Self-Care Is Important
You will be a great help to others if you take care of yourself, especially as a parent.
I am, of course, referring to your health. I will include three facets of your health. First, your physical health, which means your strength and endurance for your daily activities and other short-term demands for hard work.
Second, your mental health where knowledge and experience give you confidence to meet your daily tasks and keep your life in order. That is a challenge, which is why I feel you need the perspective of good spiritual conditioning.
The third facet that I want you to focus on today is your spiritual health and conditioning. It is my belief that this is a major type of exercise for your mind and spirit to develop the kind of attitude that reflects faith and compassion for the welfare of others.
Granted, you may not be a believer in God and creation, with the belief that you have a spiritual life beyond this physical life. However, those who do believe they have a spiritual connection usually have a better outlook on the future, a better attitude at work and at home, and tend to be more forgiving to those who treat them badly.
Most people living with pain or going through hard times have difficulty seeing hope in their future and often try to make others feel as badly as they do. They need your sympathy. Are you spiritually conditioned to do so?
Filter the World
There are inspired scriptures written to help believers cope with the powers of good and evil around them. Scripture was meant to help believers filter the information around them.
We say good and evil because that is the battle. Satan is known as the father of evil, with a host of fallen spirits who follow his lead to turn our souls toward evil thoughts and actions. They work on our weaknesses. We see the evidence in those whose acts arise from the use of drugs, alcohol, and the use of fear to gain power.
There are some simple ways to work on your spiritual conditioning, such as reading books with daily devotions and a few related scripture references. To make your study more specific, you could refer to a Concordance of the Bible, which has scriptural references by topic. Or just make reading the Bible a daily practice.
My point is that your spiritual health is just as important as your mental health and your physical health. Maybe more so since a good spiritual condition will help you see what is wrong in your life and help you filter that out!
Stay within Yourself
Your spiritual conditioning is between you and God. Very few want you to tell them how to live. You will have more influence in how you live than what you say. Read what God has inspired others to say and write, and you will have some understanding of the reasons why we pray and the power of faith. Those are spiritual strengths, evidence of things not seen.
This becomes even more important when you have a family or become an influence in a family setting. Your actions become a reflection of your spiritual condition.
There is an adage among Christians which says, “What would Jesus do?” You could start there and consider your conversations and habits and how well they reflect your beliefs.
I am concerned as much about your spiritual conditioning as I am about my own. It is not easy to remember to take care of your spiritual condition. That is why I feel you must learn to make it a habit, preferably a daily habit.
This is the kind of conditioning habit that will make your mental and physical conditioning habits easier to include in your personal improvement journey.
Your Family’s Welfare
Very few will get by with few spiritual and mental challenges within their own family, let alone the outside world. We are all individuals making our own choices to follow good or evil influences. Good examples within the family will have a very positive effect. Can you learn to be one of those good influencers?
My focus on this blog site is to help you build a better mindset for money. That is not about how to make the most money and live better than others. Rather, your focus must be to learn how to fit money into how you want to live. Hopefully, that will be a good thing for you, to help you have control over your circumstances.
That process requires you to learn good information and avoid the bad. Until now, your friends and family have had an influence on your decisions. Now, you must evaluate if that was good or bad. That is a spiritual evaluation.
Your assessment will help you make better choices going forward, especially if you continue with your spiritual conditioning to help you be able to filter what you hear and what you read.
Your family’s welfare may depend on that process.
Spiritual Decisions
There are many who wish to be influencers, some good, some bad. Many will ask you to take sides. That is a spiritual decision.
You must ask yourself why they are asking you to choose their side, their group. Pray for your decisions. Pray believing God will answer. You may get acquainted with that “still small voice”. Or you may reflect on what happens in your life related to the things you prayed about and see the answer.
God is not our genie in a bottle. He will not give us all we want. Some of our wishes are not what we were meant to have.
We all like things that make life easier and more fun. However, those things come at a cost. You may not make enough money to have those things now. But, if you learn to be a good steward over your resources and blessings along the way, you may find yourself able to afford many of them later in life.
By then, you may have such good spiritual conditioning that they will cease to have the same value as when you were young and more easily influenced.
You will become much better at doing the right thing, in your work and in your family.
Careers can come and go. You may change careers over your lifetime. Many do. Some on purpose. Some because they found their “calling”, something they felt compelled to do and found a great deal of satisfaction doing it.
If you are not satisfied with what you do now, do not give up finding that source of funding for your future that brings you enough satisfaction that you wake up each morning excited about another workday doing what you enjoy! Pray for it. It could happen.
Look beyond finances, consider your spiritual influences, and work on your spiritual conditioning!