Thriving and Prosperity

You and I are created as emotional and spiritual creatures, created to live fully. We find life to the full through emotional and spiritual relationship with ourselves, others, and God. We cannot find full life otherwise. We are predesigned to find fulfillment in relationship.

We are predesigned to find fulfillment in relationship.

    We are all created the same. Based upon the DNA of human beings, we are approximately 99.9% the same. We are only .1% unique! Take a moment to ponder the power of .1%. Not a single one of us looks exactly the same, acts the same, thinks the same, and yet we are remarkably similar as to what we need in order to thrive, which is what DNA seeks—thriving and prosperity.

    Just as the cellular life functions similarly in us, so does the DNA of our emotional and spiritual makeup. Consider the expressive power of the .1%, and then imagine the change our admission of being 99.9% the same could mean. Our sameness is much more powerful than our uniqueness, if we would but admit and accept our 99.9%.

    Admitting and accepting this design tears down the walls we build and hide behind, while we still have identity boundaries. We live available to growing into who we are created to become and doing what we are created to do—give ourselves to living fully.

Based upon the DNA of human beings, we are approximately 99.9% the same. We are only .1% unique!

    The fullest life is the life of maximum service, sharing what gifts you have developed with a world in need of who you are and what you do.  This fulfillment can be raising one child with love, or affecting the prosperity of a whole nation. The result is the same in fulfillment.

    The genesis of living fully, or being 100% available to living, requires that we feel our feelings, tell the truth about our internal experience, and give ourselves to the process (God owns the process of how life works). This process is how we develop into thriving, prosperous people, who then offer thriving and prosperous conditions to others.

    As we do so, we grow into people of passion, intimacy, and integrity. Passion is a willingness to be in pain for something or someone that is greater than our comfort. Intimacy is the experience of being known by others from the inside out, and vice versa. Integrity is the capacity to live courageously, truthfully, and humbly and keep one’s behaviors consistent with this character.

The fullest life is the life of maximum service, sharing what gifts you have developed with a world in need of who you are and what you do.

    Passion becomes living fully in intimacy. Intimacy becomes loving deeply with integrity. Integrity becomes leading well a life worth emulating and honoring. The three growth areas lead us to living fully, loving deeply, and leading well.

    I have spoken, counseled, consulted, and written extensively about our condition, its possibilities, and its blessings. Thousands of peoples’ lives have been prospered through the experiences of these basic truths, which I have expanded upon in all the materials I have developed with the help of many others. The material is not theory. The material moves us into experiencing thriving and prosperity.

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To experience the freedoms and blessings of a life lived fully, please read the books I have written or co-written, and follow the numerous blogs and podcasts that you can find on Sage Hill Resources.

Craving Well

To feel a powerful desire for (something) is to crave. Synonyms are long for, yearn for, desire, want, wish for, hunger for, thirst for, pine for, set one’s heart on. To live in craving requires the courage of vulnerability and the strength of patience.

To live in craving requires the courage of vulnerability and the strength of patience.

    God created us to crave. We are created to crave legitimate connection that fulfills and completes us—even in a place that cannot fill us completely, because we will continue to hunger again and thirst again. We will always have to go back to the well and dip our buckets in again. In as much, then, we all need a well where the water is good for our hearts, and we have confidence that it will not run dry—if we are going to have our cravings touched in legitimate ways. Therein lies our question, “Where is my well?”

    In Psalm 63, David expresses highly charged craving with the following words while he was struggling for his life in the Judean desert: “You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water….On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night….I cling to you.”

We are created to crave legitimate connection that fulfills and completes us.

    In this Psalm, David knew that nothing else could fill him but the water of God. He went to the well, knowing that no “Bathsheba” could quench his thirst. He would not sacrifice his craving to lust, an illegitimate form of fulfilling legitimate desire.

    He was willing to do what we are all created to do. He was willing to admit his craving, and he was also willing to experience two strengths that allow us to crave truthfully. He was willing to hear, “wait” and “not yet,” trusting that God made him (Psalm 139) and cared about him (Psalm 8).

Our willingness and ability to tolerate “wait” and “not yet” is a marker that separates craving from lust.

    Our willingness and ability to tolerate “wait” and “not yet” is a marker that separates craving from lust. We often sacrifice the miracle of our craving being quenched five minutes before it occurs because we do not tolerate trust and dependency in our God-made craving.

     I pray that we will grow in our capacity to wait and tolerate the “not yet” of our lives. That we will grow in our courage to crave, finding the courage to hunger for more than we can hardly ask or imagine. I pray that lust will not rule our lives, and that we will face the difference between craving and lust.

    I pray that this year, and years to come, we deepen our trust in and dependency on this God who created us to crave all that is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy. I pray that we know he made us, and that his heart is set on us.

Hope's Daring in 2019

The ever-present temptation towards apathy or resignation is the reason hope is so daring and risky. Hope awakens us to wonder, dreams, possibilities, courage and belief. These forms of imagining will always be slightly or greatly painful once we actually face that we live “east of Eden and west of Heaven.” Or to put it another way as Samuel Beckett said, “You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.”

The ever-present temptation towards apathy or resignation is the reason hope is so daring and risky.

    We struggle to live well and fully between some day and not yet. Therefore, to hope daringly also means we will sometimes have to grieve deeply. Therein lies struggle.

   Hope is an inborn gift that initiates our strength to stay in the struggle where we live, on earth, until we arrive in God’s full presence, in heaven. Because hope is painful, it must be sustained and nourished by others and God, so we have the strength to continue to daringly hope. This relational sustenance allows us to persevere with faith in all the imaginings that we dare to step into. This same relational sustenance is also the nourishment we need to grieve until hope returns.

Hope is an inborn gift that initiates our strength to stay in the struggle on this earth.

    Being in heart relationship or intimacy (into-me-see) with God and others allows others to celebrate our “reaching,” and also allows them to aid us in our grief if the “reach” turns to loss.

    My hope for us this year is that we will increase our intimacy, increase our confidants, and especially increase our closeness to God so that we can struggle well between someday and not yet. We are created to hope—even in a place of great pain.

Daring to hope allows us to press on towards where we are created to arrive.

    Apathy is no cure and resignation is no answer. Daring to hope allows us to press on towards where we are created to arrive. We need intimate relationship to sustain us in the journey.