care is to make for friends, interrupt our work schedules, put aside Saturday chores, have breakfast with a friends instead of going to church. We don't have this kind if time to give many friends. And we don't have the energy. Some of us can manage time for only one or two really close friends. Not many of us can do justice to more than three.
To care is to be honest with friends. A friend is not idol. Nor is a friend an uncritical fan. Friendship cannot survived long on benevolent fakery, nor do friends stay friends for long when one of them uses flattery to win friendshio. For friendship to last we need to care enough to be honest. Of course, the caring has to be transparent in our honesty, honesty without caring can ruin friendship. But if we care, we will be honest.
Commitment is About Accepting a Friend's claim on us.
A friend has a right to expect us to do things for her that we would not do for just anyone: give her special consideration, do her special favors, show her special concern, go the extra mile to be with her. And if you ask her, "Why should I?" She has every right to reply, "Just because I'm your Friend."
Friends play favorites, the way parents favor their children above their neighbors children. That's what friendship is about. And they should expect it from each other. They have a claim on it.
A story of friendship with CAL and JOHN they were very closed friend until CAL died.
They both meet in the registration line at Calvin College, where CAL back from the war, was enrolling as a freshman born out of due time. They both had a hunch, then and there, that they might hit it off.
There friendship took time to take root, of course, and there were dry spells, but it grew, and they finally became committed friends. They stayed as best friends for twenty-five years, until cancer discover to CAL and killed him.
They never said much about there friendship until just before CAL died.
John lived in California the time CAL diagnose with cancer. He got cancer in his liver that the surgeons could not cut away. The doctor said over the phone to John, If you wanted to talk with CAL before he died get back to Michigan pretty quickly. So JOHN got on a flight to Grand Rapids the next day, and spent a week with him in his hospital room, talking about a lot of things they had never talked about before.
JOHN told CAL that he was grateful to God that he had been his friend for so long. CAL also told JOHN he was grateful too. And they cried together.
They never spoke a vow. Never use the word commitment. And yet there friendship lasted because they are committed to each other. A thousand commitments, little ones, again and again, as we had occasion to make them.
I think that to last for any time at all, any friendship needs commitment.
Still even committed friendship can die. And something in us wants a good friendship to last for life.
We want a lasting friendship as much as we want a lasting lover. Even more, sometimes.
But friendship does not seem to be meant to last forever, not when it is blended only of the three classic ingredients: AFFECTION, ADVANTAGE, and ADMIRATION. The more reason, then, to remember that commitment is the one thing we can add to ordinary friendship to make it last longer, sometimes for life.
Our hearts tell us that friendship ought to last forever. And the longings we have for lasting friendships may be a hint that we are meant for them after all, that the day will come when every good friendship lasts forever.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Bread:
Psalms 11:1-7
[1]I trust in the Lord for protection.
So why do you say to me,
“Fly like a bird to the mountains for safety!
[2]The wicked are stringing their bows
and fitting their arrows on the bowstrings.
They shoot from the shadows
at those whose hearts are right.
[3]The foundations of law and order have collapsed.
What can the righteous do?”
[4]But the Lord is in his holy Temple;
the Lord still rules from heaven.
He watches everyone closely,
examining every person on earth.
[5]The Lord examines both the righteous and the wicked.
He hates those who love violence.
[6]He will rain down blazing coals and burning sulfur on the wicked,
punishing them with scorching winds.
[7]For the righteous lord loves justice.
The virtuous will see his face.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy the day
Making Friendships That Last
We all want someone who knows us better than anyone else does, and yet accepts us, enjoys us, needs us, holds nothing back from us, keeps our secrets, and is there for us when we want to be near him.
We all seem to need at least one close friend. Even people who believe they ought to love everybody need special people they want to be close to just because they like them. And are liked by them. It's different from charity; we ought to feel charity for needy people. But we want somebody as a close friend because we like her, not because she needs our kindness.
I'm talking about a close friend, a best friend, not a casual friend or a friendly acquaintance. It's hard to describe the precise difference between a close friend and a casual friend. But this doesn't matter much because if you have a close friend, you will know the difference.
It's a matter of preference. A close friend is somebody who prefers to have us around, is partial to us, makes us his favorite. We talk about things together we don't talk about with other people. We do things together that we don't want to do with anyone else, at least not as much as we want to do them with each other. Friends stick with their favorites; that's the way of friendship; it always discriminates.
There is a friend that sticks to us closed than a brother, the Bible says, telling us as much about brothers as it does about friends. Not a surprising revelation, in fact, because most friends do stick closer to us than brothers do, or sisters.
But is there a friend who lasts a long as a brother does? Maybe until death? Are we expecting too much when we Wang close friend to be our friends forever in a world where almost everything is only for the time being?
We Don't Really Expect Friendship To Last Forever
Even the way we become friends is a hint that we do not believe that they are meant to last forever.
For instance, we don't usually arrange a ceremony to begin a friendship with solemn vows. Fancy asking the Minister to arrange a "Friendship Ceremony" for you at the church. Telling you want a high church service, a cleric well robed, a grand organ, with the slow strains coaxing both of you, arm in arm, as befits friends; toward the altar, before which the two of you will vow a solemn covenant of friendship "until death do us part". A traditional Minister will probably think you are a bit crazy, but will tell you in sympathetic tones, " I surely do respect your feelings". But that sort of thing is not done in this church.
It happened once in a while, in the olden days, that friends vowed to be friends, no matter what. Maybe you remember the Biblical story of Jonathan and David, and how they took and oath to friendship forever. "Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him...." And they both banked on that sweet swearing when the times turned treacherous and friendship was tested by blood. A great story, and worth thinking about; maybe it would help friends to stay together always if they swore an oath at the beginning.
But it isn't the way most of us get to be friends. We are more likely to stray into friendship, fumble into it almost by accident. We meet, needy, ready for a friend, and we feel each othet's pulse, delicately, discreetly, as the openings come. We look each other over, discover that we talk the same language, that we agree on what is important in life, that we like to do the same sorts of things, and that we get special satisfaction from doing them with each other. And so we fumble into friendship just by hitting it off.
It is the same when casual friends become best friends; we do not step beyond the casual stage into best friendships the way people move from being lovers to becoming wife and husband. We get to be best friends, as Lillian Rubin notes in her book "JUST FRIENDS", by a kind of grafting and a growing together as we learn to trust each other, feel safe with each other, understand each other, admire each other, maybe even envy each other, and simply expect each other to be there to do things we especially like to do together.
If a time comes when we don't feel safe in it anymore, can't count on each other, get too involved with other relationships, maybe fall in love and get married, we gradually remove the life support systems and let the friendship die, let it die with dignity if we are lucky, but die anyhow.
And when it dies neither of us feels that we have violated a sacred commitment. Preachers do not tell us that the country is going to the dogs because of the decline of friendship. Friendship die and nobody clucks a more cluck. Nor do we formalize the ending of friendships. Popes do not annul friendships, the courts do not issue a decree of divorce between friends. All this suggests that we do not really expect friendships to last permanently.
And after all, maybe friendship is not really the sort of relationship that is meant to last?
Are Friendships Ever Forever?
What goes into the making of any friendship? What are the ingredients that mesh ordinary people into this wonderful, this tender, this too fragile relationship? And why can't we count on it to last?
There are three kinds of friendship, as Aristotle saw it. One of them is a friendship based on affection: friends like each other and enjoy each other. Another is a friendship based on usefulness: friends do things for each other. And a third kind is based on character: friends admire each other.
I think every real friendship is a mixture of all three ingredients. It's just that the blend changes from one friendship to another. But there is a lot to say for Aristotle's list, enough anyway to see why none of his three kinds of friendship can last long if it doesn't have commitment as the bonding agent. Let's look at each of them.
Friendships of Affection: We Like Each Other
Someone gets special pleasure out of being in your company. Your presence adds to her enjoyment of whatever she is doing with you, you are a joy to her. And you make her feel better. You are a comfort to her. This is affection, and it makes for close friends.
Maybe it is just the sort of person you are, your personality, your style; it blends well with the sort of person she is. She feels comfortable with you, they way a person gets comfortable with an old shoe; the longer you are around, the better you fit. You make a friend feel good in almost any situation.
She may rate other people higher on the character scale, and you may not be the smartest person she knows; no matter, she likes being with you, even if she isn't sure why.
It isn't as if she looks in your eyes and tells you that she really likes being with you. In fact, she doesn't think about you much when she is with you, just as she doesn't think about the comfortable shoes she's wearing. You and she are concentrating on your tennis shots. Or on getting a party organized. Maybe you are arguing about why God allows so much pain in the world, or you are just rooting for your kids at a soccer game. The point is that you get pleasure out of doing these things with each other. And at the end of a long afternoon, you may just say" That was good", let's do it again."
And we are not close friends just because we like doing the same things. I have known people who liked coffee as much as I do, but they are the last persons with whom I would want to have a coffee. There has something about the person himself that makes doing something fun because I am doing it with him.
We like each other, of course. If I wanted to be with you because I liked you, and you were only willing to be with me because you felt sorry for me, we couldn't be friends. Reciprocity is the key.
Too bad liking each other a lot can't make friendships last for life. Two things get in the way.
