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We’re going on week three of our stay at home orders and things were kind of crazy around here. We’re getting a little stir crazy and, you know, we’re just trying to hold it together. Like all of us here in this world. It’s just a crazy time. We have definitely entered into a new frontier as far as the life that we never dreamed would be.
I’ve talked to several people, my friends and I keep saying over and over again, “It’s okay not to be okay.”
Because this is a whole new playing field. We’ve just been handed a whole new set of rules and a whole new field to play on and nobody knows what’s going on. It seems like the questions just keep growing and the uncertainty just keeps getting bigger and bigger. None of us know how this is all gonna play out. It feels like the upside down from Stranger Things. You know, this is just we’ve walked into an alternate world, for sure.
So today I just want to talk to you and be a voice of hope and love and encouragement and send you a big virtual hug. Just wrap my arms around you and tell you that I love you and I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I do believe it’s gonna be okay.
I hear the voice of God who repeated himself over and over and over in the Scriptures. He said it so many times, “Do not be afraid.”
I always think about that. I’m like he said it an awful lot of times. I think he might be trying to tell us something. I think he’s trying to get a message across to the people of the world. What could that be?
Oh, maybe —
Do not be afraid.
It sounds so simple, but it’s the hardest thing to not be afraid. You know, we as humans, understand that we’re capable of so much. We have so much potential inside of us. But then we also know just how vulnerable we are. We understand how much we don’t know, how much we don’t understand, and the thing that terrifies us is the not knowing.
Over the last few years I have learned to accept the not knowing, and I really do believe that that is part of our spiritual journey, our journey moving and flowing and growing back into Love. I think the biggest piece, the big key to it all, is trust.
Trust
Trust when we do not know the outcome.
Trust that good — love always wins.
Right now it feels like everything we’ve known is crumbling right before our eyes, the bottom’s dropping out.
I’ve experienced this several times in my life, as many of us have when the bottom drops out. It feels like there’s no way good can come from this. But good does come from these kinds of disasters.
One of the ways I really do believe that good can come from situations like this is if we allow ourselves to be woken up. One of the times that I experienced the bottom dropping out in my life, I’ve talked about a lot, and that’s Matt’s affair.
I was blissfully living unaware of our life of misery. I really do feel like we were blissfully miserable. When you live like this you kind of say, “Well, this is how it’s gonna be until you know, God comes down and saves us or something.”
But when that all that happened, it woke me up. It woke both of us up. It was one of those moments where I looked around like, “Wow, we were living pretty miserable. We had a pretty dismal life. It wasn’t that great.”
I remember a family member telling me, “If Matt comes back, would you be willing to take him back?”
I said, “Yeah, but some things we’re gonna have to change. It cannot go back to the way it was because I just I had too much awareness of how things were.”
I remember that family member saying, “Well, then you’ll never be able to get back together because you have to be willing to go back to the way it was.”
But the thing is, when you’ve woken up and you realize this is not the life I want to live, I want it to change. I want it to be better. You can’t go back. But sometimes we don’t realize that there is anything that needs to change. And then suddenly, you’re like, “Wow, maybe things do need to change.”
I really do believe in so many ways this is the time that we’re living in. We’re living in our own awakening of a new life.
We have a choice as to how we’re going to move forward from this time period. We can grow from this or we can disintegrate and degrade in the middle of all of this.
The human heart is made for adversity.
We were built for this.
It’s in our DNA To really thrive in adversity. We rise up.
No, I’m not gonna continue to live this way. I’m going to grow and become better. I know this is possible for us.
We have a choice to make. One of those choices is, are we going to choose to live in fear, or are we going to choose to live in Love? One of the ways that I have grown to understand is our thoughts are what fuel how we feel. So at any given point that you feel afraid it’s because of the thoughts that you have been thinking.
You get to decide what you think.
You get to decide what you’re going to allow your mind to dwell on.
Now that also means you can be influenced as to what you think by what you allow to come into your mind. That includes what you see, what you hear and what you read. It influences your thoughts.
We’ve established a rule in our home. Any time we feel afraid, we pay attention to what we’ve allowed to come into our home, into our mind and to dwell there. And I will even say to my kids, “Does this put fear in your heart?” If it puts fear in your heart, then you’ve got to make the choice to turn it off and walk away. Close the book, turn off the TV, shut off the phone and walk away. Because what you allow to come into your mind to stir up fear it will be harder to capture your thoughts and take them captive when you’re constantly allowing for fear to be put into your mind.
The source of this fear can come from many sources. This is the part that’s not always easy to shut off, turn off or walk away because many times the source can have good intentions and mean well. That can be a family member. It can be the TV, the news. It could be a post on Facebook. It can also be your pastor standing on the stage.
So many times there can be things that are said to us that are rooted in fear. We get to choose if that’s what we’re going to believe.
During this time, this pandemic, in this global crisis, this is affecting our economy. This has affected my company, Lillian & Co. This is hitting really close to home for all of us. Well, I have become so driven to learn. I want to know what’s going on. I am now really doing my due diligence and figuring out the economics of this and how this is projected to affect us. I’m really, really trying to become educated in all these areas.
There are so many doomsday people out here, “Oh, this is gonna be awful. Oh, this is a crisis. Oh, this is worse than the Great Depression. Oh, this is —
Fear,
Fear,
Fear,
Fear,
Over and over again.
They’re just speaking a message of fear.
Doomsday
The end.
This is so terrible.
This is awful.
Yeah, it is gonna be tough. It is tough right now, but that doesn’t mean that we have to live in fear because in every situation there is a solution. There is an answer. There’s always a way of escape.
But if we’re living petrified in fear, just cowering down in doomsday because Oh, dear God! The bottom dropped out! We will never be able to rise up and find the solution. We will never be able to find the escape that we need in this situation.
There’s opportunity in adversity. There’s growth in adversity. We have an amazing opportunity right now, but you’ve got to decide as to what are you going to listen to.
Are you going to listen to the message of fear or you going to listen to the message of Love?
You’ve got an opportunity right now. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. It doesn’t mean that it’s just gonna be like a walk in the park. Growing is painful. This right here, this right now that we’re living through, that we’re walking through, it’s a death.
It’s the death of an old life. But you know what? It’s also the birth of a new life.
I just read a quote that said, “We all want to go to heaven, but none of us want to die.” I’ve experienced it in my own life, at a micro level. I have experienced that the other side of death comes a beautiful new life, a rebirth. I’m going to stand on this.
I’m not saying it’s just gonna be like a walk in the park. It may get worse before it gets better. But it’s one of these journeys that if we stay strong, put our faith in Love and we keep our eyes open, wise as a serpent.
Be smart.
Educate yourself.
Grow in this.
During this time, get your roots down deep.
You will come out on the other side better, stronger, more powerful with a better life 1000 times better than you had before. I believe it. You just gotta believe it for yourself and continue to pursue a life of love, happiness, and abundance.
