Prodigal-Casting Crowns

Thought Jan 31st, 2011

For there will be no mercy for you if you have not been merciful to others. But if you have been merciful, then God's mercy toward you will win out over his judgment against you. James 2:13

Forgiveness Releases Stress

Life is a mixture of give and take. And sometimes when we get  the short end, the natural reaction is to feel emotionally wounded and angry. A multitude of medical research has found that forgiveness reduces chronic stress and protects our health from a myriad of serious problems.

For example, a non-profit group, called Campaign for Forgiveness Research, reports that there

have been over 60 scientific articles published on the beneficial effects of forgiveness. The

Journal of Behavioral Medicine reports that people with a forgiving nature correlated with lower

blood pressure and those who did not forgive experienced more frequent acute, stress-induced

reactivity and had higher blood pressures even while at rest!

Let’s begin with defining exactly what forgiveness is and isn’t.

Forgiveness is the positive power to forgive others and to forgive oneself. It is not making excuses
for unkindness, or condoning bad behavior; or trying to deny or diminish your pain and suffering.

Forgiveness is for you – not the wrongdoer. It is a process that  frees you from being consumed

with anger and fantasies of revenge. Forgiveness brings feelings of peace and acceptance.

Forgiveness is an acquired skill that must be practiced to learn properly and the reward is selfpreservation

and a much better quality of life.

In fact studies have found that the inability to forgive not only increases one’s risk for heart disease and stroke; it also leads to negative changes that increase blood pressure, elevate heart rate, and decrease immune function (resistance to disease).

In addition, forgiveness psychologically increases one’s feeling of control (the opposite result of holding anger and bitterness, which magnifies feelings of helplessness). The power of control coming from the confident feeling of being able to overcome any difficulty, so that it doesn’t make you miserable. We’ve all experienced a state of anger that colors our view of everything else around us in a negative light. Studies have found that those who cannot forgive experience psychological distress, restlessness, nervousness and hopelessness.

Researchers report that subjects who are filled with unforgiving thoughts experience an increase in sympathetic nervous system arousal, the fight-or-flight response which triggers the release of cortisol and all its damaging effects (heart attacks, strokes, chest pains, stomach pains, backaches, headaches, weakening of the immune system and more). Dr. Douglas Russell, a Veterans Administration cardiologist found that the coronary function of patients who had suffered a heart attack improved after a 10-hour course in forgiveness.

Fred  Luskin, PhD, of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, reports that people who blame others for their problems have a higher incidence of chronic pain, cardiovascular disease and other ailments.

How to Practice Forgiveness:

• Begin by acknowledging that you are emotionally hurt. Sometimes just this admission

creates a healthy sympathy for your sensitive emotions.

• Rather than revisiting your injustice, focus on the good things in your life. If someone steals your parking space, be thankful that you have enough time to find another one, and your car is running well. Or maybe you made a stupid mistake, but give yourself credit for all the smart choices you’ve made.

• If you are really enraged, you need to calm your body first. Performing one of the beginning breathing techniques (Breathing Tranquilizer technique or Lengthening the Exhale Technique). As you slow your breathing, your heart rate breathing rate and blood pressure with naturally slowdown.

Question?

This is direct and to the point:

Is one man's terrorist, considered another man's revolutionary?

Gerald...

God is upon you...

God saw u getting tired and a cure was not to be. So he put his arms around you and 
whispered come with me. 


With tearful eyes, we watched and saw you pass away. 


Although we love u dearly, we could not make you stay. A golden heart stopped beating, hard working hands at rest.. God broke our hearts to prove to us, he, only takes the best. 


I saw this on Facebook this morning. I miss my friends...


Love and light on this Christmas Season and may God's blessings be upon you and your families during the upcoming hardships.


Gerald

Protection/Space Clearing

Heart Of The Dove...a pathway home

Protection/Space Clearing

Marty Turner/Gerald Martin

What is the importance of protection?

