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My Father and the Navy

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by Cheryl Ries in Uncategorized

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otis-manchester-young-25I’m one of the lucky ones . . my father came home to my mom after his tour in the Navy during the Korean War, and a few years later began his family with her. He was Navy through and through, a sailor who got to travel the world, experience life onboard a submarine, a carrier and in numerous ports of call. He learned much more about being an engineer beyond his classes at the university. I know he also grew up with discipline, which helped to make him the dedicated father and husband who always provided for his family and gave us his best. I got to know him into my 20’s, when he passed suddenly . . but he is my direct connection to what is good about this country and our military.

I truly marvel in the more adult years since at those who mock our military members, those who believe America is a bad place or those who think we don’t have any good in us. I know better . . for I have met others like my dad – too many to count. I imagine many of those who were either drafted or enlisted as kids usually, and died in service to this nation, were also a lot like my dad – dedicated defenders of what we stand for as a nation. And I am not going to ever let a day go by when I don’t C80414SubmarineForce2-vihold my country, our flag and our people up as one of pride for their sake!

Those who gave it all deserve the best from each of us in return, or their sacrifice means nothing. If we don’t hold on fast to the foundational principles which made us the bastion of freedom for the world, then they all died in vain. The United States of America stands together for freedom to this very day . . because of all of those who have fought and even died for that right. Please don’t ever let your heart as an American beat anything but red, white and blue . . for their sake as well as for all of those who now go off in service to this country. Be defenders of liberty just like they all were. It’s just as much our role as citizens as it was and is theirs. Freedom is the result of great burdens and infinite, unbearable costs . . but thank God, there are men and women who’ll take their turns nonetheless on the front lines defending it. We all should have that same love and devotion for this country in our hearts back home – as the freedom she provides is worth at least that level of gratitude in return!

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We Need Room For Joy

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Emotions, Grief, Joy, Pain

We Need Room For Joy

 

There are two common emotional responses to bad experiences which are not advisable ways in which to deal with our pain, grief, anguish, anger, frustration, despair & sadness. First of all, we are not to not feel anything, stuffing the pain away somewhere deep inside the recesses of our souls & spirits, only to deny ourselves a process of healing in the end. Those things always have a way of resurfacing when we haven’t dealt with them. Secondly, we cannot dwell in those negative places once we’ve begun the process of healing for a duration longer than necessary.

Some take years of their lives or worse, their lifetimes, wearing their badges of “honor” which are only badges of injustice in reality for the loss of all their precious years of happiness, contentment, productivity & peace lost when those negative emotions we should only feel for a time have become encampments in which we have chosen to dwell for longer than necessary! We often want to wear our wounds like badges of honor because we feel some need for vindication or wronged by the injustices which we have had to endure, but in truth, the real badge of honor is one of strength & courage when we learn how to overcome our feelings moving beyond that which hurts us, keeping check on our own self-pity & going ahead with our lives as we know we should! We need to feel, to accept what life gives us, but we need to balance good & bad, not letting our negative baggage take such precedence that we no longer have room for joy in our own lives!

THE HEART OF THE MATTER – LOVE

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Emotions, Love

THE HEART OF THE MATTER – LOVE

You know, no other organ retains a sense of your emotion like your heart!  It is not just functional, providing the life-giving beats which drive the oxygenated blood through your body, in rhythmic fashion to keep you alive.  It does this without even one action on your part, it is part of a “subliminal” system, an unconscious system which keeps your body going.  The heart also monitors your emotions though, as it most assuredly senses the changes of love’s breezes blowing over it’s bows.  The heart is the register for all your life, the functions and the feelings.

When you feel something, it passes from all your awareness within the mind through to the heart.  The most sensitive point of your being, where some have said the spirit resides within you, is also the place where love collides with thoughts, feelings, hopes, faith, dreams, and all the realities you have ever known.  The heart is truly the place where Cupid has aimed his arrows, for when we love, when we feel what we know to be love, we are the most vulnerable creatures, even more so than were we walking wounded!

