//Mental Health Ministries//
One of the Most Important Lessons
Life is Messy – How to Change Your Situation
“Life is choices. This is a great truth and a hard lesson. It is a great truth because it reminds us of our power. Not power over others, but the often untapped power to be ourselves and to live the life we have imagined.
It is a hard lesson, because it causes us to realize that we have chosen the life we are living right now. It is perhaps frightening for us to think that we have chosen to live our life as it is today. Frightening because we may not like what we find when we look at our lives today. But it is also liberating, because we can now begin to choose what we will find when we look at our life in the tomorrows that lie unlived before us.
What will you see when you look at your life ten years from now? What will you choose? Life is choices.
You have chosen to live this day. You have chosen to watch this video. You have chosen to live in a certain city. You have chosen to believe certain ideas. You have chosen the people you call friends.
You choose the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and the thoughts you think. You choose to be calm or restless, you choose to feel appreciative or ungrateful. Love is a choice. Anger is a choice. Fear is a choice. Courage is a choice. You choose.
Sometimes we choose the-best-version-of-ourselves, and some- times we choose a-second-rate-version-of-ourselves. Learn to master the moment of decision and you will live a life uncommon.
Life is choices. Most people never fully accept this truth. They spend their lives arguing for their weaknesses, complaining about their lot in life, or blaming other people.
We choose, and in doing so, we design our lives.”
Dynamic Catholic Presents – 5 Ways to Make the Best of a Negative Situation
When Life Deals You a Tough Hand
5 Ways to Make the Best of a Negative Situation – Matthew Kelly
How Do You Think About Your Problems?
Look for the Lesson
Learn from It
Focus on the Good
It’s OK to be Sad!
Keep an Open Mind
Open Yourself to New Possibilities
Daily Reflection – Sometimes the Wisest Thing to do is Nothing
Minute Meditation – Returning to Our Roots
Among the proper lessons of culture is that we remind ourselves of our limits, of our need for community, of our ignorance and the tragic realities of living in such ignorance—lessons, in other words, that help us remember that we are creatures. It is through such recollection, being gathered back to ourselves from the diffuse ambitions that draw us away from our roots, that we are able to begin to heal the damage done to the world and ourselves. “The task of healing,” writes Wendell Berry, “is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less.” Humility, by helping to return us to the integrity of our humanity, which involves an acceptance of our particularly human creatureliness, also helps to make our lives more coherent, more integrated. “The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature,” writes Berry, “the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.”
— from the book Wendell Berry and the Given Life,
by Ragan Sutterfield
//Franciscan Media//