Steve Simms's Blog, page 190
April 10, 2021
Hate is never cruelty-free
Be cruelty-free,
No human harmed,
None mistreated,
No one hated,
Kindness for all.
Have a hate-free heart. It’s one of life’s greatest blessings!
Hate should never be defined as disagreement. We can disagree with kindness, compassion, and love.
Hate has a lousy track record. It overrides reason, casts out compassion, causes violence, kills kindness, and ruins relationships.
The history of hate is mostly hidden. That’s because it hurts national pride to face it.
Weak people often feel a need to hate, so that they can blame someone for their emotional pain. A fearless person doesn’t hate. Hate is a sign of fear. People who aren’t courageous enough to forgive stay stuck in hate.
Hate is cowardice. It allows fear to cast out compassion and create a negative attitude toward certain people. Every time you open the gate to hate, your heart shuts down.
Jesus gives us another option for dealing with our foes. We can love our enemies. We don’t have to hate them.
To mistreat people, either verbally or physically, is to vandalize the image of God. For a practical guide to overcoming hate, search for my book: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color-Kind. Thank you.
Hate wants to harm.
Compassion wants to heal.
Reason analyzes.
Apathy ignores.
Hate is a great weight,
A hefty load,
Hardening every heart
That carries it.
If we were all cruelty-free!
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April 8, 2021
Emotional health is true wealth
Feelings are like plants. Some are fit for consumption and some aren’t. It’s important to know the difference. Like waves, as emotions roll inside us, we can choose to ride them or we can wave them on.
Hazardous emotions aren’t good for your environment. They can be handled with caution and disposed of safely. Emotional health is true wealth.
If you can reject manipulation by people trying to force you to obey them, then you can reject compulsive thoughts and feelings. Emotions are controllable. It’s not easy, but we can learn to manage them–to turn them on or to turn them off. Life can be a blender creating a soothing, emotional smoothie, or a dicer, chopping up our inner peace, depending on how we run it.
You can’t hold two conflicting emotions at the same moment. If you lock into one, it locks the other out. Choose positive emotions. If you lock into negative emotions, they will lock you down, but if you pick up positive emotions they will lift you up.
Inside of you, anger and laughter both can’t prevail. When you clearly see the funny, the mad will turn tail and leave.
Emotional motion can be good or bad. Let positive emotions move you, while courageously resisting negative ones. Peace of mind harbors positive emotions; anxiety welcomes negative ones.
Emotional servitude is bondage. We can learn to serve honesty, kindness, and righteousness, rather than our feelings.
People who advocate accepting all your emotions, seem to resist their tender, caring emotions that tend to produce public tears. However, if people can learn to resist tender emotions that they see as embarrassing, they can learn to resist negative emotions as well.
We’re often told that it’s not good to suppress your feelings, but then we’re prescribed drugs to do that very thing. That’s a contradiction!
Thoughts, feelings, and desires will all lie to you. It’s best to fact check before you believe and/or follow them.
Amusement brings pleasure to the emotions, but musing brings insight to the mind. A good “aha” is priceless!
Natural selection,Letting your feelings
Flow without your direction,
Is a dereliction.
Emotional health isn’t a heart empty of emotional activity, but one that cultivates helpful emotions while resisting harmful ones. Negative emotions are warning signs that something is off in your thinking.
Without inner energy, we give in to negative feelings, desires, and thoughts. We need a daily inspirational charge!
Negative emotions aren’t just a waste of energy. They also tend to produce harmful consequences.
When appreciated, valued, and treated with consistent kindness, it’s rare for people to respond with hostility. Instead they tend to respond with positive emotions.
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Life goes better with Jesus
Continually make Him welcome.
Listen to and obey Him.
Spend your time with Him.
Fully surrender to Him who is
The hope of glory
Life is a round trip visit to planet earth on a tourist visa. The living Jesus helps us make the most of our stay.
