Steve Simms's Blog, page 196
February 15, 2021
Falling on ice
February 14, 2021
Self-assembly–putting yourself together with God’s help
You can assemble thoughts and ideas in ways that magnify hope. Your life will eventually be mastered by whatever your mind continually magnifies.
Disappointments are less disappointing if you refuse to let your mind magnify them. If you would refuse to mentally magnify your problems, they wouldn’t seem so loomingly large.
Our perspective molds our perception. Step into another person’s viewpoint and you’ll understand why he thinks the way he does.
Pride exalts self. Humility embraces mercy. Our society needs more compassionate, mental analysis and fewer angry, emotional justifications. The more ways you can see an issue, the less you feel you feel a need to defend one point of view. What’s behind your eyes and stored in your brain and in your heart, often determines what you see, more that what’s directly in front of your eyes.
Magnify the Son of God in your soul and you will experience spiritual fire. Christians are called to “Rejoice in the Lord always,” not to rejoice in politics.
The Bible shows Christianity was never intended to be continually focused on one man talking. It’s full of “one another” commands.
Official Christianity is often superficial and artificial. Initial Christianity was uncontainable fire in the soul.
Let your soul
Hear Jesus speaking
And His words
Will make you whole.
February 13, 2021
Complexity matters — especially in politics
Complexity matters. Nothing is as simple as it seems. Complexity is your friend. It calls you to continually search for truth and understanding.
People are complex. To think you know someone based on one issue is naiveté. When you disagree with someone, there’s usually much about their opinion that you don’t understand.
If some people were good and others were bad, politics would be simple. The fact that there’s good and bad in everybody complicates things. All human opinions (including this one) are a mixture of various degrees of truth, confusion, and deception.
Life is complex. To see it as simple robs us of wonder, awe, amazement, and mystery. Anybody can simplify a complex political problem, but it takes courage and wisdom to fully and honestly examine it.
Truth is paradoxical. It’s beyond the ability of humans to fully understand. To be uncomfortable with paradox and ambiguity is to be uncomfortable with truth.
Many apparent contradictions are paradoxes–truth that’s too complex for human minds to fully understand. If we understood paradox, we would understand each other better. Both sides of a paradox contain truth. Thus, rejecting paradox docks your understanding of reality.
If you’re not confused about politics, you’ve probably settled for superficial slogans and sound bite answers. If you’re stuck in oversimplified, polarized conflict, trying to see things from the other side will help. Not to think and grapple with truth, is to make life simpler than it should be.
If you think and ponder, instead of getting mad, conflict can release rivers of creativity. If you can only argue one side of an issue, you’re thinking is too small.
Any political opinion that requires few brain cells to conceive, but much anger to defend, is probably inaccurate. We need to expand our understanding so we can grasp complex ideas, not compress complex ideas to match our understanding.
Complex problems are seldom solved by opinionated emotion. They require expanded thinking, not narrow mindedness. Inflammatory language is almost always based on over simplifications. The unwillingness to accept some ambiguity causes many problems and much deception. The ambiguity of life is too big for you to ever explain away.
Complicated ideas are a threat to our ego–to our mental pride–so we tend to simplify them to fit our understanding. Our complex political problems need more than simple, one-sided solutions. If either my simple political solution or your simple political solution worked well, we wouldn’t be arguing about them.
Seeing truth from your own perspective isn’t a lie, but it’s also not the entire truth. To simplify a complex concept to fit your own understanding, is to compromise the truth. If you won’t listen to the whole story, you’ll be stuck with a half-truth.
Political issues are much more complicated than our emotion-driven opinions. The working of the human brain and emotions is a great complexity. Telling people to “get over it” is an unfounded simplification.
Political debate has been simplified into the consistent repetition of half-truth, while denying the other half, however, nothing is as simple as a sound bite. Transforming the complicated into the simple usually whittles away much truth.
At some point, the simplification of truth morphs into error by leaving out important information. Facts I don’t like, also matter. To leave them out of my opinion is self-dishonesty. To give a simple answer to a complicated situation and demand that people agree with you, is arrogance.
When people disagree they’re often focused on different parts of the same truth. The simplification of complex issues often peels away truth and leaves us with a partial-truth.
Simple answers seldom contain all the facts. Insisting on simplifying complex concepts causes much divisiveness. The over simplification of complicated ideas leads to the multiplication of conflict. The urge to simplify everything causes much misunderstanding in human relationships.
We need each other. Many of the essential workers you rely on, don’t vote like you! Although humans no longer live as hunter-gathers of food, we all desperately need to be hunter gathers of truth.
