Tag: <span>appreciation</span>

  I have met many who have lost their appreciation for life. They’ve traded their ability to live freely, to love, and to laugh, for reactions, repressions, and denials. Some folks, hurt by love, have discarded love forever; it bears too much pain. Others, worn down by oppressive relationships, jobs or circumstances, have given themselves over to drugs, alcohol, or other means of artificial comfort. I have discovered that a person’s ability to resist stress is only temporary. Eventually that stress envelops that individual and wears him down. Now, he readily yields to those stressors because it’s human to get “stress relief” at all costs. Evil takes advantage of these “human” qualities and attempts to wear out the saints — they try to make life become “too hard — too long.” Their evil government looks for eventual capitulation –then they offer freedom and release — but the new-found freedom equals slavery.…

  “…we must also accept the reality of our incompleteness.” Gerald G. May M.D.  From his book “Addiction and Grace.” He starts in, “We can and should do our very best to move in that direction, (to achieve the state of perfection.) struggling with every resource we have. but…”we need to recognize that the incompleteness in us, our personal insufficiency, does not make us unacceptable in God’s eyes.” “Far from it, our incompleteness is the empty side of our longing for God and for love. It is what draws us toward love and one another.” “if we do not fill our minds with guilt and self-recriminations, we will recognize our incompleteness as a kind of spaciousness into which we can welcome the flow of grace.” “We can think of our inadequacies as terrible defects, if we want, and hate ourselves. But we can also think of them affirmatively, as doorways…