For one thing, even best friends move to new jobs in new locations, and get too far apart to play together or work together. So they find new people in their new place, people whom they like and with whom they enjoy doing things. Alvin Toffler warns us, in Future Shock, that in the future- which has since become the present-all our friendships would be ad hoc: here, now, and over with when the company sends one of us to another plant, or when we join another church or move to another neighborhood. Friendship for this place, this time, and as long as we stay put. But not much longer.
For another thing, friends change, and they may discover that they have stopped liking the new version of each other. Everybody's friend has something unlikable sneaking about in her personality. We discover it in each other sooner or later, and sometimes it annoys us too much to put with it. Jane liked a lot of things about her friend Thelma, even though she was forever borrowing her things and hardly ever returned them. But she's tired of having to ask her to give them back, and her nagging gradually siphoned the pleasure out of their friendship for both of them. So, as they stopped liking each other, they gradually slipped out of friendship.
Aristotle says in his Ethics that friendships of affection fade always "as soon as the reasons for which the friends loved each other no longer present themselves." And such thought led Gilbert Meilander glumly, with a touch of exaggeration, to put it on the line, in his book, Friendship: "Fidelity and friendship are incompatible."
In any case, liking each other is not enough to turn two people into like-long friends. Lifelong friendship need commitment.
Friendships of Usefulness: We Do Things For Each Other
Good friends do favors for each other. Most of my friends do more for me than I do for them. Not more than I want to do for them. But more than I can do for them. So being their friend is an advantage for me. They are not my friends because they do me favors; they want to do me favors because they are my friends.
But some people become friends simply because of what they can do for each other. Business friends, for instance. They give each other tax advice and investment tips. They help each other make contacts at conventions. They exchange notes on where to buy equipment at discount, and they gossip about competitors. What an advantage to have one another as friends!
But that is about as far as it goes. They don't share each other's family problems. Henry Morton, who runs a computer store, is a friend of Gerry Mansfield, a sales representative at IBM; they do a lot for each other. But Henry never tells Gerry that his heart is breaking because his teenage daughter is pregnant. And Sally Nordew, who has her own accounting firm, is a friend of Richard Holbert, a tax attorney; they both benefit from their relationship. But Sally sees Richard only over a lunch once a week or so, and she never tells him that she is worried sick that she might have cancer.
Some people make friends only with people who can be useful to them. Franklin D. Roosevelt loved to have people around him, cronies, politicians, intellectuals, all kinds. But we are told that he made friends only with people who could help him keep his rendezvous with destiny. One historian (Doris Kearns Goodwin, in the FITZGERALDS and the Kennedys) says of him: "At bottom, for all his warmt and capacity to make friends instantly, FDR was a man without a deep commitment to anyone. He enjoyed people....but he rarely gave himself to them." Maybe the great and powerful people of the world pay for being great and powerful by missing out on committed friendship.
Friendships of usefulness can be flavored with feelings of affection. They can even become intimate. But getting close is not the same as being committed.
Being useful to each other keeps two people together only as long as the advantage is enjoyed by both of them, and doesn't get too ones-sided. And the trade-off eventually does get uneven. One of the friends ends up doing a lot more for his friends than his friend does for him. Or her. One of them may get fired, or lose his clout, and not be able to do much for the other. When it happens his friends may stop calling, never have time for lunch, and a chill wind may blow the friendship away.
These friendships do not depend on what people are to each other, but on what they do for each other. They are based on a kind of service contract; the friend who is giving more service than he is getting is free to cancel the contract with honor. So this is one reason why friendships based on reciprocated services don't usually last for life. They lack personal commitment.
Friendships of Character: We Admire Each Other
I admire most of my friends. I even envy them; I wish I had some of their good qualities. In fact, I don't think I would want to be friends with people who did not have something about them that I admired.
But admiration needs to be shared. I like people whom I admire to admire me as well. Admire at least something about me. Otherwise it's hard for me to be their friend.
I have a good friend whom everyone admires. One reason that everyone admires him is that he has a radar in his mind that picks up something worthy beneath the skin of almost everyone he knows, and he finds loving ways to tell them what sorts of nice things he sees in them. But what makes me his friend and not his fan is that he sees good stuff in me too, and now and then he let's me know what he sees.
If I admired a person who saw nothing in me worth admiring, I could be his fan. Maybe even his disciple. But not his friend. To be friends we need to admire each other.
Aristotle thought that friends who admire each other's character are likely to have a lasting friendship. Why? Because character doesn't change very much. Good people do not usually become bad people. So if we are friends because we admire each other's character, we could be friends for life.
But not even mutual admiration is, by itself, enough to keep a friendship alive that long. For one thing, we discover somewhere along the line that even people we admire have feet of clay. The best of us is flawed. Our flaws show through eventually; we disappoint our friends, and sometimes their disappointment hurts enough to wound our friendship. Or even worse, we may discover that the traits we so much admired were put-ons, cosmetics hiding a shaddy interior. And we cannot count on any friendship to survive the feeling of being conned.
Besides, even friends who admire each other a lot drift apart when one of them moves to another part of the country. If I stay in close touch, our friendship is likely to die of malnutrition, with dignity maybe, and peacefully, but with the same result as any dying. I may still admire him, but I would admire him as a person who used to be my friend.
I feel a good deal of melancholy when I think of it, but it is true that we cannot count on mutual admiration to make friendships last forever, any more than we can expect friendships to last because friends like each other or are useful to each other. If friendships like these do happen to last a lifetime, it is probably because they are more than friendships of affection, or usefulness, or admiration. Most likely, they are held together because the friends are committed to each other.
Any thoughts?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Devotional:
When trials enter our lives, be encouraged, that these moments are a temporary test.
God promises that though we face hard times in this life, His loved ones will receive the crown of life.
It is a blessing when God meets us in difficulty, grows our character, and lets us know He is faithful in every situation.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy life today...Happy sunday
Our Daily Devotion:
You are God’s masterpiece.
Through you, He shows kindness and mercy to this world.
Don’t underestimate how valuable you are.
You are God’s loved one, prized creation and He has good works for you to do.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy the day
Daily Devotional:
This verse points to a need for focused Christian living. It is so easy to get distracted by our responsibilities, entertainment, and all the noise around us.
We have to refocus our lives so we are able to invest in the things that truly matter.
What matters most? We answer that question by allowing the teachings of the Bible and the Holy Spirit that should lead us.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy the day
Creating Our Own Identity
What life is about for most of us is a search for ourselves. We want to know who we are. And how to define ourselves to others. So we spend our lives finding out.
We are looking for a personal hub that holds us together as the wheels of our lives keep turning.
We CHANGE, we accept CHANGE, we want CHANGE. No healthy person wants to be stuck forever with what he or she was in the past. Or is now. If we don't CHANGE we get stale, complacent, and mired in our sins and miseries. But if we don't hold ourselves together while we CHANGE, we lose our balance.
Let me speak for myself. I want my life to be more like a continuous line__than a series of unconnected dots.....
A curved line, yes, a line that twists and turns around a thousand corners, but still, somehow, stays connected all the while.
I want a links and contacts between my yesterdays and my tomorrows. Growth, yes, change, of course, but what a zany life it would be if I couldn't recognize my real self in Tue images of my past.
It is a miracle, sort of, that the boy I see on a wrinkled snapshot, that scrawny matchstick with pants on, skinny as a baby sparrow, is actually the same person as the silver old bird writing this sentence. How remarkable, and yet how important to me, that I and that clothespole are one and the same person.
But the CHANGES we pass through are not the only reason we keep searching for the abiding self we are.
We are so confoundingly complicated. And confused.
One of me is a wily rake; the other is a simple saint. One of me is laughingly healthy; the other is a pouting neurotic. One of me is romantic, sighing for the perfect love; the other is a practical realist, content to live faithfully, if imperfectly. One of me is vulgar enough to shock my best friends; the other is refined enough to get along in all the proper places. One of me is a true believer; the other is a wondering doubter. I carry such contradictions within myself that I must confuse the angels.
But where is the real me?
I would know my real self better if I could just be more consistent, more simple, put together so all the parts nicely fit.
Where can we find our enduring selves beneath all our metamorphoses and conflicts?
In have come to the conclusion that we find our real self in the continuing stories we are writing with our lives.
We are all writing our stories; and each of us has to write his or her own. I cannot write my parents' stories, any more than they could have written mine. I cannot write my children's stories, though there have been times that I have wanted to. I can write only mine.
The trick is to write a continuing story. A story with a plot that has a central character. Not a collection of unconnected episodes about a collection of unconnected characters.
Writing a continuing story out of my life depends on whether I dare to make commitments to people and care enough to keep the commitments I make. And whether I accept other people's commitments to me as gifts that contribute to my story.
In fact, who we are always begins with somebody's commitment to us.
Who am I? I am Betty Palaran's boy. I have an identity because a woman(my mother) committed herself to me when I was "mewling and puking" in her arms, a sickly, bawling, undernourished, skin-and-bones baby. I am somebody because a woman was there for me, touching me, feeding me, warming me, hushing me, and letting me believe that she would be there for me again, and again, when I needed her.
And I have a self because of the woman who kept her commitment to me.
It is not as though I always accepted her commitment to me as the raw material for the beginning of my story. I often demanded-as a condition for accepting her-that she be a different person than the real, complicated human beings she was.
I did not want her to be a woman who could not provide me to be a father. I did not want her to be gone away from home, working so hard and getting so tired that she had to dig terribly deep to mine enough energy for me when she was at hand. And I did not want her to think so poorly of herself that she could not find it in her to permit me to think well of myself. I wanted her to fit my fantasies of what a mother should be like.
