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Validation: How to Love Well
Validation is the little-recognized glue than creates and mends relationships. After all, we live in our own selves all day, every day. Understanding someone else’s journey takes effort, in part because clearing the decks of our own experiences is so challenging. But the rewards of validation are great. Validation builds trust, opens previously clogged channels of communication, and creates relationship between the most unlikely pairs. The primary myth about validation is that by affirming someone else, you are signing off on their beliefs. Validation means selling out your position for the sake of peace and a couple of feel-good moments. Not true. Affirmation of a person is not ratifying their…
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How Do I Know God Will Listen to Me?
For years I believed that I needed to make God listen to me. We have this unfortunate tendency to overlay the image of our parents onto our beliefs about God. So just like my father, I imagined God as benevolent but distant and preoccupied. But also like my father, once you got His attention, it was a laser focus where you would discover all your previous misconceptions. This was both good and painful. Having a bonafide genius for a father has its benefits and drawbacks. The only fight I remember my parents had on a regular basis was the one where my mother was trying to get him home…
Healing Through Art & Words
