• people pleaser
    Abundant Life,  emotional health,  Emptiness,  Fear,  Self Awareness,  self worth,  Self-Acceptance,  True self

    The Five Wounds of a People Pleaser

    I think most of us struggle with being a people pleaser at some point. Our development as adults requires that we let go of the fear of man as the Bible calls it. We first individuate from our parents, a task that takes decades. After that, we must carve out our identities, choosing what we will and will not stand for as a person. Often this process means eliminating friends along the way, determining which relationships are toxic and which are life-giving. C.S. Lewis famously said that man’s strongest drive was to belong to a group. In essence, humans are herd animals. And like sheep, each of us has gone…

  • Featured,  Self Awarebess,  Self-Acceptance,  Self-Destructive

    How to Tell if You Have Self-Destructive Tendencies

    I imagine most everyone feels self-destructive at one point or another. Sometimes the teen years can prove too much or during times of great stress, we can all separate from our selves emotionally. But one of a successful and healthy person’s duties is to care for themselves, making sure that they don’t turn their lives into a train wreck that can claim lives other than just their own. Being self-destructive, like most things is a matter of degree. While perhaps some are just a bit careless with their lives, others are bent on ending a relationship with themselves once and for all.  Rare is the person who never struggles with…

  • Imaginative Prayer,  parable,  Pearl,  Pearl of Great Price,  prayer,  relationship to God,  self worth

    You are the Pearl of Great Price

    A second marriage brings with it a number of regrets. If onlys tend to crop up. If only, we think, we knew then what we know now.  If only we weren’t dragging along an ex-husband or ex-wife and the damages from that marriage into the new one.  I was thinking along those dispirited lines one morning several months into my marriage to my wonderful husband as I read the parable in Matthew about the pearl of great price.  Sometimes too many sermons on a subject will close our minds to the possibilities in the Word, and so I reread the familiar parable, imagining as the pearl, the gospel of Christ.  We…