A Very Happy New Year!

May the Lord fill 2023 with special blessings for you and all your loved ones.

To begin 2023 with a bang, let me teach you some ways to decrease stress in your lifestyle.

Yes, decreasing stress is something you have to LEARN.

You see, we humans are naturally inclined to take on more than is healthy and good for our mental, emotional, physical and, yes, spiritual wellbeing.

Decreasing the stress in your lifestyle requires that you begin by making a conscious decision to do so.

No one can make this decision for you. It’s your call alone.

But once you’ve made this decision, there’s plenty help that you can, and should, get both from God and from others.

The good news for us Christian women, which many other folk lack or don’t know about, is that we can fully rely on the Lord to help us in this challenging task.

You see, the Lord does not want us to live in a state of stress.

And He has provided the means to rescue us from it.

If you try these recommendations, by the end of 2023 you’ll look back and appreciate their enormous value. Then you’ll want to spread the word to others. You’ll be eager to explain to them how you learned to carry out this unquestionably important change in your personal life.

A Very Recent Example of Dealing with Huge and Totally Unexpected Stress in My Own Life

Here’s a very recent example from my own life of when I, completely unexpectedly, found myself burdened by almost inhuman stress.

Two months ago, I lost nearly 4 weeks of precious and irreplaceable work time due to a disastrous attempt of a well-known computer chain store to repair my faithful but heavily-worked computer.

The ‘tecchies’ employed by the store ruined my data, ‘lost’ my microphone, ‘lost’ my vital Word program, and installed —without my permission! —the latest version of Windows.

As you’d expect, this got me and my carefully planned work schedule into endless trouble.

I gave the store 3 chances to repair their ‘repairs’.

Each time the results were more horrendous than before!

To put an end to this nightmare, I had a much smaller repair outfit (that fortunately came well recommended) take care of my problems.

I had to return my computer to its former Windows system, I had to buy and install a new Word program, and I had to replace my precious and greatly relied on microphone.

By the time I’d finished, I had shelled out almost the same money that would have gotten me a completely new computer!

And just when my website/blog deadlines were at their most urgent, I found myself 4 weeks behind!

Pretty stressful, right?

But the stress was not to end there.

Two unusually serious events immediately followed.

The events (and the victims involved) were not linked in any way. But in each case, the victims were trying to deal with gravely serious life events that could have untold life consequences for their lives for many years.

Both begged my urgent help.

What was worse: Christmas was now less than 2 weeks away!

A heaped-up bunch of stress, right?

How could I ensure that these high-stress situations did not control me or my life?

The answer was that I had to apply all the wisdom I’d gained from the Lord and all the lessons I’d learned from Him in the previous 38 years.

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I’m going to share that wisdom with you now.

I’m going to show you some simple ways to decrease stress in your lifestyle.

Rinse and repeat these whenever you need to de-stress.

 

1. Think of the stress in your lifestyle as the Lord’s invitation to DEEPEN your inner peace and joy

2. Remember that when God extends any kind of invitation to you, He always gives you the guidance to make it happen

3. Learn to Respect and Take Really Good Care of Yourself

4. Even as You Sleep, You Pray

Even as you sleep, you pray.
It has helped me greatly in my own prayer life to know that the Jewish day begins at sunset.
Accordingly, I have found that the few minutes just before bedtime is an excellent time to start the next prayer day.

Note

This, however, is definitely not the time for heart prayer. Heart prayer has the effect of waking us up, not putting us to sleep!
Before I turn off my light, I …

• Recall where the Lord has been close to me, or seemingly ‘far’ from me, during the day
• Ask His forgiveness for any sins against love that I might have committed
• Ask His help and wisdom for the next day
• Then I simply commit my body, mind, soul and spirit to His safe keeping and to the protection of His holy angels

On waking the next day, I have repeatedly discovered that during my time of sleep I had been given a new, important insight on a situation, person, or problem —or a new sense of peace and joy.
God’s Holy Spirit had been working in me as I slept.
I have learned to regard my sleep time as a time of prayer. Isaiah 26:9 describes my own experience:

My soul yearns for you in the night
. Isaiah 26:9 NIV

 

5. The Role of Silence in Decreasing Stress

All prayer, no matter what form it takes, represents your consent to God’s Presence by faith.

In prayer of the heart, however, you make a conscious decision beforehand to be far more fully present to the Lord than you are in the more usual forms of prayer that rely on words and thoughts.

In order to be more fully present to God, you must learn to enter into inner and outer silence.

Any relationship with another person requires from time to time that you leave the noisy, distracting places and head for a quiet place where you can be sure that you won’t be interrupted.

It’s exactly the same when you are trying to develop a 24/7 dependable, sound, and lasting relationship with God.