But I grew up and put away my childish yen to recreate my one and only mother into something she never had been or could have been. I honor her as the one who made a commitment of care to me and kept it even when keeping it was a titanic challenge for her. I consider her as God's way of beginning my story with her commitment.
So, the first scene in the story of my life defines me forever: I am the skinny ugly kid to whom Betty (my mom) committed herself.
But I'm also writing my story out of my own commitments to other people.
Whenever I make an important commitment to a person, I begin a new chapter in my story. I will not know the full meaning of my commitment until I have finish my life story.
"The ultimate meaning....of the promise I make today can be clear only at the end of my life, and the meaning of my life at its end will be different because I made this promise today." According to MARGARET FARLEY.
When I make my commitment, I put myself in a stream that flows in a certain direction. I won't know for sure until I get to the end what it really meant when I entered the stream.
What finally comes of our commitments really depends on a thousand small choices we make in the process of keeping them.
Any thoughts?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Daily Devotional:
If you don't show your love for someone, it may appear to others that they are not loved.
Are you sidetracked by your busy day that you're forgetting the little things?
Those little things add up and become powerful enough to send the wrong message.
Overcome this and send a loving message. What speaks to your loved one?
If it's confidence, encourage them. If it's feeling pretty, compliment them. If it's strength, support them.
Fulfilling this law will honor God.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy your day...Blessing
Memory is the Mysterious PoWer
It is care that also keeps bright the memory of yesterday's desires. Memory is the Mysterious power to resurrect in October a desire that died in April. A memory is a living thing, it blends what was with what is now. And when the winds of desire are not strong enough to "twirl one red leaf", memory sweetens what is with the scent of what used to be. And committed love says "Thanks for the memory". Let me tell you of the true loves of Eric Zorg-of his desiring love and his committed love. It will make everything clear.
Eric loved his wife, Karen, for fifteen years in an idyll of yeasty desire.
Let is be said in honesty that jealousy sometimes played bad tricks on them in the darker nooks of their Eros. Still, it is true that Eric felt the flow of his desire moving like a white water rapid toward Karen alone, toward all she embodied in the flexuous tautness of her flesh and all she ensouled in the breezy freedom of her spirit.
They love each other well.
But five years ago Karen's springhtly sexuality was slackened a step by a nettlesome lapse in memory, mostly a forgetting of names, then dates, and then slowly of things so near and precious to her that, in her bright interludes, she knew something was happening to her that she wanted, above all, not to happen.
Early on, before Alzheimer's disease occupied the heartland of her life, she still was able to offer an occasional seductive promise to Eric. And she still did her first mate's chores on their thirty-five-footer, her fumbling with the gear only making her salty grit the more precious in his eyes, while they skimmed the lazy Pacific swells from Catalina Island back to Marina Del Rey. But that was more than four years ago, when weekends on the ocean felt like an hour spent too soon.
Now every hour is a shadowed day.
Karen's once vital body and luminous spirit no longer signal to Eric that he is of all men most favored. She does not talk anymore; Eric calls her Karen, but the name is a scratch of sound to her now, and she makes no answer to it.
Eric maneuvers small spoonfuls of bland mush into her mouth several times each day, playing gentle tricks on her mouth to get the food inside, only to have her spit half of it, half munched, on her baby bib. He cleans her diapers and wakes often during the night to cover her shoulders with the blanket she has tossed off in her fidgety sleep. Does she dream? Does she know Eric is there? That he who is there is Eric? She cannot tell.
He has moved his office into his house, and works out of it there now, nagging and nursing his insurance accounts while keeping one eye on Karen, in case she is seized by one of her sudden, strange urges to wander, sometimes far, where no one knows her, outside the house. His friends tell him he should put Karen in an institution.
What is there in the fabric of this man, this ordinary man who still has the same deep desires all ordinary men have, what is there that binds him to the side of this mockery of the woman who promised once that she would satisfy his desires forever?
He has so much right to happiness as any other man. Why does he not shuffle her off to professional custodians, and seek a new love to meet his unslaked desires? What compels him to stay with Karen in the dawnless darkness of her soul's lingering night?
Committed love, and only that, is what keeps Eric at her side. He cares for Karen.
She calls out a need she cannot speak and he answers back with a care he cannot explain. Care, love's survivor of desires that died with a shinning yesterday, is the miracle behind Eric's caring presence in his darker today.
Desire is spent. There is nothing of her he desires. How could he desire this stranger, this mewling infant who spits up on her pillow? It is care for a restless body whose irrational spirit seems sometimes to mock him like a demon chorting over a lost soul.
It is care that keeps respect for her.
He respects the God-like being hidden somewhere inside this frail mindless form of a woman to whom he once said those most daring words: I will be there with you. He cannot see her real self, feel he'd magic, or hear her music anymore. He just believes that she is there, ravaged but not destroyed by the Alzheimer syndrome.
And it is with care that he remembers her.
What he remembers is alive as the love that fulfilled hi past. Who she was dances with what she is now. His life with the real Karen is not dead. It is alive in the flitting images on the screen of his remembrance. His memory gives him a savory after-taste of what he once desired and she once gave him.
There is cynics who say that Eric only does what he does because he knows he will be miserable still if he does anything else; he is only choosing the lesser of two miseries. Nothing heroic about that. Maybe so. And it is true that he sometimes rages in his soul's dark room, stifling complaints to a silent God too long gone on leave of absence, muffling a wish he dares not utter, a prayer for Karen to die.
Committed love is seldom pure; we will not have it without a tangle of conflicting cries, without muttering our muffled complaints. It is always alloyed with the coarser stuff of unsatisfied desires. But even compromised, it is the secret power for sticking with what we are stuck with when the fun has gone out of it and we know that sorrow may stay to the end.
What I've said in this chapter is simple, elemental, and a foundational for everything else that is still to be said. Commitment is a way of loving as the fire of desire slowly burns down, and we feel a little cheated because the best thing we have ever wanted is passing away. But caring is commitment's way of loving, not getting what someone promises us, but giving what someone needs. And when respect and good memories are added to care, we have the makings of enduring love. The makings of a love that lasts and more, a love that makes life enduringly beautiful.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Devotional:
Children as true possessions of the Lord have such incredible value.
As parents, caregivers, grandparents, and adults with influence we cannot take our calling to be shepherds of their hearts lightly.
When we really consider our lives, what of our many investments do we expect to outlive us?
Which of these pursuits hold true value? Passing on a heritage that included the hope of Heaven, faith in a God that cares for us, and the love of Jesus matters so much more than almost anything else we place our time and efforts into.
It is a gift to be able to pass on God’s love to the next generation.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy the Day...Blessing
The Only Way to Make Love Last
I once thought of James Ettison as a not-very-profound person, but it was ungenerous of me to think of him that way. James was a salesman, on the road a good deal, and I think I envied him a little when a gentle and lovely woman fell in love with him. Her name is Alice, and he was as sure as a human being could be about anything that she would bring him all of his deepest desires.
They got, and settled snugly, maybe smugly, into happiness. But about two years, on a cold November night before the snow had come, Alice car skidded on a stretch of ice that had formed unnoticed beneath a bridge on a two-way stretch of highway, and she ran head on, full speed, into the car coming from the other direction.
Alice survived. After tilting toward death for a year, she gave signs of living again, and she did. But she was never the same. She was all but paralyzed from the hips downward. Her memory was spotty and selective, and she uttered sounds that James had to learn to translate the way a person learns a new language. As months slithered into years, the past crept back with fits and starts into Alice's memory, which, in some ways, made life harder for her, because then she became that much more conscious of her other handicaps. She bore them like a smiling angel most of the time, but unpredictably, out of the blue, she sometimes, for weeks on end, was smothered by depression.
James quit his traveling job right after the accident, got some work near home, and made a nearly full-time vocation of taking care of Alice, once so wonderful. Nobody ever heard a discouraging word from his corner, and the man once a spiritual lightweight showed he was a world-class keeper of commitment.
Alice died fifteen years or so after that one terrible November night, and somebody asked James how he had done it all so patiently when he had gotten such a poor smidgen of everything he had hoped Alice would give to him. He said he had never thought to ask, though he had sometimes asked God why Alice was stuck with living and got nothing back from it.
But pressed a little, he said it: "I just loved her."
What wondrous love is this that stays when deepest desires go begging?
Then there is Emily and Jason. They had kept a passion stoked, but in bounds, for ten years when, out of nowhere, a virus nobody talks about invaded Jason's loins and knocked his sexual faculties out of connubial commission, rendered him unqualified for the higher registers of sexual love. A microscopic killer, deadly to sex, and no wonder drug to kill it. But Emily has lived with Jason now for fifteen years of noncoital marriage, and if you were to ask her how she manages, I know that she would tell you no more and no less than this "I Love him".
What wondrous love is this stays after the desires of love are denied?
A lot of our loving is a magnificent desire. Someone ignites desires in us and then holds out a promise that he or she can satisfy them. They are desires as deep and strong as we have ever felt. Or can feel. Desires for intimate communion, for being one with another person, totally one, spiritually, sexually one, so that the other can fill us and make us complete.
When a person becomes our hope for what we most wondrously desire, we are in love. And the love we are in is desiring love. It is one of God's better inventions. No one should go through life without it.
