Abundant Living from John Guerrero

 Mindfulness, self-awareness, acknowledgement, and acceptance. These are qualities and practices that many modern-day experts promote as some of the keys to emotional and mental well-being. They aren’t wrong. I’ve experienced the power of these practices at different times in my own life. Being self-aware, paying attention to what’s going on inside of yourself, acknowledging feelings and experiences and struggles all have helped me to grow in many ways over the year, pushing me out of my head and helping me to approach my problems with greater clarity. It has been said that avoidance leads to pathology. When we distract ourselves in order to avoid feeling what we’re feeling, this causes problems. This is partly where our suffering begins. When we stay so busy that we don’t have the time to even notice what might be going on inside of us, this is an issue. When we know what we’re feeling (anxious, afraid, sad, exhausted, hurt, alone) but we don’t do anything to address or resolv...

 King David was a man who knew the pains of anxiety well. He was not unfamiliar with mental and emotional anguish, and in much of his story as well as his own writing we can see how those conditions really affected him. In order to understand how he handled those emotions, it’s important to first understand the experiences he had to endure. This is where some backstory is highly necessary. We know that David was a shepherd boy who had been given the task of tending to his family’s sheep. He was young when we first meet him in the Scriptures, and the Bible’s first real description of him is in this story of Samuel the prophet arriving at his father Jesse’s house and, ultimately, anointing David as the future king of Israel. It’s important to remember that Israel already had a king. Saul had already taken the throne as the nation’s first ruler, and there was much that could be said about him and his leadership style – some positive, but mostly negative. As time goes on, Dav...

 In 1 Samuel chapter 1, we see the story of a woman named Hannah who found herself in a place of intense anguish and anxiety. How Hannah talked about this emotional state and what prompted her to reach this point is worth exploring, because of the light it can shed for us today about the root of anxiety and how best to cope with it. Anxiety is not an uncommon emotion. It’s a derivative of one of the eight core human emotions, as a matter of fact – fear – and it can take on many different forms and expressions: apprehension, nervousness, dread, fright, and panic. We tend to feel anxiety about a number of different things – from small to large – and this anxiety often comes from a fear of worst-case scenarios. Anxiety can also be defined as “the mind and body’s reaction to stressful, dangerous, or unfamiliar situations.” It is that sense of panic and fear and tension when we are presented with a situation that makes us uncomfortable. Beyond simply the body’s and the mind’s reac...

 When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, He responded with a classic and well-known command: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your strength.” Jesus made it clear that the most important calling that any of us have is to love and obey and live for God, to give Him all of our devotion and commitment. We understand this to be something that, by nature, is not always easy for us to do.  Being sinners who have a natural tendency to love lots of other things besides God, it was important for Jesus to remind us that, if we are truly going to obey the Father, we must start with a sincere love for Him. But then, immediately following this reply, Jesus followed it up with “the second greatest commandment. He said, “And the second is like it - to love your neighbor as yourself.” Again, in this statement Jesus touched on something that is not entirely natural to us and that tends to go against the grain of our sinful...