Love is the most ominous of all the sensations as it crosses the magnetic field of electricity within the brain, but when it gets to the heart, it becomes a stream of current unrivaled by any force of nature!  Love would allow a grown man to hurl his own body in the path of an oncoming train to save his beloved child or spouse, love would throw itself upon a fire to save another’s flesh, and love would climb any mountain, ford any stream . . . well, you see my point.  Love transcends anything known in this world which is understandable and interpretable!  It defies our complete ability to even assess a word which pinpoints what exactly it is!  Love is . . . the immense capacity to put another person’s needs, desires, and care above your own in this world!  Love is magical, love is infinite and love is beyond our human understanding.  Love is from God in my opinion, therefore, it’s definition lies in the great unknowns which encompass other Divine features of life, unseen but surely proven!

AN ADAGE A DAY

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Goodness, Wisdom

AN ADAGE A DAY

Have you ever stopped to realize why all the adages you’ve heard your whole lifetime exist?  Because they’re true!  Somehow, the good and smart people before you, involved in similar circumstances, decided to forewarn you.  So they made up some clever and precise adages, which people toss around and some actually pay heed. 

My favorite is: no good deed goes unpunished.  That is so true.  When you do something for someone else, no matter what it is, if you have any expectation attached, you will feel “punished”, or perhaps let down at least by the outcome.  It’s usually the case that the other person or people never really know your agenda, nor your motives, so they rarely do things in the same manner or with the same desired outcome.   Sometimes too, it is as if the world is backhanding you when you attempt to do something right.  Perhaps it is the case that you are trying to do something for all the wrong reasons, those which garner you attention instead of doing it anonymously, as should be the way of doing gestures like that.  Or maybe, this adage is true because we are in some state of guilt over something we didn’t do well enough when doing what we are called to do in life, so a layer of bitterness forms over our giving hearts, which prevents us from feeling anything but guilty for our actions.  And finally, we may just find we are giving things, or of ourselves, to people who just don’t want what we are giving.  They either don’t feel the same, or they don’t want what we deemed so special a gift.  There could be a million different explanations, but the world seems to display a counter-balance for every action, so it seems logical that for the good deed will come the punishable aftermath.  

Another adage I enjoy is:  an apple a day keeps the doctor away.  Now this I am beginning to believe in earnest!  I have reached that time in my life when things go wrong just because.  There aren’t definitive moments of injury or illness I can note, just constant degradation of the “mechanism” which is me.  Something aches for no reason, this feels strange for a different day, that hurts when I do this or that . . . it makes no sense.  It’s called getting old and we all must do it with grace, hopefully.  I choose to fight against it, maybe this is the universe fighting back??  I was always so healthy and without injury when young, now I ache here, I moan there.  It’s a neverending story . . .this perceived battle between time and our bodies.  Aging gracefully might just mean not struggling so and letting all the feelings wash over us, changing what we can, accepting what we cannot change, and learning, as they say, to know full well the difference! 

No matter which adages are your favorites for whatever reasons, wisdom is what made them so.  Wisdom born of someone else’s aggravations, time, encounters, feelings, pain, and situational summarization, just so that you could say, “Gee, I’m not alone!”.

FEED YOUR SOUL

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Confidence, Hope, Joy, Laughter, Relationships, Soul, Spirit

FEED YOUR SOUL

Feed your soul with what you require for this life, starving it of anything you truly need for its preservation can lead to its slow demise.  The soul, just like the physical body, requires certain essential nutrients.  Those for most are:  love, companionship, joy, laughter, spirituality, close relationships born of confidence, and peace of mind.   Some may find they can exist easily without any or all of those, but rarely with a contented soul.  The being which dwells within, your spirit, starts to erode.  Feeding your soul, also means feeding your body, your mind, your heart, and your spirit.  When something is lacking from your inner set of needs, you will begin to feel an ache, a longing, a perpetuation of intolerance building within the cellular walls surrounding your most vital organs.  From there, the disease of the ultimate death of the soul which dwells within you, the wonderous and beautiful creation living on the inside of you, can and does eventually set in.