Desiring love is a fragile flame, burning bright for a springtime, maybe through summer. But then there is a love we call committed love. It is the love that stays alive through the longest winter.
Human love moves us in two directions, like two currents in a single river, each flowing on its own course.
One love is the current of desire; the other love is the current of commitment.
The current of desiring love is drawn toward a promise; it is drawn toward the person who promises to fulfill our deep desires. Nathaniel Branden, in his book "What Love Asks of Us", defines love as self-centered desire: " Love is the highest, the most intense expression of the....for me, 'good for me' beneficial to my life' human disposition.
The current of commitment moves from a promise; it is kept going by a promise to keep on loving when our loving is not satisfying our desires. Marie-Leon Ramlot, in the French Vocabulary of Biblical Theology, fixes on the less selfish way of promised love: "Promise is one of the key words of the language of love. To promise is to pledge one's power and one's faithfulness...the commitment of the heart and the generosity of faith."
Two currents. Two direction. Yet both are the currents of love.
Consider for the moment the moods of the first current, desiring love.
Love delights in her when she is near.
Love longs for her when she is gone.
Love hungers for the touch of her flesh.
Love thirsts for embrace in her spirit.
Love lives by hope that she will be all she promises to me.
Love dies when she will not be for me.
What I hoped that she would be.
The love of desire! What a gift it is.
Too bad it doesn't last. But it doesn't, not for most people, not after the blessed heat of it's early summer days. If someone should promise to desire you forever, don't stake your pension on it. Love born of desire is seldom forever.
The intimate companionship of committed love is what can last a lifetime.
But how do we love another person with a committed love? It is just raw moral fiber that holds us in a relationship no matter how badly it disappoints us? Sticking with what we are stuck with until a merciful death parts us: is this commitment love?
Yes, in a way, it can be something like a will to survive, sometimes, when life gets terribly tough, and one part of us wants to pack up and leave the scene.
Committed love is a will to give a chance at permanent tenure. But gutsy sticking is not what committed love is all about.
Commitments build the strong that hold up a partnership. But these strong outer walls are important only because an inner life of caring love can be nurtured inside them. The walls give care a structure for survival. Sticking it out provides a place for love to come home to after it has wandered a while. And maybe lost its way. But making it last is only a way of giving people a chance to make it good.
What, then, is there to committed love besides sticking to a relationship? What else does commitment do to keep love alive and well-or to heal it when it gets sick-or maybe to resurrect it when it has died?
Committed love is a paradoxical power. Paradoxical? Yes. Paradoxical, because it is power to surrender. A power to surrender? Yes, power, because sometimes it takes a lot of strength to surrender.
But everything depends on what you surrender.
Committed love
Is a power to surrender our right to get what we desire so that the person we love can get what he or she needs.
Let's slow down here and take the last sentence in bits. We surrender our right. Our right to what we desire. For the sake of the need the other person has. When my desire conflicts with your need, I will opt for your needs-if my love is committed love.
We are talking about a love that reaches out beyond our own wants into the other person's needs. Keeps reaching. Keeps trying to understand what the other's real needs are, keeps looking for them, asking about them, listening for the coded messages, waiting for the right time for plain words, staying there with her. Because I know that she, like me, has deep, deep needs that leave her poor of spirit if they are not met.
Committed love
Is for the winter of life's unfairness, when we feel drained of s dream that didn't come-true, for the wormwood season of our desire's disillusion. Careful now, we must not misunderstand the terms of surrender.
Committed Love
Is not the surrender of our needs for the sake of the other person's desires.
Committed Love
Does not turn us into stooges for another person's whims-obedient servants of his or her brutality-suckers of his or her betrayals. Nor is it a set-up for putdowns.
But sometimes when I surrender my right to have what I desire, I can feel as if I am surrendering one of my truest needs. I need help to see the real difference.
Do you really need a voluptous sex life or do you only want it badly? Do you really need somebody fascinating to talk to you every night or do you only want it badly? Do you really need a partner who makes you feel like a terrific human being or do you only want one?
Well, if not the Alleluia Chorus at every bedding down, at least Wine Kliene Nachtmusik for you now and then. And if not somebody who makes scintillating conversation every night before the burning heart, how about one who smiles your way over a TV dinner? And if not a partner who lifts your self-esteem a couple of notches at every breakfast, at least one who doesn't clobber your self-image in front of company. Not asking too much.
Desiring love does not always reach for the sky. It can make accomodations. Most of us settle for a decent earthly compromise, so long as our cup is at least half-full.
The question is, how can committed love keep flowing when the current of desiring love stops running our way? The answer is, by blending desire with care. Care comes quietly alive when the winds of desire hush, and I hear the whisper of need. But care has lyrics of its own.
Care is love's investment in another person's needs.
Care is love's flexibility to go where another needs to go.
Care is love's firmness to stay close by when the other cannot move.
Care is love's generosity to give when the other speaks of needs.
Care is love's presence when being there matters most.
Care is love's power to survive the death of desire.
The miracle of care is that when I have gotten over my unfilled desires, I discover that taking care is gratifying, in a very different way, but just as gratifying in its way as expected pleasure is. Not as exciting, not as erotic, not as crazy making either, but in its own way more fulfilling over the long haul. Her needs become my desires. This is what loving care, caring love, is about.
Caring Love
Is more than doing things for someone. Care is also respect that holds back and let's another be.
Caring Love
Respects her right to be her very real self, unshadowed by me, in the light of the sun that shines equally bright on us both. It knows that she has a valid claim to be left alone to be who and what she is. It respects her inalienable right to be treated with honor and reverence even when desiring love for her is dead or dying.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Daily Devotional
Sometimes emotions can get the best of us and cause us to say words we don't truly mean.
Or we are charged with emotions and choose words with different implications than we intended.
When you get in this state do your best to stabilize and then try to communicate emotions when you can better watch your tongue.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy the day...
Our Daily Devotional:
For many of us we live in comfortable homes with stresses that come with living a happy and successful American life.
God calls us to be more than comfortable.
The religion that God wants for us stretches us, requires faith that we didn’t know we had, and brings us to otherwise scary places.
We are all called to love those in distress. Start asking God in what new way would He have you love beyond reason.
He will give you a heart to meet a need you didn’t even know existed and it’ll change your life in the best kind of way.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy life today...
Our Daily Bread:
In Christ we have a new identity and the beautiful thing about the transformation that God offers us is that it gives him great pleasure.
He is thrilled to welcome us into His family as his adopted ones. It was His great plan from the beginning.
Be thankful today that you have been given an eternal family through Jesus.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy the day....Blessed Sunday to all
Our Daily Bread:
God’s message of grace can be traced back to the beginnings of human history.
Even when God approaches Cain, one of the original sinners, He encourages him! He tells Cain that He will be accepted if he does the right thing. Essentially, God pleads with Cain, asking him to choose God, choose to do this thing the right way.
We always have a choice. It is in our power to do what is right.
Watch out for sin and choose to not let it be your master.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy the day
When Sarai become Sarah
Genesis 17:15-16 15]
15]God also said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah.
16] I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations, kings of peoples will come from her." God also changed Sarai's name to Sarah to remind Abraham that God will fulfill His promises not through Hagar and his son Ishmael but Sarai's own son.
Genesis 17:17-22
However, Abraham thought they were too old to have a son, so he prayed for Ishmael instead.
Abraham said to God:
Genesis 17:18 18]
"If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!"
But God said:
Genesis 17:19-21 19]
Yes but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him.
20] And as for Ishmael,..I will surely bless him, I will make him fruitful and will greatly increase his numbers... I will make him into a great nation.
21] But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year." Abraham innocently asked God to fulfill his promises to Ishmael instead, but God could not be tempted! Abraham will have a son by Sarah and will name him Isaac. God does not change His mind about His promises. He will always fulfill His promises for God cannot be tempted to lie. However, because Abraham prayed for Ishmael, God will also bless him and make him Ishmael into a great nation. But God will fulfill His covenant through Isaac as He promised.
Genesis 18:1-2
After a time, God appeared to Abraham again near the great trees of Mamre while Abraham was resting.
Genesis 18:2
Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground. Abraham welcomed and served them.
Then the Lord said:
Genesis 18:10 10]
I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son." God promised to be back and fulfill His promise. Do you think God would fulfill His promise? Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
The Positive Purpose Behind Personal Commitments
The truth is that Peter was not all that brilliant, and he probably would not have made it at medical school if Eloise hadn't nagged him through his endless exams while she earned rent and grocery money doing night duty as a nurse in the intensive care unit at Butterworth Hospital.
He and Eloise had some good times and some bad times together since Peter started practicing internal medicine ten years ago at a total care clinic in Amherst, Massachusetts. The best times, for Eloise, were the August weeks they spent at her father's cabin off the coast of southern Maine. The worst times were when she was pregnant, always very sick, not much fun to be with, and during which Peter would devote his spare time to a meaningful personal relationship he was cultivating, nothing sexual, mind you, but still fairly intimate, with a beautiful Amherst woman who was under his tender care for a chronic back-ache. In between the best and worst times were the times of muddling through the bringing up of two boys, refining their tennis serves, all while Peter needled his narrow way into a lucrative pocket of the well-paid medical fraternity of well-kept Amherst.