American history is much more paradoxical and complex than text books show. Check out my book: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color-Kind.
Simplicity’s not what it’s cracked up to be. Complexity matters.
February 12, 2021
Jesus is eternal, but sermons aren’t supposed to be
I can’t find the idea in Scripture that meetings of the body of Christ, need to be built around a sermon. If Christians spent more time reading the Bible with an open heart, we wouldn’t feel such a need to hear lectures about it.
Christians have been trained to depend on a man’s sermons and have been desensitized from hearing directly from the living Jesus. All sermons and no hands-on training is ineffective for making disciples. Jesus is eternal, but sermons aren’t supposed to be.
When people leave a lecture they tend to leave it behind. When they’ve heard a deeply, heart-felt testimony, it stays with them. I recently heard two men tell how they’ve been changed by the living Jesus. Their stories are still ringing in my soul!
There comes a time for Christians to go beyond listening to lectures about their faith and start doing it daily! Humble, heart-felt conversations about Christ have impacted me far more than sermons have.
Jesus doesn’t live in organizations. He lives in people who surrender their will to follow an d obey Him. Before Christianity turned into church, it was a movement led by the living, resurrected Jesus.
“Created equal” doesn’t apply to desires . . .
All desires aren’t equal. Cultivate and follow the desires that make your life better, not worse. Desires that bend toward evil lead to inner torment, guilt, and bondage.
Your focus will determine your desires. They will rise or fall as you feed them or fight them. If you won’t control your desires, they will capture and control you. Desire for more can extinguish the joy and appreciation of what you already have.
When you truly appreciate what you already have, you’ll have enough for great joy. If you have freedom, food, shelter, and clothing, you have enough stuff for a happy life.
Many human desires are disguised longings for God and can only be satisfied by Him. Christians are called to be led by the living Jesus, not dominated by desire.
Forgiveness is too often the missing ingredient in relationships.
Long ago in a far away Galilee
To confine Jesus to long ago in far away Galilee is to miss out on His present day miracles. Church says that Jesus is risen, but then tends to burry Him in the distant past or exile Him to the distant future. People won’t believe that Jesus is alive and present if Christians live like He’s dead & gone.
Remembering Jesus in the past isn’t enough. Biblical Christianity is about experiencing Him in the present. A Jesus who is confined to the past or the future, doesn’t give people much hope for today.
If we don’t want to spend all day today with Jesus, we probably don’t really want to be with Him forever. If you feel like you don’t have enough stuff, but you do have enough of Jesus, you have life backwards.
Grace doesn’t force itself on the person who insists he needs no mercy, forgiveness, or help from God.
Conscience
The light inside
Will be your guide
If not denied
By your pride.
Champ
You won against
400,000,000 to 1 odds
In the race
For your conception!
February 10, 2021
Spirit-led prayer can burst from your heart
The way to perceive and enjoy God’s blessings, is with a thankful heart. God created your heart so the living Jesus could live in it and direct it. Let Him. If you’ve asked Jesus into your heart, you can learn to show His love to everyone you meet.
If Christians won’t learn to be led by the Spirit, we won’t recognize that we are one in the Spirit. To be led by the Spirit is to be guided, not by our desire, will, opinions, or feelings, but by God’s direct, inner prompting.
If you don’t know what God intends to do in and thru you, you’ll have trouble staying in His will. Ask Him and He will show you.
When prayer is allowed to burst from your heart, it’s powerful! (Quench not the Spirit.) If a vicious animal attacked you, you could escape by climbing a tree. When a vicious thought attacks you, use prayer to climb into God’s help.
Be color-kind, not color-blind. See all colors yet be kind to everybody. Skin color is real. The concept of color-based races of people is fictional. Truth is, we’re all the same color under the skin.
My birth race is human.
https://amzn.to/3q8y91y
(Yours is too.)
Virtue can’t hurt you
When a society makes virtues (high moral qualities) undesirable, it’s in trouble. A culture that mocks virtues will gravitate toward anarchy. Virtue is continually under attack. It’s easy to abandon it. I need to oppose the evil inclinations within me as much as the evil I see around me.
Virtues are behaviors that show high moral standards. The word’s seldom used anymore. (Perhaps we don’t talk about virtue because we see so little of it.) Instead there seems to be a conspiracy of accusation–people bullying to get their way by boldly blaming others.
Virtue is moral cleanliness and a clear conscience. It is alignment with goodness and should be a lifetime pursuit. There’s something in humans that tries to stop us from thinking, saying, and doing bad things. It’s called conscience.
