Filled with Good Things

Making sure that I am choosing healthy foods, and drinking lots of fluids (water), keeps me occupied lately... As well as school, work, family, and being married. I realized the other day though, that just as I need to make sure that I am filling up on good things to eat, I need to make sure that how I interact with others in my life needs to be focused on good things as well. It really was a light bulb moment for me. For so long, I have thought that what another person brings into the relationship,  low emotional resources, low self-esteem, or low confidence, are their problem, and if they desire to change, then they will. Its not my responsibility.

Let me clarify... It's not my responsibility to change another person, that belongs to the Holy Spirit. It's not my responsibility to make another person seek help for a personal issue that is so blatantly obvious to me. :) It is my responsibility to make sure that what another person receives from me is a grace-filled, gentle, over-overwhelmingly positive..... blessing.  Ellen G. White talks about speaking in blessings in her book "Thoughts from the Mount of Blessings." The beatitudes in fact are the language of heaven, and blessings pour out of its residents, like one speaks a native language.

Looking at past clients with whom I have worked with new vision, I realized that some of them have no one who will bless them with anything as small (but can mean more than anything) kind words, and hugs, and hope for their future. If they have nothing kind, gentle or thoughtful in their hearts and minds from past experience, then me telling them about using kind words, or communicating affection, or finding something caring to do for another is like having a visitor in my house who only speaks Greek. We won't communicate. Instead, providing the experience of kindness, gentleness and thoughtfulness, and then drawing on the times in our relationship where those things have been experienced, may provide a catalyst for change.