For me, when something is aching inside, it means it has gone unnourished or untended to.  It is not implausible to garner that for a reason of neglect, disturbance in patterns, inability to reach the “dream” or any other of a number of reasons, we cannot achieve what our souls demand for their very prosperity to thrive.  An example of this is richly quoted on the social media forum, Facebook.  It is often bandied as a profile post:  don’t give all of yourself to someone who sees fit to give you in return only crumbs!  Meaning, if you are more for someone than they can be in return, then the imbalance might cause your inner self to feel a sense of longing, of need, of less instead of enough.  It’s only up to you what you will tolerate in life, but I do know that settling for less than you deserve or than you truly want, will feel like you are starving your body!  Give it what it desires, without harming it with excess.  You must be aware of the internal desire your soul has to not in fact be selfish, but instead, to be the ultimate protector of self.  If you are out of bounds, off track, not in right step, starving the innermost sanctums of your being, you will feel discomfort, sometimes even to the point of a physical sense of pain for that lack!  Learn to listen instinctively to those things happening within your soul, they are in direct link with your spirit and body, if not in right step, you will soon pay in health, happiness, and hope lost!

How can you feed your soul?  It is so easy.  What makes you feel good?  What things do you enjoy that no one can take?  Maybe you love music and deny yourself that extra 1/2 hour of listening time in the car while driving to return phone calls instead.  My thought on that is this, driving and talking is hazardous, it slows down your reaction time, so keep the phone calls until you are stopped and listen to the music instead.  Even if you are a business person, you should just pull over, take the call and then commence in your driving again when you’ve finished.  I bet you learn how to more efficiently handle your cell-phone calls this way!

Put people who mean the most at the top of your life!  You aren’t going to keep them in your life for long if you let them feel diminished or take them for granted.  Life is precious, quit thinking there are tomorrows enough to make up for all the time the excuses used up today!  If you are making excuses for not doing something consistently, chances are you just didn’t want to do it anyway!  It’s a reality.   With the people we love, we must tend to the relationship every day, as though it were a garden and that without our care, something each day would wither and die.  Eventually, enough parts will have perished, that upon your unexpected return, you will find the garden has in fact completely gone, nothing is left.  Now I believe real love doesn’t die, but in that moment of such repetitive disregard, it has learned to shut itself off with all the negative things . . . like when weeds ultimately choke out the living, thriving plants in a garden.  They didn’t die, they were overtaken by something else and replaced!  If you love and value someone, you want to put them high up on your list of priorities, that relationship is something you don’t wish to forget to take care of each and every day!  

In feeding your soul, you can feed the world!  The souls and bodies, spirits and minds of this world are linked, and therefore, when we feed and nourish that which lives in us, we help to nurture the world.  No life is distinguishable from another, it is connected through humanity, and of course, the sum total experience of that humanity.  Live life with your soul nourished, and you shall give yourself back to the world, healthier, happier, and filled with hope! 

LEARNING AS I GO

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Knowledge, Learning, Lessons

LEARNING AS I GO…

Life’s a series of lessons, learned as we live, not known beforehand.  They’re sometimes scoldings, sometimes they are trophies, awards, and accolades for “jobs well done”.  Mostly life lessons are an uncertainty, a way to evolve through the knowledge, discipline, experience, and time, which will all help to form the final form which makes up you.  Life is a way to become more than you started out being, and if you’re fortunate, you take your lessons and make the later versions of “you” new and improved! 

