Khari > Recent Status Updates

The Christian life begins with freedom from dead works, from religious systems and from all human attempts to 'please God'.

One basic purpose ... is to help you examine your own practice of Christianity...Are you practicing grace, allowing the Spirit of Christ to live through you in a way so you help lift oppressive weights off others and spiritually empower them to live? Or do you try to force people to live under laws, rules or formulas for spirituality that cause them to feel weighed down, unable to measure up to your standards?

I wonder if it is possible to spiritually or psychologically abuse yourself?

The second point about spiritual abuse hit home "The focus of the issue was subtly changed." Someone goes to talk about their problem of depression, the person they talk to addresses it as the problem being the person themselves, shifting from the emotion as problem to the state of being as the problem.

I think I probably do that.

"[God] loves to give good gifts to those He loves. But He will not honor the chase of these things."

The spotlight never fixes our insecurities, it only magnifies what we thought popularity would cover up.

"We can go to Bible study and amen every point made, but if we don't apply it to our lives, we won't be changed. And I'll even take it a step further and say that if we've been exposed to a teaching that we know we need to implement and we don't make any changes, that's a clue that the hardening of that part of our heart is in process."

"Is my attention being held by something sacred or something secret? What is holding my attention the most is what I'm truly worshipping."

Ouch.

"When you feed negativity on the inside, it's negativity that you'll exude on the outside."

"The enemy loves to take our rejection and twist it into a raw, irrational fear that God really doesn't have a good plan for us...Satan knows what consumes us controls us. Therefore the more consumed we are with rejection, the more he can control our emotions, our thinking, and our actions."

"We can't walk in victory while wallowing in thoughts of defeat and rejection."

No amount of outside achievement fixes inside hurts.

Facts.

"The need to belong goes beyond the need for superficial social ties...it is a need for meaningful, profound bonding. A sense of belongingness is crucial to our well-being."

I can't continue to fully embrace God while rejecting His ways.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which though must leave ere long.

Sonnet lxxiii

So far I find reading this to be a major slog.

It is vain to save children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching them to be men, and how simple can it be to teach an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves?

We cannot create anything good until we have conceived it.

"Both men and women ought to face more fully the things they do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing them."

"In modern civilization [some say that we are not] really required to capture, to sentence or to slay; that all this is done indirectly, that specialists kill our criminals as they kill our cattle...Democracy was meant to be a more direct way of ruling, not a more indirect way; and if we do not feel that we are all gaolers so much the worse for us, and for the prisoners."

"When people say that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and muddled cynicisms of modernity. Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice. A king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal, evil, uses the general strength to crush it out; the strength is his tool, but the belief is his only sanction."

The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work, and he hasn't obeyed.

...How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness."

...sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe?...

...drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens, or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; To be Whitley within a certain area, providing toys, boots,...

"When people begin to talk about domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only mans dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might...

The object of empathy is understanding. The object of sympathy is the other person's well-being.