As we all know there are many different forms of energy within our consciousness and some attract good and positive energy and then there is the negative and dark energy.  We have strong abilities that we are not always aware of.  One of such ability is being “telepathic”.  We have this ability to read energy, feel energy, and often times we are completely unaware of and we find the “light”, “love”,  “positive” energy we require when we are “low”,  “hurt, “sick”, “angry”, “frustrated”, “lost” and seek out to find what we need or what to feel better.  When we do this we may very well tap into someone else's field of energy “use” their energy.

When this is done with intention and not agreed upon by both parties involve, we in the field call this “psychic vampire” energy.  When this happens without being aware, we become exhausted and sick.  We have the tools and the knowledge to protect ourselves by paying attention to details and using the tools we have been given.


What are some of the tools we recommend.  

1. Prayer is always first....
2. Sacred mantra and/or mundra’s
3. Sacred White Sage
4. Essential Oils

and much much more

Building your own personal toolbox....

What is space clearing?

We would never think of leaving our floors or furnishing unclean for years and years, yet that is what happens energetically when an environment is not periodically space cleaned.  On an energy level you are living with the energy of everyone who has ever occupied your home. Emotions, particularly angry or negative feelings, are powerful energies that embed themselves in the walls, floors and furnishing of a home. 

If the previous family was unhappy or experienced financial distress, then that energy will still be lingering in your home affecting your family’s health and well-being. (1)

Every home has what is known in Feng Shui as predecessor energy. This is the residual energy left in your home by everyone who has ever stayed there for any period of time.

Space clearing your home is one of the easiest and most beneficial Feng Shui that can be done for your home.   

Space Clearing is done with an intention:

Set the intention before you begin and follow through.

In order for the space clearing to be complete there must be closure 

Intention for “new”, “beginning” and “completion”.

Next workshop will be on December 5th @ 1 pm …..El Paso, Texas

This is a hands on workshop providing you with materials and instruction to read houses, release of entities and how to open yourself to assist in releasing the entities and anything that needs to go into the “Light”.  We will have time for questions and answers as well.  This is a very intensive hands on workshop when you leave this workshop you will have the tools and confidence to clear, cleanse and release entities through your own inner light and wisdom.


Registration is required and directions given at that time.


(1) Paragraph written by Alexandra Brighten, Black Hat Feng Shui Practitioner and
Instructor

Kindness of a Stranger That Still Resonates

This is a story that I read in the NY Times this morning. I felt it worth passing on, as this is the direction that this country is headed now.

Gerald...

_____________________________________________________-

By CHRISTOPHER MAAG
Published: November 7, 2010

CANTON, Ohio — The event was a reunion for people who were never supposed to meet, commemorating an act of charity that succeeded because it happened in secret.

Helen Palm sat in her wheelchair on the stage of the Palace Theater and read her plea for help, the one she wrote in the depths of the Great Depression to an anonymous stranger who called himself B. Virdot.

“I am writing this because I need clothing,” Ms. Palm, 90, read aloud on Friday evening. “And sometimes we run out of food.”

Ms. Palm was one of hundreds who responded to an advertisement that appeared Dec. 17, 1933, in The Canton Repository newspaper. A donor using the pseudonym B. Virdot offered modest cash gifts to families in need. His only request: Letters from the struggling people describing their financial troubles and how they hoped to spend the money. The donor promised to keep letter writers’ identities secret “until the very end.”

That end came last week at the city’s famed 84-year-old Palace Theater, at a reunion for families of B. Virdot’s recipients. About 400 people attended. For the older people, it was a chance to remember the hard times. For relatives of the letter writers, it was a time to hear how the small gifts, in the bleakest winter of the Depression, meant more than money. They buoyed the spirits of an entire city that was beginning to lose hope.

Of the 150 people in Canton who received checks, most for as little as $5, from B. Virdot, Ms. Palm is the only one still alive, and the only one to learn the anonymous donor’s true identity. “I thought about B. Virdot a lot” in the years after 1933, Ms. Palm said. “I was really surprised when I learned his real name.”

