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Tag Archives: Blessing

RIGHT NOW . . .

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by Cheryl Ries in God

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Blessing, Challenges, Confidence, creation, Divine, Faith, Fight, God, Holy Spirit, masterpiece

RIGHT NOW . . .

Right now in my life, I’m like an unfinished masterpiece.  I was reminded today when looking at the infant niece of a friend, who is ill and facing heart surgery, that life’s brevity is enough inspiration to constantly let yourself be shaped and formed!  I whine too much.  I moan and complain over such silly things.  I know nothing of pain, nor enduring it, in comparison to that of a tiny little 2-month old baby fighting for hers!

When God gives you challenges, it should automatically make you rise up and put your suit of armor on.  There shouldn’t be any question about whether you are able, or even whether you have enough artillery to fight.  Who cares!  If you have a challenge, you are equipped, as you were made to make it through.  We are not a sum of failed parts, but rather the realization of creation born of divine perfection.  Even in our imperfection, our purposeful lives make us meaningful and anything but failures!  So why is it, that when we reach a rough patch in our roads, we start to cower, not sure we are able to drive further?  Shouldn’t we just proceed, knowing that we are God’s most armed fortresses, with the Holy Spirit dwelling inside, filled with all the inherent strength, bravery and knowledge we will need.  We might not actually have the physical prowess, the actual bravado, nor the skills to know how to do something, but we have the best warrior we could ever hope to have, we have God in our corner!

So the very next time you encounter something, anything, even almost nothing, which challenges your ability to know what to do, or how to react, or which way to proceed, I challenge you to do what I have learned to do . . . ask God to help you!  It’s so simple.  In every aspect of life, I keep my inner ear open to God’s consult for direction.  I don’t consider anything to small nor too simple to call upon God for help.  If you get in the habit of constantly making contact with God about life, as you are living, you will soon learn that He wants to be a part of everything you are, all that you do, and the totality of what you aspire to be!

Let go and let God is a saying not because it’s catchy!  It’s a saying because others like you and I thought that somewhere along the journey we needed God.  So we made a habit of asking Him to help us with even the most mundane, as even in our comings and our goings, we can be assured, God is interested in our reliance upon Him.  He actually desires it.  He wants us to trust in HIm and to grow dependent upon Him.  It isn’t being needy nor is it being strange, it is the way your Father wants things.  So when you find yourself in need, give your cares to God.  Even in ordinary daily stuff, give it to God and ask Him to make the most and best of everything you do and say today!  Each day you rely on Him will be remarkably notable for its distinguishable calm, simple flow, and naturalness.  In other words, relying on God allows you to live life according to His will and therefore to be in His care!  You will probably notice a big difference when you give up control and let Him take over.  Life is simple, trust in God to lead you in your journey, if you make a mistake along the way, you will find Him willing to help you make the mistake into something beneficial for you!  God wants to bless you and love you if you’ll give Him the chance!!   Ask God to be your coach, your captain, your commander and your chief, let Him arm you for any battle, and trust that He will see you through anything, since He knows what you are going  through!  Have faith, don’t give up the fight!

THE SEA OF LIFE

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by Cheryl Ries in Life

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Blessing, Journeys, Life, Success

THE SEA OF LIFE

Life is like a sea, sometimes we are on top of the waves, feeling like surfers tackling our problems and making headway with a big grin for all the success we feel. Other times, the waves are complacent little bobs of nothingness,which although still slight swellings responsible for some motion, which barely take us anywhere and we end up feeling stagnant, like we’re stuck. Then every now and then, we get those tsunamis, sometimes even in clusters of multiples, which not only scare us, but take us so far and so fast in turbulent distress out of our norms, that we are shocked, dismayed, and disturbed by the sheer fact that our sea of life sent them our way. Most of the time, we hope to be in the constant calm of a crystal blue sea, able to see our direction ahead, surrounded by others whom we trust and love, responsible for our own journey with a definable compass and equipment we can rely on, and with the knowledge that we haven’t had any upsetting tides nor stagnant times to stress us. 

When life’s sea sends us in strange and unknown waters, those uncharted and with unknown markers, we can feel fear. We can find ourselves more afraid to proceed in life than ever before . . . and fear is the vast darkness of depths yet unseen. Fear robs us of so much joy in life, it steals our peace of mind and catapults us into places of despair and evil. If you could equate it to the realm of the sea, it would be like finding either a shark’s fin cutting through the water’s surface near you, or even a school of sharks swimming underneath you. Nothing screams more primally of fear than imagining the fear of the top predator of the sea crossing our pathway! Our fears are like that. They live in the darkest recesses for a reason. They prey upon our peace for a reason. They are disturbing and unsettling to us for a reason, they are imagined, they are unseen, they are usually unrealized. So why do they garner so much power? Well, fear is the realm of all the negative thoughts we have, so in that negativity lives all that is wrong within us. 

We can also dwell in the drift of nothingness, when it seems as though the sea hasn’t enough current to propel us anywhere!  We become frustrated and puzzled,wondering how to find our escape, to swim ourselves free from the confines of stagnation! Is that so bad?  Normally we like a bit of calm, but in stagnation, means a floundering without direction, with no definable goals, our aspirations falter and we suffocate when finally, in fatigue, we sink into the endless sea around us.  It’s tiresome and overwhelming, this state of affairs!  We must learn to have faith and to leap forward when life stops dead in its tracks.  There are motors on a sailboat for the times when the wind is not anywhere to be found.  Sometimes in life, we need our plan B’s to guide us to another place where we are more ready to wait out the dead spaces of nothingness which surround us.  Don’t be afraid to use your motor when the sails won’t fill with air!  Call upon the powers which guide you, for me it is God!  Always and forever, I will rely and trust in Him.  Use your strength to move past the moments of stagnancy and consternation, press on!

