Personal Development Archives

6 Truths About Thinking, 3 Ways To Think

September 20, 2021 by EnnisP Leave a Comment

A brain should never be used as a sponge.

Auto-Think Will Never Keep You Safe

Everyone thinks.

I do. You do. Bright people do and even the less bright do.

No groups or individuals hold exclusive rights to thinking.

We all entertain ideas, consider possibilities, and we do this constantly.

The only people who don’t process thoughts are either comatose or dead.

But those observations raise many questions. If we’re all thinking, why don’t we all come to the same conclusion? Why don’t we all arrive at the correct answer? Why do we readily, with eyes wide open make bad decisions?

The Brain Is A Tool

Simply put, the brain is a tool. A very important tool. We couldn’t live without it and it does many things automatically. The brain controls breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and more without our involvement even when we sleep.

The brain also has a manual setting. We can engage it deliberately to make it work for us. Like items in a toolbox, we can pick the brain up and apply it to specific problems as they arise.

When we do that it’s called thinking.

The problem is, though universal and necessary, thinking doesn’t always lead to solutions.

We employ the brain to help us solve problems but nothing’s guaranteed. Use your brain the wrong way or incorrectly or haphazardly and you’re likely to get into trouble.

Can you imagine using a drill as a hammer or a shovel as a screwdriver? We don’t typically use rakes to paint walls?

By the same token, a brain should never be left on autopilot and should never be used as a sponge. [Read more…] about 6 Truths About Thinking, 3 Ways To Think

13 Thoughts From Moses’ Second Forty Years

August 28, 2021 by EnnisP Leave a Comment

The One Quality That Separated Moses
From The Average Israelite
Was Resolve

AT the end of the first forty years, Moses had both ability and faith (Hebrews 11:24) but he still wasn’t where he needed to be.

Moses ranked well above average in the area of personal development. I doubt he could achieve much more but you need more than personal development alone to serve God.

Moses was in the right place to grow further but he wasn’t fully ready to serve his ultimate purpose. That’s where the second stage is important.

STAGE TWO: THE RESOLUTION STAGE
(Exile in Midian, Exodus 2:11-21).

This stage started with a skirmish but then settled into monotony:

At the age of 40 (Acts 7:23) Moses kills an Egyptian in a failed attempt at alleviating the suffering of the Israelites.
Rejected by the Israelites and threatened by Pharaoh, he escapes to Midian.
In Midian, he defends a group of shepherd girls.
He meets Jethro, the shepherd girls’ father, and marries one of his daughters, Zipporah, with whom he has two sons.
He works for Jethro, shepherding his flocks for the next forty years.

At the end of forty years as a shepherd, God commanded Moses to return to Egypt. Only eleven verses cover this stage but Acts 7 provides more details.

A few additional observations are helpful.

Additional Lessons

Moses continued to learn in this second stage but it involved different lessons. The lessons in the first stage were mostly mental and physical.

Moses was trained in all the wisdom of Egypt – he could think.
And he developed the skills of a military leader – he could fight.

But he needed more.

There were still emotional and spiritual lessons to be learned:

How to follow God
And how to lead people.

Both lessons were hard to learn and according to his experience, they proved hard to live with.

His Abilities Were Apparent But Insufficient

There’s not much detail from the second forty years but three things are worth mentioning.

He killed an Egyptian slavemaster.

His excuse for killing the slavemaster was his desire to deliver Israel but the effort was ineffective so it’s a moot point. What he wanted to do and how things turned out were very different. Israel wasn’t delivered and Moses had to run.

Moses wanted to do the right thing and his effort was an expression of faith but the only thing he really did was vent frustrations.

From this experience, Moses learned that his natural abilities, though extraordinary, weren’t sufficient for the job.

He was an able fighter.

Physically, Moses was no slouch. Killing an Egyptian slavemaster single-handedly would have been difficult for the average individual. Not for Moses. If a problem could be solved with physical dominance, Moses was the man.

But, again, he needed more than his natural abilities to solve the problem.

He knew God had called him to deliver Israel and he was committed to that calling.

Moses was frustrated with Israel’s continued repression and slavery.

For forty years he watched his parents suffer at the hand of Pharaoh. His parents, particularly his mother, had reminded him often that God had promised to solve their national problem (Gen. 15:13-14) and she surely planted the seed that he was God’s chosen man for that job.

Armed with that knowledge and a determination to follow through, he was going to do something, anything to deliver Israel. [Read more…] about 13 Thoughts From Moses’ Second Forty Years

4 Lessons From Moses’ First Forty Years

August 26, 2021 by EnnisP Leave a Comment

The First Forty: Development

The pertinent details of Moses’ life are well documented in the Bible. Thankfully, it doesn’t include his entire bio. Just the important details.

Moses lived long enough (120 years) that a full-length bio would arguably be longer than the Bible and that length would make it difficult to isolate important lessons.

Instead, his life is divided neatly into three separate stages of 40 years each and only the most important details from each stage are included. The first two stages provide very little detail but it’s enough to gain important insights.

