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Home > The Christian Working Woman > Five Things We Need to Re-Learn


	Podcast:		The Christian Working Woman
	Episode:		Five Things We Need to Re-Learn
	Category:		Religion & Spirituality
	Duration:		00:14:28
	Publish Date:		2021-06-26 05:00:19
	Description:		Wouldn’t it be nice if we could learn everything we need to know just once, and that’s it! But life is not that way and we are all prone to forget—prone to wander from what we know—prone to do our own thing and go our own way. So, if we’re going to become spiritually mature, we have to be good at re-learning. For example, we often need to re-learn to be content. Most of us are victims at times of looking on the other side of the fence and deciding that the grass over there sure looks greener than our grass. It just sometimes seems like our lives are painted drab gray and everybody else has bright red or yellow! Someone once wrote: "The uncommon life is the product of the day lived in the uncommon way.” Which means that a person whose life is exciting and full is one who finds meaning and satisfaction in the seemingly insignificant, daily things in life. Let me give you a very simple example: I have some china which I really love. And it gives me great pleasure to set my table with that china, to hold it, even to wash it. I enjoy my china. I remember once, when my daughter was a teenager, Julie found it rather strange to hear me getting excited about this china which I had owned for years. And I said to her, "If you can find pleasure and joy in the little things in your life, your life will be full of pleasure and joy. Otherwise, it's going to be very drab most of the time, with a few high points only now and then." Regardless of how humble and unpretentious your daily life may seem, you can elevate it if you can learn to enjoy and appreciate what you have. As the Apostle Paul says in Philippians 4:11, one needs to learn the secret of being content in any and every situation. Contentment brings meaning to our daily lives and frees us from the dreariness of looking over our fence at someone else's grass. Have you enrolled in the school of contentment? You can begin today by appreciating the small things, smelling the roses which are in your life, instead of being focused on what you don't have and looking over the fence all the time. Another thing high on the list of things I have to re-learn is how and when to let go. You know, there are times when we simply have to let go and turn situations over to God. Letting go does not mean that we don't care, nor that we wouldn't do whatever we could do to help the situation. It simply means that we recognize where our abilities end and where we relinquish situations to God's control. For instance, most parents face this "let go" decision with their children. You raise your children the best you can, teaching them biblical principles, but at some point, you have to let them go. Perhaps you let them go and they make mistakes, but you know there's no other way for them to learn. You let go allowing them to make their own decisions, even if you could make better ones for them. I answered a letter to someone who was struggling with letting go of his dream to be married. He really wanted a partner and was obsessed with that dream and just could not let go of it. You know, often we have to let our dreams go—those cherished things we've been hoping and longing for. They may be very good things, like getting married. But God often wants to know if we love him more than we love our dream. And so we have to let go. Sometimes those dreams are returned to us fulfilled later on; sometimes they are not. But until we let go, they will possess us and rob us of joy and contentment. We have to learn to let our burdens go. Jesus has told us to turn our heavy burdens over to him and accept his light in exchange. Many feel guilty when there's a problem in their life if they aren't feeling the burden all the time. Would that describe you? But that's not the way God wants us to respond. He wants us to drop our burdens at his feet and just keep letting them go. I can tell you that I have verbally told God, "Lord, I'm dropping this right here.
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