But then Peter actually fell in love, a freefall into the affections of one of those gifted women who get more exciting as they get older, a late bloomer, and a survivor who had entered law school at thirty-five after her divorce -mostly to prove to her ex-husband that she was more than equal to him -and had found herself in not time at all making a lot of money writing up trusts for rich folks trying to preserve their legacies. Endowed with a strong mouth, narrow nose, and long legs, she strode around in her Burberry coat and scarf, as if she were always just on time for an important appointment. But she never seemed hassled. Not only one to be indirect, blunt may be the word, she let Peter know soon enough that what she wanted from him was very close relationship. Stunned that an elegant woman like her was attracted to him, Peter fall in love, and out of commitment.
Eloise agreed a little too quickly with Peter that the blossom of their love had wilted into mutual toleration. She had gotten frumpy, she knew it, her intellectual curiosity had never been feverish, and the erotic current that in days almost forgotten had flown through their connected circuits had turned itself off during her second pregnancy. The apparent stability of their marriage was really a frayed blanket hiding Peter's nagging boredom.
But when Peter told her he wanted to leave and dared to ask for her blessing, he finally raised Eloise's dander.
"My Blessing"? You and that woman will burn in hell before you get my blessing, Peter. You made a commitment to me. You may get your middle-aged kicks from this snotty Amherst witch, but you are committed to me. Doesn't commitment mean anything to you, Peter?
" Commitment? You talk commitment when my happiness is at stake? Our happiness is a lot more important than sticking to a lousy commitment we made lifetime ago. Give me one good reason why I should stuck with it now, just when I finally have something good going for me?"
Why? Why? Just because you made it. That's why."
Is that why we keep commitment's? Just because we made them?
Its not enough reason for my self-maximizer.
Having spelled the beans, I'll have to tell you more about my self-maximizer. He is the gi-getter inside of me who tells me that my first job in life is to realize my potential. I have a simmering potful of uncooked potential within me, and my self-maximizer believes that I have a right, maybe a duty, to bring it to a boil.
My self-maximizer is the part of me that whispers exciting things to me about my untested capacity to feel things I have never felt, experience things I have never experienced, become things I have only dreamt about becoming.
He hints that commitment keeping is a sucker's game-a moral scam to cheat people such as Peter and me out of their last chance for happiness. He tells me that I might be a lot better off if I kept myself free to cut bait and move on if I wasn't catching my legal limit of satisfaction.
When his twin, the commitment keeper inside of me, reminds me that I have promises to keep, my self-maximizer suavely nudges me to invoke the bottom line of happiness: why should I let a mere commitment stand in the way of my inalienable right to the pursuit of total fulfillment?
So, having admitted that my own private self-maximizer tends to take Peter's point of view, I will consider Peter's question as if it were my own: why should Peter, or I or you, put commitments are better people than those who don't.
The virtue of commitment keeping is not its own reward.
I grant that fidelity is an attractive quality in a person. We used to call it a vitue- which means it is one of the qualities we look for in first-rate people. Being a staunch person, a person of fealty, a loyal person, is to have the mark of excellence on you. Staying with sinking ships and losing causes, this is the stuff of virtue. Agreed. But, contrary to pious opinion, virtue is seldom its own reward, and the virtue of commitment keeping never is.
Becoming jut-jawed persons who preen themselves on their moral luster is not the reward we get for sticking to commitments. The reward for commitment keeping is a better kind of life for people who care about each other.
Some people sweat and snort through daily workouts so that they will be fit enough to sweat and snort through the workouts. Why do you jog?" I asked my perspiring friend. "To keep fit," he answered. "And why do you want to keep fit? I asked. So that I can be in shape to jog," he replied. Good enough reason for fanatics, I suppose.
But surely we are not bound to commitments so that we can get in shape to keep our commitments. So that, in turn, we can look good to the connoisseurs of virtue
I know of a man who makes a major production of his commitment keeping. He expects his grateful family to praise him with a morning hymn, "Great is Thy Faithfulness," at every breakfast time.
Everybody in town knows him for his moral character. He gets a loan from the bank, anytime, without collateral, on his reputation as a commitment keeper. Good old dependable Joe.
He reminds Janine, his wife, if his selfless devotion to their marriage, reminds her constantly; it always gives him an advantage. His voice slides into the nasal register, bordering on a sneer, as he reminds her of how he has never given her reason to doubt his fidelity, though, God knows, he has had chances enough.
He let's her know that he sticks around, not because she is worth sticking to, but because he is such a loyal character. So when he struts his commitment -keeping stuff, he ends up leaving Janine feeling like an unwanted woman who is cleaved to only because her husband is too moral to leave her.
Something almost always goes wrong when we keep our commitment out of commitment to our own commitment keeping. French novelist Francois Mauriac tells a story about someone he had the inspiration to call THE WOMAN OF THE PHARISEES. This woman, the grande dame of the valley, very rich in houses and land, was committed to the poor people in her village, visiting them all regularly, always leaving behind a gift suitable to their needs-as she saw them-along with a suggestion that a little more ambition and s little more thrift could improve their situation. She never left s poor family's house without making them feel worse for her having been there.
She flogged them with her commitment to them. And they hated her for the gifts almost as much as they hated themselves for accepting them. What she was committed to was her reputation as a rich woman committed to poor people.
Mauriac's story reminds me of an epitaph written by C.S. Lewis:
Erected by her sorrowing brothers
In memory of Martha Clay.
Here lies one who lived for others.
Now she was peace. And so have they.
In sum, getting to be virtuous is not reason enough to persuade us that commitment keeping is a rung or two higher on the ladder of life's duties than looking out for our own happiness.
What makes commitment keeping worth working at is this: it serves the long term good of people in relationship, people who want to live in caring human community. That's the beginning and the end of it. We can create a good life together only out of trust. And trust, to make it last, needs commitment.
We need to know that people who promise to be with us are really going to be there. If we all lived as strictly free-floating, unfettered, self-enhancing individuals, we would all be left hanging in the vacuum of each other's undependability. We need something firmer.
Commitments give it to us. They create small islands of security for us in our oceans of insecurity. They make enclaves of steadiness in the jungles of change. They give us the only human basis for trusting each other. For counting on each other.
Commitment is the invisible fiber that binds a collection of individuals into a caring community. A large one or a small one. Everything depends on it. Everything from a family reunion to a concord of nations, from calling a committee meeting to founding a nation, from calling a committee meeting to founding a nation, from celebrating high mass to getting a return trip ticket to Pasadena. Not to mention a lasting marriage. Or a good friendship.
Maybe you can have a regime, or a gang, or a crowd, or a prison full of inmates, or even a foreign legion, without commitment, but you cannot have a human community. The only way, anywhere, anytime, create a good human relationship within a caring community is by daring to make and caring to keep commitments to each other.
So my answer to Peter's question -why should I stay with a commitment when happiness calls away? Is the answer I give to my own self-maximizer: the reason for keeping our commitments to each other is that, in the long run, and -as T.S. Eliot reminded us- there is no human life that is not lived in human community.
Let me sum up: the right kind of commitment keeping makes good sense because it is the only way to keep good human relationship alive. And good human relationships make everybody's life better.
Commitments are worth the effort and, sometimes, the sacrifice, because, when all is said and done, people are almost always better off because of them. If we keep them the way they are meant to be kept-with care as well as with consistency -we are laying the foundation for the only kind of life fit for human beings. This is ultimately why commitment keeping is worth a try.
When my persistent self-maximizer asks for one single and sound reason why I should keep my commitments even more than I should maximize myself, I tell him what I have told you: it is better for us, and it makes life better for other people, if we make and keep commitments to each other. But there are more reasons than this. And we have to see how it works out in the fire and smoke of real life, where people are not always able to keep the commitments they have made.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Bread:
Psalms 37:11-20
[11]The lowly will possess the land
and will live in peace and prosperity.
[12]The wicked plot against the godly;
they snarl at them in defiance.
[13]But the Lord just laughs,
for he sees their day of judgment coming.
[14]The wicked draw their swords
and string their bows
to kill the poor and the oppressed,
to slaughter those who do right.
[15]But their swords will stab their own hearts,
and their bows will be broken.
[16]It is better to be godly and have little
than to be evil and rich.
[17]For the strength of the wicked will be shattered,
but the Lord takes care of the godly.
[18]Day by day the lord takes care of the innocent,
and they will receive an inheritance that lasts forever.
[19]They will not be disgraced in hard times;
even in famine they will have more than enough.
[20]But the wicked will die.
The Lord’s enemies are like flowers in a field—
they will disappear like smoke.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy God's grace of the day
The Real Reasons People Keep Commitments
Let's admit, to begin with, that not everyone who sticks with a relationship stays out of loyalty to a commitment.
Some people are just covering their bets. They have too much to lose by separating. So they choose the lesser of two evils, and stick it out.
Some people just gets used to each other. They don't like surprises; they stay with each other because they feel settled in. Comfortable.
She knows when he's coming home, what he will say when he gets in the door, what he drinks before supper and what he is likely to talk about while he eats dinner, how he takes his clothes off-shoes first, shirt next, then socks, and when he is likely to get a notion to make love. He never unsettles her with the shocker that he has changed his mind. She knows what he is going to say, he knows what she is going to say, so mostly, neither bothers.
Oh, one could get cynical about such "commitment". The jaded confessor in the Albert Camus book THE FALL looked at one man's commitment this way: " I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people...and that explains most human commitments....Hurrah then for funerals."
Let the cynic have his say. I put his misanthropic sentiments on record, just to show that there is more than one way to look at some commitments.