The Broad Strokes

Before we get into the lessons, let’s look at the details of the first stage in broad strokes.

STAGE ONE: THE DEVELOPMENT STAGE
(Infancy to adulthood in Pharaoh’s house, Exodus 2:1-10).

Here’s what happened:

Israel was enslaved.
Death was decreed for all male born Israelites.
Moses was miraculously saved from destruction.
And was adopted into Pharoah’s house, enjoying the privileges of a family member.
Tradition (Josephus) says he successfully led military campaigns.

The Book of Exodus only provides ten verses on this stage but several lessons emerge.

Growth Is The Only Option

The first stage of life for everyone is the growing stage or to put it differently, the stage at which people tend to balk. Growth starts on day one. It’s the only option but we generally find it uncomfortable.

People want to be grown but they don’t enjoy the process of growing.

They want to be well informed but that achievement requires hard work, the kind we tend to avoid.

No one starts at the end.

The beginning, or the bottom, is the only starting point, which in real terms is nowhere yet. [Read more…] about 4 Lessons From Moses’ First Forty Years

The Thing Getting In The Way Of Your Happiness Might Be Your Search For Happiness

April 16, 2021 by EnnisP Leave a Comment

Guest Post By Tim Pepper
Find Tim’s Music At TimPepperMusic.com

It occurred to me in the parking lot of Kroger. Listening to a podcast of another celebrity talk about their life and the reality that getting the things they thought they wanted never made them happy, it hit me. We don’t know what happiness feels like. None of us do. How are we supposed to recognize the thing we are striving for if we don’t know what it actually is?

Happiness, and searching for it, and the lack thereof, and the fleeting experiences we’ve had with it, is something we all have in common as humans. It’s an intangible feeling that we are consciously, or subconsciously, or maybe even unconsciously searching for. But we don’t know what it really is. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know how to manufacture it. All we really know is that we want it.

Let me be totally clear. We’ve all had happy experiences. We’ve felt it. We know happiness exists. Further, we all think we know what will make us happy. We all think we know how to find it. We all think we know what it is. But we don’t. If we did, we wouldn’t still be chasing it. It comes along, and we either can’t recognize it, or it fills us with anxiety that it might vanish as suddenly as it appeared.

It’s usually in retrospect that we can look at various phases of our lives and say, “Yes! I was happy in those days.”

What accompanied my parking lot epiphany was the idea that we are all under the wrong notion that a life that is a happy one, is all happy. Life is ups and downs. A happy life is no exception. Even in the midst of happiness, there is disappointment, anger, fear, rage, sadness, harsh realities, burdens, and all the other things that are a part of real life. Maybe one of the reasons we find happiness so elusive is that our idea of it is completely and utterly wrong. Maybe our expectations have set us all up for failure.

I’m a newly-wed. We tied the knot 18 months ago and before that, I’d been in very few serious relationships and most of them I’d approached with some level of detachment. The beautiful thing about detachment is that nothing matters. [Read more…] about The Thing Getting In The Way Of Your Happiness Might Be Your Search For Happiness

Bible Inspiration’s Most Important Point

April 2, 2021 by EnnisP Leave a Comment

Peter Didn’t Understand Inspiration’s
Most Important Point
And That Made Him Vulnerable To Failure

The meaning of inspiration and how it actually worked is not the topic of this post.

It’s an interesting topic and I’ll say enough to establish the basics but the discussion can and has filled volumes. Google it and you’ll get endless pages of search results.

Sadly, most discussions focus so heavily on the meaning of the word inspiration, they fail to develop the most important point:

If the Bible is inspired, it stands alone and needs no help from human ideology.

It’s finished. You can accept it, you can’t change it. It’s God’s Word and His alone.

The Bible is NOT intended to tell us what we already know and it wasn’t provided as a proof text to endorse our pet ideologies.

And God makes that point very succinctly:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. (Isaiah 55:8)

That idea is the motivation of this post.

“Inspiration” Not The Best Word

It should at least be mentioned that the word “inspiration’ is probably not the best word to describe how the Bible came to be.

The English word has roots in Latin, inspirare, which means “to breathe or blow into” but that doesn’t correspond exactly with the New Testament Greek or with what we understand about how the Bible was written.

More to the point, the word has also taken on new meanings totally unrelated to the Bible. These new meanings have broadened sufficiently to eclipse its biblical meaning.

The Greek word that denotes this process is theopneustos. It is a compound word from “theo” (God) and “pnuema” (spirit) and literally means “God-spirited.” Modern translations, however, are opting for God-breathed instead of Inspiration or God-spirited for obvious reasons.

Inspiration is not a bad word, but with the new connotations, it is no longer the most precise word.

Spiriting isn’t how we express words so God-breathed is a little more relatable to the average person.

However, Inspiration is the word most often used when discussing the concept theologically and I haven’t abandoned the use of it in this post. [Read more…] about Bible Inspiration’s Most Important Point