Guidelines For Living Devotional

Researchers are telling us today that stress is causing more emotional and physical damage than our grandparents could have imagined in their worst nightmares, from producing cancer to lowering IQ in our children. There is no question that it produces ulcers, hypertension, heart disease, and a whole lot of emotional hassle which doesn't make anyone very happy.

was really planned, or the last time you reached for the aspirin because you had a headache?  Chances are about 10 to 1, you remember reaching for the aspirin.  That tension-headache which made you snarl at the kids and grouch at your wife wasn't necessarily organic.  It doesn't mean you have a brain-tumor or need to see a neurologist.  Your headache, however, was a red flag.  It signaled stress as your nervous system screamed, "Help!  I'm overloaded.  I just can't handle this." 

Chawnga Pudaite, the son of a headhunter, met a Welshman by the name of Watkin Roberts. The year was 1910, and the five days that Roberts spent in the hills of the Hmar territory in India changed Chawnga's future. The quiet, soft-spoken Welshman told Pudaite of a living God who sent His Son into our world to bring life, and that week Chawnga Pudaite made a decision which cost him dearly.  When he decided to follow Jesus, he was driven from his home and family.  But when his son was born, he prayed that he might be able to read, write and take the Bible back to the hills of Hmar from which he had come.

"One must forgive one's enemies," said Sigmund Freud, "but not before they have been hanged."  Such graciousness!  One who adopts that attitude must hope never to have enemies himself, for the person who cannot forgive burns the bridge over which he himself must someday certainly pass.

Everything changes, yet nothing changes! Culture and civilization undergo tremendous changes, yet we who are part of that changing scene actually change so little.  I mean, bottom line, human nature doesn't really change.  Our struggles, our heart cries, our needs, our temptations all seem to repeat themselves generation after generation like repetitious themes in a third-rate play when the only thing that really changes is the scenic backdrop in the theater.

How much is enough?  Have you ever pondered the question in relationship to your own lifestyle?  When John D. Rockefeller was asked how much money it would take to be satisfied, he replied, "Just a little bit more!"

The American humorist, Mark Twain, wrote, "Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities."  I wonder what old Twain would have said had he been alive today.  Never before has the consumer been confronted with so many choices.

Do you ever find yourself asking, "Why do I feel as I do?"  Sometimes there are answers, but more often than not, we don't really understand the complex feelings and emotions that make us feel the way we do.

When Ashley was growing up and displeased her father, she was told, "You'll never amount to anything.  You've got bad blood in you" (referring to her mother's side of the family).  The message got through, and as a little girl, Ashley felt like something was very wrong with her, something which she didn't understand.  Nonetheless it made her feel very inadequate and inferior.

While Socrates became famous for his saying "Know Thyself!" the man who was born some 400 years later, Jesus Christ, lived the admonition, "Give thyself!"  There is a great deal of difference between knowing yourself and giving yourself.