But why grouse about settledness? What looks like soul-choking boredom to people who prefer not to know what's coming next, can be gentle settledness for those of us who do better without daily surprises. And settledness wears well. Even if it doesn't keep the joy bells clanging in our hearts.
Other people stay around because they wager that what they have is not as bad as what they think may be the alternative.
There could be a badgered banker in Sioux falls who would leave his wife tomorrow if he did not put such a high price tag on his place in the community. He has a severe case of the twenty-year itch, and is absolutely certain that a life-satisfying relationship-to which he feels he has every right to-is waiting for him just beyond the boundaries of the marriage that throttles his untested potential for passion. But he, being prudent as well as itchy, knows he needs the respect of all the folk at first reformed Church; he can't afford to get out of good graces with the profamily constituency there. He needs the goodwill of his wife's family also; it owns too big a chunk of Sioux Falls real estate, hefty collateral on bank loans, for him to risk alienation from them. And he wants to keep his old friends. So he sticks with his marriage, mainly because he is so heavily invested in Sioux falls.
Transplant the Sioux Falls banker to Southern California, give him big city anonymity. Where he could be divorced several times over without anyone at first National headquarters even noticing, and he might leave his wife two months after arrival. But a first National of Sioux falls. He has to be the very model of marital reliability.
Credit the banker with common sense, but don't give him an A+ for commitment.
Other people are simply trapped. A talented lady I know has agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces-and a husband who brutalizes her in several subtle styles. I think she would leave in a minute, but she can't get away because she does not dare go outside to look for a job and she can't afford to live anywhere else but at home with him.
Give her credit, maybe, for not putting arsenic in his coffee, but don't confuse her staying with commitment.
Not everybody sticks with what he or she is stuck with out of a heroic effort to keep a promise. I mean no discredit. It's simply that many of us stick with things because the alternatives to staying are even less attractive.
But let's talk about people who really do choose to live by promises-spoken or unspoken-they have made. They don't keep their promises simply because they have made them once and are stuck with them. In fact, commitment keepers don't usually think much about the fact that they have made promises.
They don't stay because they feel stuck to a vow that some eternal law obliges them keep; they just care about the persons to whom they are quietly committed.
Another reason we keep commitments has to do with BELONGING to people.
BELONGING to people is risky. It could be a subtle way of being owned by somebody, the way a person can own a hunk of real estate, a chattel, or a slave. But we can also belong to people simply by putting ourselves at their side. Their place becomes our place. Their needs become our needs. Their destiny our destiny. BELONGING can be a way of loving.
The Albert Camus Story THE PLAGUE is about a person's sense of BELONGING and therefore about commitment, even though nobody mentions the word.
The people of the town of Oran knee they were in for something dreadful when the rats came out of the dark places to die in their streets and hallways and when, once the rats were all dead, the citizens began to die the same way. The cup of dread was full by the time a thousand persons were dying of the plague every week, and the sanitation department began hauling bodies by the tramload, at night, when nobody was looking, to a city dump. Eventually the town was quarantined to protect other towns in the province; nobody could get in or out.
Dr. Bernard Rieux was caught in the plague, just like everyone else, and it never occured to him to try to get out of town, even though he longed to join his wife, who happened at the time to be a patient at a resort in the country.
A journalist named Raymond Rambert was caught in Oran too, and he wanted to get out in the worst way. "Why should I stay, " he asked Dr. Rieux," I'm different from the rest of the people; I don't belong here.
But he was stuck. And, for nothing better to do, he began going with Dr. Rieux on his daily rounds to make dying a little less horrible for the people, and maybe save some children. Rambert pitched in, doing whatever a layperson could do to help people die with some dignity.
One day a person smuggler offered Rambert a chance to get out-for a price.
But he surprised Rieux by deciding to stay.
Stay? Why stay, Rieux asked. "Your happeness is waiting for you in Paris. You have every right to be happy. And you certainly cannot be happy here."
Rambert's answer provides us with one of the better secrets of why people keep commitments: "Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I'd no concern with people. But now that I've seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not."
Rambert and Rieux were in the same boat; they were committed because they Belong.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Bread:
Philippians 2:12-18
[12]Dear friends, you always followed my instructions when I was with you. And now that I am away, it is even more important. Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear.
[13]For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.
[14]Do everything without complaining and arguing,
[15]so that no one can criticize you. Live clean, innocent lives as children of God, shining like bright lights in a world full of crooked and perverse people.
[16]Hold firmly to the word of life; then, on the day of Christ’s return, I will be proud that I did not run the race in vain and that my work was not useless.
[17]But I will rejoice even if I lose my life, pouring it out like a liquid offering to God, just like your faithful service is an offering to God. And I want all of you to share that joy.
[18]Yes, you should rejoice, and I will share your joy.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Bless
The High Stakes of Commitment
I make an appointment with someone, with you, perhaps, for sometime in any of your tomorrows, and all the future tomorrows that follow your yesterdays. I reach out into a future that neither of us can see, and I plan a meeting with you, and ask you to trust me to be there with you. I stretch myself into unpredictable days ahead and make one thing predictable for you: I will be there for you. I create a small island of certainty for you in the swirling waters of our uncertainties: it is the certainty of my presence with you. I make space in my life for you that you know will be there waiting for you, even I every other place is crowded. These are some of the things I do when I make a commitment to another human being.
How strange it is, when you think about it, that a mere human being can take hold of the future and fasten one part of it down for another person. That ordinary people can lift their lives a good notch above their whims and their impulses and their desires, and secure their lives together in the face of all fretful fates that lie in waiting. How wonderful it is that we can offer each other one mooring as we face our free-floating futures- the mooring of trust in each other's commitments.
We have a mystery on our hands, no doubt about it: it is the mystery of how we, weak and limited persons that we are, can look all the uncertainty of life full in the face and say, I will make one thing certain: my presence in the life of another person. The mystery gets deeper when we consider that there are always two essential ingredients to a personal commitment. Two components. And we need both of them equally. A personal commitment is a blend of consistency and care. Let's take consistency first.
According to anonymous:
The Los Angeles Times has a nifty slogan: "We are there for you every day." And they are. They have been there for me at my address every morning for more than fifteen years. It is nice to know that come flood, hail, or desert sun, I can count on waking up to the plop of the Los Angeles Times. On my driveway. I don't know whether he cares a fig about me, or about any of the people at whose homes he delivers the paper every morning. And I don't mind. All I really want from him is consistency -the paper, same time, every day.
But this is not commitment: his consistency is only a matter of contract, of giving me that for which I pay. When it comes to a commitment between two persons, we need care as well as consistency. When I care about you, I deliver myself to you. Which is a lot different from delivering a newspaper every morning. Consistency has to do with predictability. Caring has to do with personal presence. The people who deliver the Los Angeles Times are predictable, that is, they deliver the paper to me consistently. My wife brings her very self to me in caring love, she is present as well as predictable.
This isn't enough to be predictable. Not in personal commitments. But it isn't enough to be present either. I have an acquaintance who is powerfully present with me when he is there. He looks me in the eye when he talks to me, he pays attention to everything I say, makes me feel as if I am the only thing of importance in hi life at the moment. He makes me believe that he cares. And when he leaves he promise to call me, and he says. "We'll have lunch." But he doesn't, and he doesn't return my calls. We don't have lunch. I don't see him again until we happen to meet at a party. And feel let down. I need consistency as well as care. Presence without predictability, care without consistency: it's not enough. Any more than consistency without care is enough. Commitment is both. But all this only raises the stakes and increases the risk. We promise so much of ourselves when we know so little about what things are going to be like when the time comes to keep the commitments we make. Consider the risk.
We will Change
I won't be quite the same person tomorrow that I am today. I will change. My needs will change. My desires will change. So will my feelings.
When I promise to be with you, I do not know for sure what I will be like at some distant time when you will need me. Yet I expect that the person I will become will keep commitment that I make today. You will change as much as I will. I do not know what you will be like in some distant tomorrow. Will you be attractive? Healthy? Will you change your mind about the important things we both believe in now? Will you feel differently about me? Will you want me to be near you? How can I know for sure? Yet I expect to keep my commitment to you, whoever you turn out to be in the future.
Circumstances will change too. Neither of us knows what life will be like when the time comes for us to keep the commitment we make today. Will times be hard? Will other people have come into your life to crowd me out? Will life be too difficult for us to manage together? How can we know?
And yet I expect to keep my commitment to you in the future, however tough times. A commitment has a "no matter what" quality about it. No matter how I change. No matter what happens to you. No matter what happens around us. It has the feel of UNCONDITIONALITY.
What a risk! And how high the stakes?
The stakes are high for us because we surrender so much when we make serious commitments to people. We stand to gain a lot too: maybe love, maybe life. But let's not discount the surrender.
There are at least three things we surrender when we commit ourselves to another person.
We surrender our FREEDOM
We surrender our INDIVIDUALITY
We surrender our CONTROL
All in all, a lot of surrender. Before we go on, we had better take a good look at each of them just to make sure we know beforehand how much we surrender.
We surrender our FREEDOM
When we make a commitment, we freely decide that our lives will not flow free, unattached, from one personal relationship to another. We set our minds-in-advance- to say no to some offers that comes our way. Our commitment builds an invisible fence around us, and we freely choose to respect the limits.