His secret lasted 75 years. Then, in 2008, a Canton native named Ted Gup received a suitcase stuffed with his late grandfather’s papers, including letters addressed to one B. Virdot.

Mr. Gup, an investigative journalist formerly with The Washington Post, discovered that B. Virdot was his grandfather, Samuel J. Stone, who escaped poverty and persecution as a Jew in Romania to build a successful chain of clothing stores in the United States. He created the name B. Virdot by combining the names of his daughters, Barbara, Dorothy and Mr. Gup’s mother, Virginia.

Mr. Gup used the letters as the basis for a book, “A Secret Gift,” just published by Penguin Press. Relying on newspaper archives and government documents over the last two years, he found and interviewed more than 500 descendants of the letter writers.

Taken together, the letters from families struggling through the Great Depression create a larger story of a city and a nation struggling to accept a new notion: that without help they might not survive, no matter how hard they worked.

“In many cases these were individuals with their backs against the wall, watching their children go hungry every night,” Mr. Gup said in a phone interview last week.

At a time when accepting charity was seen as a moral failure, Mr. Stone’s promise of anonymity shielded the letter writers from shame. An unemployed woman caring for her sick daughter and disabled sister wrote to Mr. Stone, “If I thought this would be printed in the papers I would rather die of hunger first.”

Kenneth Richards was dumbfounded when Mr. Gup tracked him down to his home outside Canton and told him that his mother, Mattie Richards, had received a check from B. Virdot.

“I really didn’t believe him because my mother just wouldn’t ever ask anybody for help,” Mr. Richards, 72, said. “Here was a woman I never knew.”

The stigma against handouts continues in Canton, once a thriving manufacturing city that spent the last three decades watching factories close. James Macey lost his job as a waiter last month when the restaurant he was working at, Cheeseburger in Paradise, closed. He applied for more than 15 jobs before requesting unemployment assistance on Friday.

“I waited two weeks because I didn’t want to apply for unemployment,” Mr. Macey, 25, said. “It’s embarrassing.”

Canton’s tradition of charity continues, too. Mr. Macey’s pastor at Cathedral of Life Church offered him $250 to scrub the church’s floors. Insisting that was too much money for four hours of work, Mr. Macey requested $100. The pastor, M. Dana Gammill, asked him to accept $150.

Many people need such help in Canton. More than half the city’s children live below the federal poverty line, according to the Census Bureau, up from 38 percent in 2008. More than 3,000 people called the United Way for help in October, a 33 percent increase over last year, the agency said.

Frustration over 10.4 percent unemployment in surrounding Stark County has caused more political instability than Canton has known in generations. John Boccieri, a conservative Democrat, won the seat in Congress from the local district in 2008, only to lose to Jim Renacci, a Republican, last week. “People are scared,” said David B. Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Akron. “When the economy is bad, the party in power gets punished.”

In 1933, the fear was visceral. J. L. White, father of seven children, wrote in his thank-you note to B. Virdot that he was considering suicide just before he received the gift.

For other families, Mr. Stone’s gift provided the only holiday cheer that bleak winter. Olive Hillman used the $5 check to buy her 8-year-old daughter a doll with a porcelain face and leather arms.

“I was thrilled to get it,” said the daughter, Geraldine Hillman Fry, now 85. “It really was the only doll that I ever had in my life, so it meant a lot to me.”

At Friday’s reunion, people talked about how Mr. Stone’s example of generosity resonates today.

“I think there’s a message here that people in Canton know how to get through the hard times by pulling together,” Mr. Gup said.

Days before Christmas 1933, with Mr. Stone’s gift in hand, Edith May took her 4-year-old daughter Felice to a five-and-dime store and bought her a wooden horse.

Seventy-seven years later, Felice May Dunn owns two farms and 17 Welsh ponies.

“In my life it made a big difference,” Ms. Dunn, 80, recalled. “It was my favorite toy.”

_____________________________________________

In times of trouble, turn not away a stranger, as they may be an angel in disguise.

Love and Light to you...: