A Closer Look at God’s Promise to Give Us All Things

2 November, 20191 November, 2019Marissa

There are some big promises in the Bible for those who seek God. Jesus even says you’ll receive “all things” you pray for if you believe (Matt. 21:22; Mark 11:24). “All things” seems quite a big promise. And at times, it seems like one God doesn’t live-up to. If He really meant we’d get “all things” we pray for, then why don’t I have the miracle cure, the new yacht, or the publishing deal I asked for?

“All things” must not cover whatever physical blessings we want, else there wouldn’t be so few wealthy Christians. It must not cover perfect health and physical safety, else there wouldn’t be so many Christians fighting illness or being killed for their faith. The problem isn’t just that we lack faith — even people in the faith chapter were sold into slavery, sawed in two, and wandered around homeless (see Hebrews 11).

Maybe “all things” means something different than we assume at first glance. And maybe it’s even better than we realized or expected.

Seeking the One Who Made All Things

God is not a vending machine that spits out blessings when you put in prayers. He wants to give us good things of course, but even more than that He wants to connect with our hearts.

This is the boldness which we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he listens to us. And if we know that he listens to us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked of him. (1 John 5:14-15, WEB)

It’s okay to pray big prayers and expect results when we ask within God’s will. The part of these verses that really captures my attention, though, is that we know God listens to us when we pray. Have you ever thought about that? Listening is so important in relationships. You can’t get close to someone unless you’re both listening to each other. When we seek God, we can have confidence that He is a listener who wants to get to know us.

You shall call on me, and you shall go and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You shall seek me, and find me, when you search for me with all your heart. (Jer. 29:12-13, WEB)

When we seek God, our goal shouldn’t be to get things from Him. It should be to find Him. If you want “all things,” then seek a relationship with God the Father and with Jesus, “for whom are all things and through whom are all things” (Heb. 2:10, see also Col. 1:16-20).

10 Self-Care Tips for Highly Sensitive People and Introverts

30 October, 201910 April, 2020Marissa

When was the last time you did something to care for yourself?

According to a definition used on PsychCentral, “Self-care is any activity that we do deliberately in order to take care of our mental, emotional, and physical health.” Most of us practice at least a little bit of self-care every day with basic tasks like brushing our teeth and making sure we eat something. But self-care should go farther than just enough to keep us functioning.

Self-care isn’t a selfish thing. It’s about recognizing and meeting our own needs and taking the time to recharge so we can bring the best version of our authentic selves into every area of our lives.

While self-care is important for everyone, I want to focus today’s post on self-care tips for highly sensitive persons and introverts. Even though there are highly sensitive extroverts, it’s still true that HSPs and introverts have similar self-care needs. It’s easy for both to get overwhelmed by the demands of every-day life and we need time to slow down and take care of ourselves. I hope the 10 tips in today’s post will help you do just that.

1) Listen to yourself

It’s amazing how easy it is to ignore what your own body is trying to tell you. We often keep pushing ourselves, trying to get through things without caring how it’s affecting us. Something as simple as taking a few minutes to pause and assess yourself can do wonders for your mental and physical health. It’s always good to catch negative feelings or stress early and take the time and do some quick self-care right then. The sooner you deal with something, the less likely it is to come back and bug you later.

2) Drink tea

I used to hate tea, but a couple years ago I discovered I just didn’t like (most) teas from the tea plant. Herbal teas on the other hand are a wonderful thing. Whatever type of tea flavor you prefer, consider picking one without caffeine so it’s more relaxing and won’t increase anxiety. Read more →

How Do I Know If I’m an INTJ or an ENTJ?

28 October, 201928 October, 2019Marissa

When someone’s looking for their Myers-Briggs® type I usually suggest they take several different tests and compare results. But what happens when you get different results, say, INTJ in one test and ENTJ on another? Or maybe you take the tests a couple months apart and get different answers, or start reading about the different types and discover more than one that sounds a lot like you.

If you’re trying to decide whether you’re an INTJ or an ENTJ, I hope this article will help. Just looking at the names of these personality types, we might think the only difference is that one is more extroverted than the other. That’s only party true, though. When we dive deeper into the cognitive functions that describe the mental processes each Myers-Briggs® type uses, it gets easier to see the differences and similarities between these two types more clearly.