We surrender our INDIVIDUALITY
When we commit yourself to someone else, we stretch beyond our individual self and put ourself at the side of another. I put myself beside you, to walk with you into the heather of the hidden hills before us. Once committed, I am no longer a separate one. The mirror of myself no longer shows a solitary being, standing alone, by himself, an isolated individual. I am plural, one of us, my unity is we. Who am I? I am who I am in linkage with you, you are part of my definition.
We surrender our CONTROL
When we commit yourself to another, we give up control over a segment of our own life. For we let another person stake a claim on ourself. The person to whom we make a commitment can call us back to himself or herself with two simple words: You promised. And we give up our right to say; I don't care. So somebody else shares control with me, control over my own life. All in all, its a lot to surrender, and done in the sure knowledge that we are going to change. Yet we make our commitment. High risk. With a lot at stake. This brings me to the most critical point of all. The only way to live with the high risk of commitment is TRUST.
When I commit myself to you, I expect you to trust me. You know that I am capable of leaving you. You know that I can let you down. So I make my commitment and expect you to trust me to keep it.
But then I need to trust you too. I have to trust you not to abuse my commitment, not to scorn it, not to deflate it. I trust that you will not turn me away when I want to be present with you. I trust you to treat my commitment kindly.
Trust is our only guarantee. But this is not guarantee at all, not in the sense of a sure thing backed by a contract that can hold up in court. We can draw up a contract between us, and my contract may limit your losses if I should leave you, or mine if you should leave me. But no contract can tell us for sure that I will stay with you, or you with me, when staying costs us something.
Our trust is not blind, our inner eys, our heart, has its own way of seeing. We trust because our inner eye sees each other's sincerity and character. What we see reduces the risk. But it offers us the peculiar kind of hope that dares to take high risk of personal commitment. Without trust, nobody in his right mind would ever make a serious commitment to another person. With trust, a person dares to gamble on a lasting partnership of caring love.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Bread:
Psalms 99:1-9
[1]The Lord is king!
Let the nations tremble!
He sits on his throne between the cherubim.
Let the whole earth quake!
[2]The Lord sits in majesty in Jerusalem,
exalted above all the nations.
[3]Let them praise your great and awesome name.
Your name is holy!
[4]Mighty King, lover of justice,
you have established fairness.
You have acted with justice
and righteousness throughout Israel.
[5]Exalt the lord our God!
Bow low before his feet, for he is holy!
[6]Moses and Aaron were among his priests;
Samuel also called on his name.
They cried to the Lord for help,
and he answered them.
[7]He spoke to Israel from the pillar of cloud,
and they followed the laws and decrees he gave them.
[8]O Lord our God, you answered them.
You were a forgiving God to them,
but you punished them when they went wrong.
[9]Exalt the Lord our God,
and worship at his holy mountain in Jerusalem,
for the Lord our God is holy!
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Bread:
Psalms 111:1-10
[1]Praise the Lord!
I will thank the Lord with all my heart
as I meet with his
people.
[2]How amazing are the deeds of the Lord!
All who delight in him should ponder them.
[3]Everything he does reveals his glory and majesty.
His righteousness never fails.
[4]He causes us to remember his wonderful works.
How gracious and merciful is our Lord!
[5]He gives food to those who fear him;
he always remembers his covenant.
[6]He has shown his great power to his people
by giving them the lands of other nations.
[7]All he does is just and good,
and all his commandments are trustworthy.
[8]They are forever true,
to be obeyed faithfully and with integrity.
[9]He has paid a full ransom for his people.
He has guaranteed his covenant with them forever.
What a holy, awe-inspiring name he has!
[10]Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true wisdom.
All who obey his commandments will grow in wisdom.
Praise him forever!
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy life today...
Enjoying a Long Life
Most of us don't give a lot of thought to the length of out lives. Many seem to believe that there is some "fate" that determines the length of our lives and that we can't do anything about it. Others seem to be totally absorbed with their health, always seeking some new fad or diet that will add some benefit to their physical well being.
We certainly know that we can shorten our lives by improper conduct. Our habits affect our health. That may not seem obvious when you are young, but things like too much exposure to the sun or smoking can drastically shorten your stay on earth. The good side of this equation is that there are things we can do that will lengthen our lives. This is simple promise of the Bible. There are things that we can do to enjoy a long life. These things are not balances to wrong conduct. There is a choice to make.if we choose the path that leads to enjoying a long life, we must also choose to leave off the things that can shorten our lives. We have a body, a mind and a spirit. Each of these can be healthy or sick. Every part of us affects the other parts. This is obvious in our physical bodies. If you have a sore toe, just a small part of you is out of order, but the rest of the body will suffer. The same is true of our spirits and minds. Our physical health is made better or worse by the state of our minds and spirits. Everyone will die, and most of us will get sick before we die. Life and death are in the hands of God. The best way for us to live is to live for Him.
A promise to commandment Keepers.
In proverbs 3:1, we are admonished to learn from the generations that have gone before us. We can do this in two ways. We can avoid their mistakes, then, we can imitate their successes. The "law' and commandments" mentioned where the successes and lessons learned by a father that he wanted to pass along to his son. We only have two choices. We can either learn from those who are older, or we can learn from our own mistakes. It should be obvious that it is less painful to learn from the experiences of others. When we learn from others, we are given two promises.
First, we are given a promise of length of days or long life. There are several ways this promise could come true. One is that we simply add to our lives because we avoid the dangers that our parents have survived. Life is dangerous, and the foolish and foolhardly usually do not live long. Those who have lived a long time have learned things that others need to know. Heeding these lessons could add years to our lives because we learned how to avoid dying young. But there is more to it than that. The life of the body is also dependent on the spirit housed in it. Keeping the commandments of God will insure that our spirits are right with Him, and this can literally add years to our lives.
There is no better place for us to be than in the center of God's will. When we are, we have all the resources of heaven to help us with our problems, no matter what they are. When we trust Christ as our Savior and follow Him completely as our Lord, we have done everything we can to make our lives as full as they can possibly be.
Notice that the Second promise is peace. There is more to life than longevity. We may live a long time and not accomplish much. On the other hand, our lives may he short but full and meaningful. Spiritual peace is the result of having meaningful work to do, and no work means more than the work of God. When we are fully and completely involved in the work of God, we are making our lives count.
Direction to commandment keepers.
If we want God to give us long life, we have to make up our minds to do something productive and useful with it. Many seem to think that they are here on a "pleasure hunt". God has not put us here to see how much fun we can have. This does not mean that we should never have fun, but enjoyment is by-product. We get it when our primary activity is serving the Lord and serving others. It's a paradox, but one of the surest ways to be unhappy is to worry about being happy all the time. God gives us direction and to really enjoy our lives, we must follow where He leads.
This begins with our trusting in the Lord. Our trust must be wholehearted. God wants to be first in our lives. He asks us to trust in Him with all our hearts. This is a complete and total commitment of ourselves to Him. Then He asks us to not lean on our own understanding. Much of life is beyond our understanding. Everyday bad things happen to good people. We can never understand why these things happen, and we are simply told not to try. When we insist on understanding, we only cause ourselves unhappiness. God asks us to accept and to follow His Holy Spirit. We may not understand, but we can be faithful.
To get the direction of God in our lives, we must acknowledge Him. This means that God must be the first, not in the background. We often have important decisions to make. Many of these decisions could shorten our lives. His Spirit will guide us, but not if we don't seek Him. His word will sustain us, but not if we don't know it. His power will keep us, but not if we don't call on it. His Son will save us, but not if we don't ask Him. Do you see How it works? This is not some spiritual "magic". It is simply the ordinary and normal way the Holy Spirit works. God leads us, and we must acknowledge and follow Him. Compare it to climbing a ladder. We have to take it one rung at a time. The first step is salvation. The next steps are Baptism and church fellowship. Then we become faithful servants following God daily. Step by step, God will direct our paths. It is our challenge to do what Jesus asked when He said," follow me".
Warning for commandment keepers.
If God promises direction and long life for those who will follow Him, why would anyone not make this choice? The answer is given in verse 7. We are admonished not to be "wise in thine own eyes". Everybody thinks that he knows best. No one intends to be foolish; yet, many insist on doing foolish things in the name of freedom and independence. God asks us to see things from His perspective. When we do, we will also see evil for what it really is. Evil shortens life and righteousness lengthens it. This is why we are warned about sin. Health is more than the absence of disease, and, to be really healthy we must have healthy spirits as well as sound bodies.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Bread
Psalms 16:1-11
[1]Keep me safe, O God,
for I have come to you for refuge.
[2]I said to the lord, “You are my Master!
Every good thing I have comes from you.”
[3]The godly people in the land
are my true heroes!
I take pleasure in them!
[4]Troubles multiply for those who chase after other gods.
I will not take part in their sacrifices of blood
or even speak the names of their gods.
[5]lord, you alone are my inheritance, my cup of blessing.
You guard all that is mine.
[6]The land you have given me is a pleasant land.
What a wonderful inheritance!
[7]I will bless the lord who guides me;
even at night my heart instructs me.
[8]I know the lord is always with me.
I will not be shaken, for he is right beside me.
[9]No wonder my heart is glad, and I rejoice.
My body rests in safety.
[10]For you will not leave my soul among the dead
or allow your holy one to rot in the grave.
[11]You will show me the way of life,
granting me the joy of your presence
and the pleasures of living with you forever.
God Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah
When the Lord and His angels got up to leave, they looked down toward Sodom, and Abraham walked along with them to see them on their way. Now the men of Sodom were wicked and were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord. (Genesis 13:13)
While walking, the Lord said to Abraham.
Genesis 18:20-21
20]"The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous
21] that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me...
Abraham, worried about Lot, interceded with God for the righteous in the city. God promised He will not destroy the righteous with the wicked. Even if he found only ten righteous, he will spare the city. God is JUST and Merciful.
Genesis 18:22-19:11
God sent two angels appearing as men in Sodom and they arrived at the city at night time. Not knowing that they were angels, Lot invited them to spend the night in the house. Lot prepared food for them and they ate. Before they went to bed, the men of Sodom, both young and old, sorrounded the house. They called to Lot:
Genesis 19:5
"Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we can have sex with them."
The men of Sodom, both young and old, practiced HOMOSEXUALITY or had become homosexuals.
Genesis 19:6-11
Lot tried to offer his two virgin daughters to prevent them from doing this wicked thing to his visitors but they pressured Lot. The angels pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. Then they struck the men with blindness so that they could not find the door.
Then the angels commanded Lot to gather his family and get them out of Sodom quickly because God will destroy the city. Lot's sons-in-law thought he was joking and they did not believe. The angels urged Lot and his family to hurry or they will be swept away when the city is punished.
Genesis 19:16
When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the Lord was merciful to them.
As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said.
Genesis 19:17
"Flee for your lives! Don't look back, and don't stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!"
And Lot fled to Zoar. By sunrise, as Lot entered the gates of Zoar,...the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah out of the heavens. Thus he destroyed those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities and also the vegetation in the land.
Genesis 19:26
But Lot's wife looked back, and she become a pillar of salt.
God rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah because God hates HOMOSEXUALITY and all kinds of wickedness for God is holy. All the people, including Lot's son-in-laws who did not believe God's warning, perished. Only Lot and his two daughters who feared and believed God were saved. Even Lot's wife perished becuase she disobeyed God's command through the angels not to look back.
God destroyed the wicked because of sin, but God was MERCIFUL to Lot because he believed God and did not give in to sinfulness like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In the past, God promised Noah not to destroy the earth with water again. This time, He revealed that He is going to judge the wicked with fire. Sodom and Gomorrah were completely destroyed. Abraham saw dense smoking rising from the land like smoke from a furnace.
Genesis 19: 29-30
29] So when God destroyed the cities of the plain,He remembered Abraham, and brought Lot out of the catastrophe that over threw the citied where Lot had lived.
30] Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar. He and his two daughters lived in a cave.
God judge not only individuals but also nations because of the wickedness of their citizens. However, because God is just, He did not destroy those who feared and believed Him together with the wicked even thought they were only a few. God saved them that believed, but everyone who did not believe and fear God perished.
Through no fault of his own, Lot's daughters became pregnant by his own seed. The older daughter had a son, Moab, the father of the Moabites. The younger daughter also had a son, Ben-Ammi, the father of the Ammonites. Though Lot was saved from judgement with Sodom and Gomorrah because God remembered Abraham who interceded for him, Lot lost all his possessions because he did not live in the land where God promised to bless Abraham.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Acceptance by Others
There may be an occasional person who has such strong self-confidence that he does not need the acceptance of other people, but the majority of people are dependent upon others for emotional sustenance each day. The woman who is deprived of acceptance is forced into perpetual isolation and becomes deeply disturbed emotionally. She develops feelings of worthlessness which lead to despair and depression.
A mother tends to become isolated when she has several young children to care for and to supervise. She does not have time for association with her peers outside the home. It is too much trouble to get the children ready, and they are too disruptive of social engagements. Most mothers are very self-conscious of the activities of their children which may be annoying to others.
Women tend to be critical of one another. They are hesitant to entertain unless the house can be spotless and the food or refreshments exquisitely prepared. Women are much more aware of the quality and condition of clothes worn by others. Upon returning from a social or religious gathering, they can usually describe in detail the dresses worn by other women and the ability of the seamstress who made them. Such acute observation of others results in their suspecting that others are observing their clothing and activities also. This tendency can cause a woman to feel uncomfortable in the presence of those whom she does not know well or among those by whom she does not feel accepted.
There is a competitive tendency among women. When members of a social group take turns in hosting the group, the hostess on successive occasions is careful to match or surpass the entertainment of the previous occasion. Those whose homes are not as elaborate as others are very self-conscious of their more humble dwellings when their turn for hosting the occasion arrives. On the other hand, some women whose husbands make larger salaries feel superior to others and in turn are resented by those who must struggle to pay their bills.
These attitudes tend to isolate a person and lead to loneliness. A woman with self-esteem can control and minimize the isolating tendencies, but one with inferiority feelings often succumbs to them. Isolation increases inferiority. A woman who has no real friends feels too inferior to make social contacts, and this reluctance makes her feel even more inferior. Although she may be misinterpreted by her peers as being cold, aloof, and self-sufficieng, she desperately needs acceptance and meaningful contact with people.
The past roles of men and women have enabled men to be more successful in finding outside interests and activities than their wives. Men are interested in sporting events while women usually are not. Men enjoy carpentry, working in gardens, and boating while women usually are bored with such activities. Women may enjoy sewing and growing house plants, but their range of activities is usually more limited than that of men. The lack of energy and time for the mother of small children accounts largely for her not being more involved in the outside world. Every person must have at least one other person to care for and love him or her. Without a relationship to make one feel needed and wanted, a person lacks self-esteem, tends to develop feelings of inferiority, and becomes isolated. Humans are social beings who must depend on each other for emotional fulfillment and stability.
Any thought?
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
Our Daily Bread
Psalms 16:1-11
[1]Keep me safe, O God,
for I have come to you for refuge.
[2]I said to the Lord, “You are my Master!
Every good thing I have comes from you.”
[3]The godly people in the land
are my true heroes!
I take pleasure in them!
[4]Troubles multiply for those who chase after other gods.
I will not take part in their sacrifices of blood
or even speak the names of their gods.
[5]Lord, you alone are my inheritance, my cup of blessing.
You guard all that is mine.
[6]The land you have given me is a pleasant land.
What a wonderful inheritance!
[7]I will bless the Lord who guides me;
even at night my heart instructs me.
[8]I know the Lord is always with me.
I will not be shaken, for he is right beside me.
[9]No wonder my heart is glad, and I rejoice.
My body rests in safety.
[10]For you will not leave my soul among the dead
or allow your holy one to rot in the grave.
[11]You will show me the way of life,
granting me the joy of your presence
and the pleasures of living with you forever.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
The Need for LOVE
There is a wide agreement among psychologists that love is a fundamental and basic need of all people. This need is generally stronger in women than men, and they have a tremendous capacity for love, both giving and receiving. The noble quality of mother love is universally acknowledged to the extent that occasional incidents in which mothers do not love their children are difficult to believe. Tim and Beverly LaHaye have suggested five kinds of love required by a woman.
Companionship Love.
Although numerous men have become hermits and recluses, few women are known to withdraw to a life of solitude. A woman looks upon marriage as perpetual companionship, and the neglect of companionship caused by a man's job which takes him from home for long periods of time may result in marital problems. Since the man is surrounded by people on his job, he often is unaware of the importance of his companionship with his wife. If the wife stays home all day in caring for household matters and children, she desires the husband's attention and companionship when he arrives home. So often the husband has become frustrated on his job or disturbed by relations with coworkers. When he arrives home, he does not provide companionship but often makes his wife and children the objects of his frustration. The wife, too, is responsible for helping to build companionship love. She must be willing to share in the activities which interest her husband, while the husband gives attention to areas of interest to his wife.
Compassionate Love.
A woman has a natural compassion for her child and husband in times of sickness and injury. She is anxious to do everything possible to relieve suffering or discomfort of her family members. She is likely to wait upon her husband in times of his illness much more efficiently and thoroughly than he responds to her needs during times of sickness. Men should remember that women's displays of compassion mean that they have need for compassionate love in return.
Romantic Love.
Since women are more sentimental than men, they have as extraordinary need for romance. They dream of romantic occasions and tender moments. Flowers, music, soft lights, and refined entertainment are desired. When a man comes to a special dinner, he is concerned about the quality of food, but the woman is concerned also about exquisite decorations and beautiful surroundings. Unexpected gifts and an occasional night out without the children are especially appreciated by the wife even though she may be very practical in keeping expenses to a minimum in trying to manage the household. Man's need for romance may be practically nonexistent, but his wife never loses that need. Although women's liberation movements have attempted to erase the distinctions of emotional needs between man and woman, women continue to respond to expressions of thoughtfulness, such as opening car doors, being permitted to enter a door first, and being seated at the table women like to be treated like ladies.
Affectionate Love.
A woman desires embraces and kisses of appreciation. A tender and the closeness of one whom she loves is as enjoyable as the more intimate relationship. She appreciate an approving look and words of commendation.
Passionate Love.
Because of man's stronger sexual drive, passionate love is more natural and constant for him than for his wife. A woman's passions are more periodic than man's and are affected more by fatigue and emotional distress. The woman who experiences the other four areas of love and has high self-esteem as a wife will enjoy passionate love. A warm love relationship with her husband both fulfills her needs and those of her husband. Gratification comes to her by the feeling that she is meeting her husband's needs.
Any thought?
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
@Hari