While it is true that God can speak to you with a megaphone if He so desires, it is also true that more often He speaks to you and me very quietly, almost in a whisper.

This was exactly how the Lord spoke to Elijah at the time of his dire troubles and distress (1 Kings 19:11 - 13)!

In order to be able to hear the Lord’s whisper, you have to learn to be silent —inside and out.

You have to learn to ‘Be still, and know that I am God’

Psalm 46:10

To achieve inner silence, you must learn to detach from words, thoughts and feelings.

To achieve outer silence, you must prepare an environment that is quiet where you will not be disturbed.

For example, you unplug or turn off your phone, television and radio, and you put your computer in ‘shut down’ mode!

Then, well ahead of time, you ask your friends and family not to disturb you unless there’s an emergency.

What Silence Does For You: A New Way of Listening

In prayer of the heart you and I learn a new way of listening.

At the beginning, this is difficult for us. We have been born into a culture of twenty-four hour television and internet information. We live in a world buzzing with endless noise and talking.

Our culture has tricked us into believing that we can be present to another person while simultaneously carrying on a conversation with a third party on our cell phone or rocking to the music of our Smartphone!

We find it increasingly hard to be truly present to each other.

Left to itself, this relentless atmospheric static of our inner and outer worlds scrambles, distorts or, at worst, blocks out altogether God’s communications to you and yours to Him.

If you desire to be present to the Lord, you have to learn to change this cultural mindset. You have to make a conscious effort to prevent it from controlling your life.

Only as you learn to do this will you be able to open up the inner space that God needs if He is to be fully present to you, and that you need if you are to be more fully present to Him.

I want you to really understand that, like all true lovers, the Lord does not wish you to experience Him second-hand. He wants you to experience Him firsthand, directly, and one-on-one.

Prayer of the heart  is a way of begging the Lord to stay with you long enough for you to meet and ‘hear’ Him FIRSTHAND, DIRECTLY, FOR YOURSELF. The Lord always honours your request.

6. Learn How to Let Go of Your Junk

We ALL carry around baggage starting from our very early childhood and continuing.

Here’s the thing. For the most part, we don’t realize that we are! We remain largely unaware that this weighs us down and adds to our stress levels. Our junk remains largely unhealed.

This unhealed junk can give rise to unhealed negative emotions. When we are already under stress, this can exacerbate it. 

If you want to wind down your tightly-coiled emotions, you must learn how to experience the Lord’s LOVE directly for yourself. There is a guaranteed way of experiencing God’s love for you, whenever you want or need it. This way is to learn how to pray with your heart. 

Praying with your heart allows the Lord Himself to heal and dismantle your junk. Finally, you are able to let go of much of the clutter weighing you down and adding to your stress.  

Prayer of the heart also helps you as nothing else can to co-operate with God’s great and unique purposes for your life.

This is especially critical when you are experiencing stress.

I want you to know that the Lord never stops communicating Himself to you.

Prayer of the heart is His way, par excellence, of communicating with you. But God can also communicate to you in a myriad of other ways. He speaks through people, events, dreams, the words of the scriptures, words of knowledge, prophecies, and sometimes even through angelic visitations

7. Practice ‘Belonging’ to God

Practice ‘belonging’ to God.

Make it a way of life.

Remind yourself regularly that …

• You BELONG to God 

• You are His DAUGHTER 

• You are Jesus’ SISTER

 

8. Love and Accept Yourself JUST AS YOU ARE

I want you to know that God loves you JUST AS YOU ARE, warts, sins, weaknesses, and all —ALWAYS. 

THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS! 

And when you KNOW that the Lord himself loves you, you are able to accept and love yourself. 

The guaranteed way to KNOW THAT GOD LOVES YOU WITHOUT ANY CONDITIONS is to pray with your HEART.

It’s time to use this simple but highly effective way of praying. 

In this place of vast, no-strings-attached love and of unending welcome and security, you will experience safety and rest. You feel ‘at home’, that you belong to Someone, and that you are loved very deeply —failings, limitations, sins and all.

 

9. Carry on a Genuine Conversation with the Lord

Unbelievable as it might seem, God passionately desires to begin a lifelong, two-way, intimate conversation with you, just as you are, and right now. 

And, be well assured, HE’S been passionately wanting, and waiting, to speak to YOU. 

As you begin to experience the Lord’s presence, love, and rest when you pray with your heart, you will WANT to speak to Him.

And you will gradually, but very surely, develop the trust and freedom you need to ask Him questions, to present your personal concerns and anxieties to Him without holding anything back, and to await with confidence His replies!  

This genuine, 2-way, free-flowing conversation, and your ongoing experiences of His love, are the only 2 things you will be able to take with you when you finally meet the Lord in eternity.

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Coming in 2 weeks: ‘How Prayer Positively Affects Your Brain Health’