No matter what the sea of life brings your way, be happy always and thankful for the fact that you are still afloat!  It is important to be grateful for your life, your current circumstances, your blessings, your joys, your family, your friends, no matter what you can say is something of value in our life, even life itself!  Be grateful!  It is better than drowning in the dark sea, giving up, and never knowing the true measure of life . . . promising and beautiful, filled with reasons to celebrate, even the smallest reasons exist in each moment of the day, every day!  Appreciate your sea!   Your waves might become this great set of surfable ones which carry you to a place of previously unknown successes, growth, love, happiness, desire, dreams, and inspiration!  

EVEN ONE BLESSING MAKES YOU BLESSED

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by Cheryl Ries in God

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Appreciation, Beauty, Blessing, God, Gratefulness, Joy, Spirit, Thankfulness

EVEN ONE BLESSING MAKES YOU BLESSED

You needn’t wait upon a sea of blessings to consider yourself blessed!  You are blessed and should feel thankful even if there is just one thing today, right now, that you can consider a blessing.  Although, I would dare you to muse further and realize the others!

Look at your life, did you wake up anew today?  Then you are blessed.  Did you share a greeting, exchange some words of love, compassion, or warmth with another living soul?  Then you are blessed.  Did you witness something in nature which made you smile, which warmed your spirit, or which possibly reminded you of the awesome power of a universe so much greater than your own?  Then you are blessed.  Did you eat breakfast?  Did you find food and something to take in to enrich your body this morning?  Then you are blessed.  Did you have clothing to put on your body and shoes for your feet?  Then you are blessed.  I could go on and on . . but I think you get the message.  Most of us are quite blessed, even much more than just once a day!  How many of us really see all the ways which we are blessed and are thankful for those many blessings? 

Life’s greatest joy is in learning to appreciate all the richness of blessings we receive, including love; experiencing beauty; knowing joy, feeling wellness of body, mind and spirit; learning things; having relationships with others; tasting the fruits of the earth’s bounty; and living full, productive lives, not to mention God and the Holy Spirit.  Being thankful is the key to realizing how rich you are in life.  Most of us have so many reasons to celebrate life each day if we just choose to become focused on blessings, to see them, to know them in our lives.  Don’t miss the chance to alter your life by experiencing gratitude each day.  There are always things to be grateful for, in and about!  You are blessed, never waiver a day feeling ungrateful and without blessings.  If you take a magnifying lens to your life, you will notice in great detail, the many ways in which you were blessed today!

ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD

27 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by Cheryl Ries in God

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Blessing, God, Possibilities, Time, Youth

ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD

 

When we are young, we look at our lives ahead as endless, infinite expanses of unfulfilled promise.  We see days stretched out before us as limitless miles left in our tanks, nothing to restrict us, nor to restrain our momentum.  We don’t consider ramifications, complications, situations, or implications.  We only take one day after another like we’ve all the time in the world!

Somewhere along the way, hopefully later rather than sooner, we begin to see small foretellings of the possibilities that life is truly not so infinite.  Some elderly relative dies, or we hear of a tragedy which has befallen someone near to us, but it’s still not enough to force reality into our heads and hearts.  We still thrive in our carefree youth, denying the adult notion that mortality truly exists for us.

Soon we reach a time when responsibilities of life seep in enough that we start to pay attention more.  We’ve our instant communications to remind us that in fact, life is ebbing all around us like vast tidal pools; life comes and goes, but still maybe not for our realization, to us.  Maybe we haven’t yet felt the sting of personal tragedy, nor prolonged illness or disease threatening at our doorways.  Perhaps we have been blessed with intolerably good health and have a feeling of impenetrable well-being.  We are invincible, even though we surely see others are not.  It’s our good fortune and God’s blessings.

Oh, but then it comes, the threat of all threats.  We find the impenetrable barriers of our happy-go-lucky walls have in fact been knocked a bit; something foreign has entered our safety zones.  We taste illness, we taste death, and we understand mortality, usually at a time when we start to sense our own coming rapidly through life’s progression.  We can see, along with our newly formed lines of character, which mark the triumphs and failings of life upon our faces, our bodies seem to resemble those of our elders, those of our parents, or grandparents, something we just cannot understand.  Where did our time go?  How do we now relate to time as our enemy?

It is then, when time is daring you to see it as a finite human measure that we must find what we are made of.  We must conquer our fears and press forward in life, bravely deciding that, in its most precious element, brevity, time is now asking, no … pleading with us, to be more diligent, more efficient, more appreciative and less wasteful.  Time is demanding us to mature along beside it, knowing full well the most important concept of life other than love is to appreciate this gift of time!   It is precious, rare, and no matter which part of life’s spectrum you are standing, it is an unseen commodity which one must assume to be finite.  When we are young, we make our choices without the benefit of wisdom, when it finally comes, it is crucial to make certain the wisdom learned through our life lessons didn’t arrive too late to make a difference!

 

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Cheryl Ries-Author & Model

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