Do you ever tire of lessons?  I do.  Plain and simple, I long for the day when I don’t have to learn something which makes me feel a sting of shame, remorse, anguish, or self-abasing pity.  It’s not easy to be learning all the time!  Some days, we just want to be established, based, founded and ready . . . no more lessons, please!  Lessons can teach us, but after enough lessons, don’t we just feel fatigued?  It has happened to me.  I’ve been beaten down and done in by my lessons learned.  I sometimes eagerly crave the day when I don’t have to assume I have failed, faltered, or just missed the boat.  I want to be successful, don’t we all?  So learning lessons can weaken our exterior belief in our own strength.  It takes a special hard shell to know, a lesson learned doesn’t mean we are stupid, failures, or disappointments.  We all make mistakes.  So letting yourself be open to learning lessons, without being judgmental and self-abasing, is key to growth!

Lessons are like time-delayed gifts.  They will always give us a gift, but sometimes it is years after the fact before we can appreciate the lesson fully!  You might have the tendency to carry the guilt or shame like a weight around your neck for a long time before you find the benefit of that lesson!  The important thing to remember is, that no matter how much you need the lesson, there is a positive element to it!  You just need to convince your attitude of that!  It might require an adjustment, afterall, most people can get hooked into the negative way of thinking about lessons, as though evolving is a bad thing.  It isn’t, it just requires your guts and fortitude to make it through the hard times, until the sun shines on your wisdom, and a lesson leaves it mark!  Let yourself be open to learning about life through the lessons presented to you.  They happen for a reason, to make you a better human, by making your attitude more positive in the process!

PATIENCE . . .NOW PLEASE!

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Patience, Waiting

PATIENCE . . .NOW PLEASE!

In the quest for one trait which would serve me better than others, I would ask for patience, in far greater measure than I have it, nor know it now!  I am a “work in progress” when it comes to patience . . always seeking more, always hoping I will strengthen that “gene”.

When it comes to me growing older, my most depleted characteristic, which plummets in direct relationship to the escalation of my age, is my patience.  I don’t know as if this can be scientifically proven, but I believe, in my own theory, my impatience is related to the sense of entitlement some of us start to feel with age!  In other words, I’ve waited so long for things in life, that to wait any longer, at this age, is torment! 

How do I learn to improve my level of patience or supplement it somehow?  Or perhaps I need to temper my impatience for life’s situations, which obviously have an impact upon my ability to be patient, thus sensoring my own reactions?  Which sounds more plausible at this age?  Possibly neither!  I’m here to tell you, I want it all and I want it all now!

Does this sound like you?  I’ve a feeling it is a familiar chime from many these days.  We are afterall, a “gotta have it now society” . . . we don’t want to wait.  Couple that with tough economic times, a few personal mishaps and a crisis or two, and then add that to our instantaneous world, where we are encouraged by marketers and media to have what we want and never wait.  It’s serving no good for mankind in general that we are packaging all of life with this desire to have things five minutes ago.  Somewhere we’ve forgotten that we once waited eagerly weeks for snail-mail, sat by the telephone for the line to clear to speak to our dears, and had to be put on waiting lists for things we desired instead of standing in line or just ordering it online, or even finding so much available in our neighborhood stores!
  
Anyway, here’s my plan now, I am impatient, there’s no immediate cure . . and in this moment, I’ve something else to do, so I must finish this for now and seek my peace through other endeavors!  🙂

 