The word church ties Christianity to an organizational format. However, Jesus said that God wants to be worshipped “in spirit and in truth.”
A person’s life begins with its first beginning. Your sperm won the right to unite with your egg and get you started.
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There’s nothing super about superficiality
A superficial lifestyle focuses on style, but ignores substance. Superficial answers to life’s questions are deceptive. They make us think that we know more than we do.
Like lukewarm, watered down tea, superficiality isn’t very satisfying. Superficiality ≠ reality. Superficiality often creates a lot of surface tension, but openness with compassionate listening, heals relationships.
Sometimes we need to take a deep breath and sometimes we need to have a deep thought. In both it’s beauty and it’s furiosity, nature can raise us beyond superficiality.
A causality of superficiality is that we trade meaning and purpose for comfort and acceptance. Dare to step outside of your superficial zone. We need superheroes, not superficial ones!
Saying, “I’m fine,” when your not, replaces reality with superficiality. It takes a lot more courage to be sincere than it does to be superficial.
Superficial Christianity is artificial. The real deal sets your heart on fire! You’ll never find yourself in superficiality. Dare to exercise courageous spirituality in a search for reality.
When we make things official, we tend to make them superficial. Notice what institutionalization does to Christianity. A comfortable, superficial Christianity misses out on the incredible reality of daily hearing and obeying the living Jesus.
Political freedom is superficial if you’re a prisoner of your desires, emotions, and thoughts. Racism is superficiality mixed with hostility. As we go beyond the superficial and proclaim the equality of human rights, we need to recognize that no one believes in the equality of human behaviors.
The “What ya call it” poem
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April 6, 2021
Cultivating the emotions that you want to feel . . .
To stay healthy, humans reject spoiled food. We can also make life better by rejecting rotten emotions.
Make happiness happen. Deescalate the negative emotions that you feel. Escalate your positive ones.
There’s no reason we can’t decide how we want to feel and then begin to engineer those emotions. That is emotion management–cultivating the feelings that enhance your life.
Uncontrolled emotion is commotion. Negative emotions are often warnings of self-mismanagement.
Emotions follow evaluation and/or perspective. Change your evaluation and/or change your perspective and your feelings about a situation will change.
Thoughts and emotions can be resisted. They only become “yours” when you accept them and “own” them.
Holding on to paralyzing emotions will keep you stuck in motionlessness–feeling the same negativity and torment day after day. Unfortunately, our culture trains us to resist our tender and compassionate feelings but to express our irritable and angry ones.
All feelings are not equal; some will lift you up and others knock you down. Choose wisely which ones to accept and which to resist. One way to overcome negative feelings is to welcome, pursue, and cultivate positive emotions.
Open your heart and mind to good and helpful influences. Close them to bad and harmful ones. When you’re being led by feelings, they’re manipulating you and keeping you from being free. Be led by wisdom instead.
With your freedom of choice, you can choose to disobey any thoughts, feelings, or desires that try to compel you against your will. In all your choosing, choose freedom from compulsion–to not be controlled by your feelings or desires. Make the choice to embrace the best emotions and to reject the ones that try to enslave you or pull you down. It’s not easy, but bad feelings can be resisted and overcome.
Feelings can’t require your obedience. You have the right of resistance. If you can use medication to fight negative feelings, you can also choose to resist them with will power.
You are not your feelings. You are the person who can either accept or resist the feelings that try to rise up within you.
Crying can be helpful as you seek to cultivate healing emotions. I reveals that your heart isn’t hard–that it can still grow, feel, and heal.
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April 5, 2021
Have you heard beyond “heard immunity”?
I heard about Jesus.
Then one day
I heard Him
And He herded me
Into His presence.
Every single day,
The resurrected Jesus
Can be ignored,
Or adored as the Lord.
Stony hearts
Want to rollback
The big rock
And try to keep
Jesus entombed.
Jesus left the tomb
So that He can live
Inside of you.
Make room!
