The Lord is helping me to overcome my workaholic tendencies and to conquer my emotional need to over commit myself to other people or situations...
These negative behavior patterns are slowly killing me. I'm serious! While, at the same time, there are those who would love to heap even more work upon me, thus causing my health to decline even faster.
Through the often complicated dynamics of my role in the church, which requires that I find a way to balance my chapel related responsibilities, to include assisting the chaplain and helping a handful of fellow inmate elders with leadership, that I must somehow survive and flourish. Yes, there is an array of personalities and private agendas that I have to successfully navigate through.
However, my worst enemy and biggest hindrance to all this is myself. I've been the always dutiful caregiver and an overseer who perpetually (and compulsively) gives of my time and energy to a point where my health is in jeopardy. Obviously this has got to change, and soon it will.
Now it is a matter of making short and long-term adjustments to fix it. As I could feel myself losing more strength with each passing day, and even discovering a degree of hidden anger within my heart, while the well meaning elders of the congregation, to include my chaplain, try to find more things for me to do. "Thanks, guys, for all the extra stress."
Yet now that I've seemed to hit new levels of exhaustion and chronic fatigue, it has finally begun to sink into my overloaded brain that I need to make big changes. I've been discussing this for at least several years with friends, and I have been occasionally writing about it in my journal, too. But now is the time to really do something. As God, I believe, is showing me the path I need to take in order to get free of the overbearing control of men, and to better discern God's plan for my life. For if one is not spiritually alert and careful, the religious plans of men can masquerade as the plans and desires of the Lord.
May the Lord therefore grant me the boldness to state my case. May He make the hearts of my hearers receptive to my words. This done, no doubt my future will be brighter and my burden lighter.*
D.B.
See Matthew 11:28-30.
Through the often complicated dynamics of my role in the church, which requires that I find a way to balance my chapel related responsibilities, to include assisting the chaplain and helping a handful of fellow inmate elders with leadership, that I must somehow survive and flourish. Yes, there is an array of personalities and private agendas that I have to successfully navigate through.
However, my worst enemy and biggest hindrance to all this is myself. I've been the always dutiful caregiver and an overseer who perpetually (and compulsively) gives of my time and energy to a point where my health is in jeopardy. Obviously this has got to change, and soon it will.
Now it is a matter of making short and long-term adjustments to fix it. As I could feel myself losing more strength with each passing day, and even discovering a degree of hidden anger within my heart, while the well meaning elders of the congregation, to include my chaplain, try to find more things for me to do. "Thanks, guys, for all the extra stress."
Yet now that I've seemed to hit new levels of exhaustion and chronic fatigue, it has finally begun to sink into my overloaded brain that I need to make big changes. I've been discussing this for at least several years with friends, and I have been occasionally writing about it in my journal, too. But now is the time to really do something. As God, I believe, is showing me the path I need to take in order to get free of the overbearing control of men, and to better discern God's plan for my life. For if one is not spiritually alert and careful, the religious plans of men can masquerade as the plans and desires of the Lord.
May the Lord therefore grant me the boldness to state my case. May He make the hearts of my hearers receptive to my words. This done, no doubt my future will be brighter and my burden lighter.*
D.B.
See Matthew 11:28-30.
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