SHINING FOR NO REASON

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Celebration, Empathy

SHINING FOR NO REASON

If you haven’t realized it lately, you don’t have to have a reason to celebrate being you, you just have to be you, you don’t need to do anything nor be anything but just be you!  Too many times, we convince ourselves that we must accomplish things to applaud ourselves, to acknowledge our worth, or to give ourselves accolades.  We needn’t, we don’t have to have any reason.  Just being is reason enough . . . that’s what is called, shining for no reason!
When was the last time that you just realized how fabulous you were, without having a reason?  When was the last time you looked in the mirror, noticing something beautiful, attractive, well-formed, or special about yourself?  When did you last compliment yourself for something you did well?  When was the most recent time you felt really special in your own skin?  If these aren’t registering on any memory scale, and seem unlikely reminders for any recent behavior, then you need to re-examine your own self-nurturing.  You are not giving yourself enough praise.  Why is it so natural for most of us to give these kind of comments and compliments to others, including our close friends and family, our loved ones, but for ourselves, we are unable to think so highly?  If you aren’t able to see the God-given near-perfection of the person who looks back at you every time you look in a mirror, then you aren’t going to be able to hear the compliments of others, nor to feel the level of self-appreciation necessary to have a complete, happy, fulfilled life.  Loving yourself means that you see your own beauty, appreciate your own unique qualities, and cherish the “house” which contains the spirit and soul of your life.  

Does loving yourself and appreciating your inner and outer qualities mean that you are vain?  Sometimes, yes.  But there is a healthy level of self-love which most of us should have, that we often deny because we think it is selfish to be able to see our own good qualities and traits.  Nurturing ourselves requires that we learn to respect our entire person, body, mind and spirit.  It also means that we can have moments of appreciation, far from selfishness or narcissism, when we see the beauty of our own creation.  We are afterall, one-of-a-kind works of art, designed and formed by God in His own image.  
Too many people suffer from low esteem, poor self-images and lagging self-worth instead of narcissism and inflated senses of self.  In this present-day world, we are beaten down, battered and savaged by the media, the public, degraded by the onslaught of what we presume we should be in our competitive world, we lose our sense of self.  So, in lieu of having a crew of cheerleaders and enthusiastic fans on our beckon call, we must learn to prop ourselves up when life takes us down.  That is why I propose that you always include in your daily routine, a generous helping of self-love. 

What does this entail?  It just means, that each and every day, you should remember to celebrate your own wonderful and unique qualities, cease putting yourself down, give your thanks to God for whatever compliments your receive, as all that you are, you’ve gotten from Him, and never hesitate to be your own best supporter and promoter!  If you don’t love yourself, support your own life and your endeavors, and see yourself as a valuable human being, then you will never be able to give love to others, support others in life with their endeavors, and value other human beings appropriately.  To love yourself, is to know that you are a beautiful child of God!  Repeat after me . . . I love myself, and I am a beautiful child of God!

Bridges

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

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Future

Bridges

There are bridges which are torn down & roadways which do get dismantled between our todays & our yesterdays. Maybe that is ok, as it keeps us from backtracking & trespassing where we surely didn’t belong in the first place. If the bridge or road had been the best choice for us, they would have led us exactly where we hoped to go! Don’t dread the deconstruction of some parts of your past, for that will truly save you from reliving & rehashing old mistakes & old wounds.

It’s the future which beckons in a present which is calling you to wake up & live in the here & now! What bridges & roads are before you & where might they take you today? All of those memories live within us for a good reason, we aren’t meant to focus on them in the real world! Move forward into your today, letting the bridges & roadways you have had to tear down signify only one thing to you – your future lies in a different direction! Go that way instead of looking back!! And never be afraid to tear down the vestiges of impassable ways in your own life . . they’ve been made quite overtly that way for a reason!

Fruits of the Spirit

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

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Faithfulness, Gentleness, Goodness, Joy, Kindness, Love, Patience, Peace, Self-Control

Fruits of the Spirit

Love, joy, faithfulness, self-control, gentleness, patience, kindness, peace & goodness are the fruits of our spirit given to us by God in  ample measure. He just wants us to take these fruits & develop a character of consistency in our ability to reflect these fruits in our daily lives.

A great message today by Joyce Meyer! Our “job” is to be the fullness of all these things in every aspect of our lives! This is our task in maturing, for we then become consistent reflections of the fruits of our spirit, which is then to become most like God! We learn how to tap into these fruits as we live our lives by trial, by test, by deciding we shall build each to full strength within us. Each one of us fully filled & mature in these spirits would reflect a world of Godly people who truly are living reflections of what all that means! Imagine that world!

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