Chris Howlett

The Times, They Are A Changin'... I mean since this morning!

Happy Relationships

The quality of our relationships determines a big part of the quality of our lives. Of all the contributors to personal happiness, relationships may be the most important one. Happiness is more than a fleeting feeling or a simple emotional high. Happiness is a deep sense of life satisfaction, fulfillment, and joy. Happiness is what God designed us to experience.

The message from this Sunday, Wired to Connect, we focused on the fact that part of being a human being, part of being a person created in the image of God is to be a person with a tremendous capacity for relationship. Our very being is expressed through the relationships in our lives. The first and most important relationship, the one that gives energy and meaning to all my other relationships is my relationship with God. Jesus Christ gave himself to extend the relational love he enjoys with the Father and the Spirit to us. We want to live out the love of God in our love of one another.

So, how can my relationships be improved? How can I move the center of myself off of me and stop isolating myself from others, and instead, focus on how I can share love with people, and to serve the purpose of God in my life? I want to share some brief relationship pointers:

1. Receive love, yourself.

    The Bible teaches you to love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you don't love yourself, you're not going to have any love to give to your neighbor. Know that you are a child of God, worthy of the love of God, and worthy of love from yourself. You are a person of value and worth and you have much to offer others.

2. Ask every day, "How can you encourage those around you?"

    If I begin the day moving the central focus off of me and onto others, I will be more prepared to see people as individual persons worthy of my love and care, and I will be more willing to encourage them. You would be surprised, first, of how much others need your encouragement, and how well they respond when you offer an encouraging word.

3. Watch your categories.

    It is the human condition to categorize persons according to socioeconomic level, race, gender, education, job status, etc. We pigeonhole people into a certain category so it simplifies our lives and informs how we treat people. A guy in a nice business suit will almost always be better receieved and treated than someone who is unshaven wearing worn-out old clothes. God's love is expansive and knows no limits. Seeing all persons as worthy of love because they are created in the image of God will radically change how we treat others.

4. Let go of past hurts.

    Life hurts sometimes. If you give yourself in relationships, you will be hurt eventually, and most of us have already experienced the pain of broken relationships. Forgiveness is costly, but incredibly freeing. Oftentimes, most of the time, the main person we hurt by our lack of forgiveness is ourselves. The greatest cost of unforgiveness can be the lack of intimacy and joy we experience in future relationships due to our lack of freedom relating to others. Giving God our hurts enables us to experience healthier, life-giving relationships.

5. Make your relationship with God your priority.

    There is one person who you can count on absolutely. God. Everyone else can and will disappoint you from time to time. God is absolutely dependable. God also enables and empowers you to live a life of grace and service for others. If I am in a strong relationship with God, it frees my to give myself more fully to my spouse, to my children, and to my friends. Knowing the love of God empowers me to share freely my love with others. Jesus Christ is the perfect example of a humble, generous, and loving person. he is our example for relationships.

Life really is all about relationships. God created us so that he could be in relationship with us, extending the love of Father, Son, and Spirit to all people. Unfortunately, some people reject this love and isolate themselves from the ultimate source of happiness and peace. Don't be that kind of person. Receive the love of God so you can give your love freely to others.

The Power of the Mind

On September 25, 1942, Viktor Frankl, along with his wife and parents were shipped to the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in what is today the Czech Republic. The Nazis allowed him to function as a doctor for a while, utilizing is psychiatric training to help prevent suicides among his fellow prisoners. In 1944 he was shipped to Auschwitz, then to Turkeim Concentration Camp. His wife was shipped to Bergen-Belsen, where she was killed. His parents ended up in Auschwitz and were killed there.

Along with his own incredible suffering and loss, Frankl observed the misery and pain of his fellow concentration camp prisoners. In order to give his life meaning, he began to develop a series of lectures he planned to give after the war and his release on how different people coped with the severity of their physical and psychological conditions. It was his sense of purpose in the future that enabled him to live in hope in the midst of inhuman suffering.

Some people merely survived. Others gave up all hope and died. There were a few, however, that maintained a sense of hope about the future and it was these few that caught Frankl's attention. What he observed about these people led him, eventually, to write a book claiming that humans have been endowed by God with an amazing power, the power to choose. In his book, Man's Search for Meaning , he observed:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

You have certainly heard the saying, "mind over matter." Generally, when this saying is used, it is referring to the mind's capability to change or influence various parts of the human body. While much is still left to learn about the mind's ability to influence sickness and health, it is certain that the mind has power to determine it's own happiness. You have the power to choose. If people in concentration camps can choose to be caring, loving, hopeful, and generous, then we who live in the most prosperous and blessed nation in the history of humanity can choose to be positive and happy.

The problem is that so many people are not happy. We have all our basic needs met, abundantly, but we tend to be dissatisfied and wanting more. Some speculate that our prosperity is actually a detriment to happiness because when you live in a place where very hard work is required to just survive physically, your energy and effort is expended on survival and you have little time or energy left to reflect much on your condition. The mind that is fully occupied tends to be happier. Once you have a society that is prosperous and pampered as ours is and people have so much disposable income and extra time on their hands, they begin to think about what it is they don't have and start wanting more and more, growing increasingly dissatisfied and frustrated.

God definitely wants us to be happy. The question is, do I want to make the changes, in my thought-processes that will help me experience the happiness God desires for me? The Bible teaches us: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." God calls us to renew our minds by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. God's joy is a present and possible reality for each person alive if we will only allow ourselves to experience it by choosing to think more hopeful, blessed thoughts and adopt a more positive mindset. We have the power to choose. Our minds are amazingly capable of altering our reality and our feelings about our reality.