April 4, 2021
7 short poems about Jesus being alive
Religious people wanted Jesus
Cruelly killed
And then sealed
In a guarded tomb.
They got what they wanted
For a weekend,
But many act
As if He's still there.
It's time to live like
Jesus is living!Weekend Stay
Jesus had a weekend stay
In a garden tomb,
But then He rose and got away.
Now He's everywhere.
Yet to this day,
Many Christians live
Like He's still entombed there.Easter Song
Borrowed tomb,
But not for long,
The Guest soon
Was gone.
Death Invader
Jesus died
To invade
The realm of death
And conquer it.
To decorate
Jesus' empty tomb
With words and ceremonies,
Ignoring the amazing testimonies
That He's alive
In the 21st Century.Tomb Time
His tomb time is gone.
Jesus is out of the box!
Now roll away your heart's stone
And let Him own
You.Make room!
Let Jesus out
Of the religious tomb.
Prepare the way
For Him to sway
And control
The way
You live,
24/7/365!
Jesus’ message: Everybody is somebody who matters!
Nobody’s insignificant.
Too many Christians live their lives in between Good Friday and Easter. Jesus rose once, almost 2,000 years ago. He doesn’t rise every year.
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Listening to Jesus on Easter Sunday
The Resurrection means
That Jesus can be
More than heard about.
He can be heard!
Waking up Easter morning 2021, I sensed Jesus saying: “Listen, Steve. Hear My voice speaking within you with words, images, and impressions.” So I did. This is what came to me.
“If death couldn’t keep Me down, nothing else can either!”
“Much that you listen to will harm you, but listen to Me and you will heal from within.”
“Read the Scriptures with an open heart and I will make the words burn within you as you do.”
“I hear your monologue, but we won’t have dialogue until you begin to regularly listen to Me.”
“Since I’m alive, I can speak. If you’re alive, you can hear Me.”
“There’s no reason to blindly assume My empty tomb. Open you’re heart and I will show you that I’m alive.”
“On Easter you hear people say that I’m alive. Now hear it from Me, for yourself.”
“Since I’m not stuck in a Jerusalem tomb, we can hang out together. Let’s meetup.”
“My sheep hear My voice.” (I’ve read that somewhere, have you?)
“You’ve heard that I said: ‘Love your enemies. Bless those curse you.’ How blessed you will be if you do it.”
“Many Christians act like they can’t hear me for themselves, and rely on someone else to tell them what I said.”
“If you don’t believe I am speaking today, you’ll have a difficult time recognizing My voice.”
“Follow Me the way children play follow the leader.”
(An observation: When it comes to listening to the living Jesus, too many people have heard immunity!)
I heard about Jesus.
Then one day
I heard Him
And He herded me
Into His presence.
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April 2, 2021
Choose compassion. Cancel cruelty.
Compassion wants to relieve suffering. Hatred wants to cause it. Anybody can hate, but it takes great courage to consistently show compassion.
Irritation sees people as a drain on your energy. Compassion sees them as an opportunity to show kindness.
We need more compassionate words; fewer combative words. Sincere compassion, shared with angry people, curtails their anger.
Everybody is somebody who matters and is worthy of your compassion! Nobody’s insignificant.
Because compassion feels another’s pain, it’s uncomfortable and too often avoided. Compassion requires courage!
Everyone has the ability to feel compassion. We can allow it to flow from our heart, or we can block it. A heart without compassion is a river without water.
The less you allow compassion to flow from your heart, the more hardhearted you become. When you let your heart out of its box, you’ll feel compassion for and connection with other people.
If you’re lonely, reach out and begin to show people compassion. Then your loneliness won’t last long.
Compassion happens when your heart connects with someone’s pain. Jesus was “moved with compassion.” Any form of Christianity that lacks compassion is counterfeit.
Check out my practical handbook about how to choose compassion and to cancel cruelty: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color-Kind. Thank you.
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