signs of emotional intelligence, characteristics of wisdom, fear of the Lord, practicing the presence, presence of the Divine, living in the flow of the infinite, the space between stimulus and response, self-motivated, emotionally resilient, emotional resilience, internalise failure, well-placed boundaries, healthy boundaries, toxic person, handling a difficult person, fuel the fire of disagreement, balanced assertiveness, tactful, present focused, avoid negative self-talk, self-awareness

Practicing presence effortlessly

I love it when I meet someone that just effortlessly is spiritually mature – they function and interact with others effortlessly, one foot in the spiritual and the other in the physical worlds. Spiritual maturity brings with it a level of inner wisdom that is impossible to imitate.

Nonetheless, from the outside, their emotional intelligence seems simply innate, as if they were born with it. Admittedly, I have no idea of all the inner work that they have done to get there! I wasn’t present to witness their perseverance in the face of difficulties – their dark night of the soul.

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living authentically, authentic Christians, fruit of the Spirit, speaking the truth in love, let love be genuine, true to self, true to God, authenticity, faith, works, show me your faith apart from your works, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control, humility, the truth will set you free

Living authentically – the authentic Christian

One of the reasons that I think Christians get such a bad rap, is that we only ever talk about our struggles behind closed doors – if we admit them at all! Perhaps if we admitted our struggles to those outside of Churches – especially the struggles with ego and learning to truly love, we would find that others were more accepting when we tried to share our journey with them!

But, if your upbringing in the church was anything like mine – God forbid that we admit to others that we have doubts about faith, God and “salvation”. You parrot off that you are sharing God’s love with the world, as you Bible-bash them into salvation.

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self-help, the best self-help book ever written, metaphorical interpretation, reading the Bible, understanding the Bible, interpreting the scriptures, building a relationship with God, understanding God

The best self-help book I’ve ever read?

Someone was asking, recently, for the best “self-help” and personal development book that others had read. One of the group members suggested “The Bible”.

I admit, I initially responded (internally) with “no, definitely not“. (Possibly even more along the lines of a visceral response of “hell no”).

A few days later, I was reading a post (somewhere on the internet) about how self-help books are no good and that if we are truly interested in transforming our lives – what we really need is more stories.

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