If you’re not familiar with cognitive functions, click here to read “The Simplest Guide to Myers-Briggs® Functions Ever.” INTJ and ENTJs both use the same cognitive functions. They just use them in a different order of preference, as shown in this graphic:

The way these cognitive functions work together makes ENTJs and INTJs very different in certain ways and very similar in others. Thankfully for those wanting to figure out which of these two types they are, several key differences in how INTJs and ENTJs learn information and approach the world make it possible for us to tell these types apart. Read more →

How the Lord Meets with Us: Examining Jesus Christ’s Role as Intercessor

26 October, 20195 November, 2019Marissa

After writing last week’s post about coming to the Father through Jesus, I started studying the words “intercessor” and “mediator.” Interestingly, I found that in Hebrew the word used for “intercession” also means to encounter, come between, and meet with. It’s used in a variety of contexts, but I focused on the ones that related to how God interacts with us here on earth.

There are multiple ways that God can interact with humans. Two of those interactions involve rewarding good and punishing evil. We see the word for “intercession” used in both these contexts. This confused me at first, but as I studied it I found something that is very exciting and encouraging about how the two meanings connect.

Meeting With Punishment

The Hebrew word paga (Strong’s H6293) means “to encounter, meet, reach, entreat, make intercession” (BDB definition). Here’s one place it’s used in Exodus, when Moses and Aaron were talking with Pharaoh.

They said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go three days’ journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice to Yahweh, our God, lest he fall on us with pestilence, or with the sword.” (Ex. 5:3, WEB)

“Fall on us” is translated from the word paga. We might paraphrase, “Let us worship God, or He’ll meet us with punishment.” It seems strange to have the same word as “intercession” used for meeting someone with pestilence or sword. Intercession tends to be seen as a more positive thing. If we head over to Isaiah’s writings, though, this starts to make more sense.

Intuitives Abroad

24 October, 201924 October, 2019Marissa

I’ve safely returned from my trip to France, though not without a few complications. Flying with a nasty headcold scores a 0 out of 10 and I would not recommend it. Thankfully my brother and sister were healthy and navigated the airports for me so I could just follow them around in a congestion-induced stupor and focus on breathing.

That was only a shadow over the last couple days of trip, though. Most of the experience was fantastic. Before this, I’d never been any farther outside the United States than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Then all the sudden I’m getting on a plane in Detroit, waking up the next morning in Paris, and walking down streets older than the country I live in. We had one day in Paris, then flew to Nice and took a bus to Saint-Raphaël. We were there on the Mediterranean coast for about a week, during which we also visited Saint Paul de Vance (pictured in the featured image for this post), Monaco, and Cannes.

Visiting Paris with Mark Twain

I took this trip with my siblings, so our little group consisted of an INFJ, INTJ, and ENFJ (hence the title of this post, which I’ve been planing on using for a while now and am still endlessly pleased with). I started reading Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad while on the trip, mostly because I wanted to nod to it in a blog post title once we got home. I love the books by Twain that I’ve read, but even though this was the one that sold best during his lifetime I hadn’t read it before.

It’s interesting to read Twain’s record of his visit to Paris in 1867 with our own visit 152 years later. Our experience with French food was similar, with unfamiliar dishes accompanied by “wine with every course, of course, being in France.” Like Twain, on visiting Notre Dame “we recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment” even with the recent fire damage making it impossible for us to go inside. We also visited the Louvre like Twain and his companions, though we seem to have been more impressed by “its miles of paintings by the old maters” than he was. Read more →

What Do You Do When You Don’t Feel Good Enough?

22 October, 201929 October, 2019Marissa

Have you ever read one of those self-help books, articles, or blogs that encourages you to think you’re enough? That who you are is “good enough” and you don’t have to keep trying to measure up to an impossible standard?

I’m sure for some people this is encouraging. But what about when you don’t feel good enough?

If you’re really struggling with feelings of unworthiness, then just hearing assurances that you really are good enough isn’t going to help much. Positive affirmations have their place but they can’t dislodge or replace thoughts that are really rooted into your mind. They’re not a substitute for personal growth work and (in some cases) getting help from a professional therapist.

So what do you do when you feel like you’re unworthy? How do you change things when you think you aren’t “good enough” and this belief is part of what defines you?

Figure out where this thought came from

When you struggle with ongoing feelings of unworthiness, combating the voice that says “I’m not good enough” can often be easier when we understand where it’s coming from.

Therapist Karyl McBride says, “this message of unworthiness” usually “goes back to the family of origin” (“Do You Feel Not Good Enough?”). At some point, someone or something that had a deep impact on your formation as a person put the message “you’re not good enough” inside you. It may have been deliberate or accidental, but the fact remains many people picked up the idea that they’re unworthy from other people while they were growing up. Read more →