Virtues are morally excellent character traits. They are the opposites of sins. There’s no need to be offended because someone’s conscience is stricter than yours.
To be amoral isn’t freedom. It is surrender to dangerous whims, cravings, and desires. The desires you defend and develop, will gradually dominate you. You can’t be dishonest without detaching yourself from reality and diving into deception.
It’s easy to be majority-minded instead of moral-minded — to blend with the crowd instead of doing what’s right. If humans cultivated their conscience instead of silencing it, most of the world’s problems would fade away.
Virtuous reality is impossible by human effort. I see complete virtuous reality only in the living, resurrected Jesus Christ.
You can be somebody who cares about all people
Your attitude and actions provoke reactions in people. Give out what you want to come back to you. Kindness, compassion, and empathy are skills that can be learned and improved. Ethics and empathy go together. It’s hard mistreat people when you let yourself care about their pain.
People respond differently to kindness than they do to hostility. Try it and see. Consistent kindness will eventually defuse hostility. (“Love your enemies.”) When people sense that you genuinely care about them, they open up to you. To stop someone’s hostility, humbly listen with an open heart and refuse to blame or be offended.
The more we’re aware of someone’s struggles, the stronger the connection between us. Empathy replaces apathy when we become acutely aware of someone’s pain. Empathy isn’t earned. No human life is unworthy of your concern. Some indicators of a lack of empathy are: unwillingness to listen, blame, arrogance, and being easily offended.
We don’t understand people’s behavior when we’re unaware of their pain. Everyone you encounter has pain in life. Notice it and allow your heart to care. When you let yourself feel someone’s pain, you’ll automatically treat them better. If you learn to use your thoughts to create empathy inside you, you’ll feel better about people.
To intentionally harm someone is to deny that his life matters. Empathy is being sensitive to the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another person. To sympathize with people’s emotions, ask them questions to learn more about them. You can find something to like about any human being if you look for it.
People’s opinions needn’t be a threat. There’s something you can learn from every point of view. You don’t have to agree with people to make a sincere effort to understand them. No matter what anyone says, you don’t have to feel personally offended by it.
February 7, 2021
It’s good to procrastinate negative assumptions
Jumping to conclusions is a bias-building exercise. To assume is to presume that you know more than you actually do. The biggest assumption is to assume that you have no assumptions. Our default assumptions often override truth.
It’s good to procrastinate making negative assumptions about people. To assume people dislike you is painful (and may be untrue). You might as well assume they do like you. If you want to make assumptions, make assumptions that release love, not anger.
I’m not always wrong in my opinions, but I always could be. Sometimes I hear a thud and realize that a bird has made a false assumption and flown into my deck door. Too often I’m like that bird.
Your assumptions tell your mind what to look for. It’s hard to see truth that doesn’t align with your assumptions. When assumptions are treated as fact, presumptions run wild and deception lurks nearby. If you don’t know the whole story, it’s safer not to make assumptions.
Assumptions give proud answers to our questions. Truth questions our answers. To be a better listener, assume less about people. To assume without adequate assessment can be both embarrassing and painful.
Just because something clashes with your assumptions, doesn’t mean it’s untrue. Unproven assumptions will filter much truth from our thinking. The safest assumption is to assume that hate-producing assumptions are wrong.
The concept of good people and bad people is a false assumption. Every person contains both good and bad. Our assumptions about people often prevent us from really getting to know them.
Belief doesn’t make something true (or false). My opinion doesn’t change reality. When false assumptions are made about you, do you like it? No one likes to be falsely accused.
Assumptions are often roadblocks to understanding. Clear communication is difficult. It’s easy for a person to say one thing while our assumptions cause us to understand another. It takes more courage to ask questions and listen to people, than to make assumptions.
There’s a lot of overlooked truth, just beyond our assumptions. Search for it. The fewer our assumptions, the more likely we are to be accurate in our assessment. When walking on assumptions, it’s best to test them before you put all your weight on then. Often our assumptions make the obvious hazy. The assumption that you know someone’s motives, is usually false.
Human nature tends to fill in the gaps of what we know with assumptions. Assumptions are beliefs based on little or no evidence. They often contain more falsehood than truth. It easier to accept assumptions than it is to examine truth that you don’t like.
The consumption of assumption results in presumption. Our assumptions tend to make us biased against any view that disagrees with them. If all you have is a strong opinion without evidence, it’s easy to treat it as truth.
For a handbook to help overcome many false assumptions, check out my book, Off the RACE Track.
