Tag: path to peace

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The Real Deal

During this series we’ve talked about the things that overwhelm us, and how many of those things are rooted in lies about who we are and where our true value lies. We’ve talked about our need to succeed and how it’s born out of our perception that we have to earn love. We’ve addressed lack of self-love and fear, tragedy and isolation, and the reality of our wounds and resentments. All of this helps us get a clearer picture of why our lives are the way they are, why peace, joy, and fulfillment evade us, and why we’re overwhelmed — but it still doesn’t provide the answer as to how we fix it.   

Most are seeking a better life, desiring to better understand their purpose, and just plain fed up with being fed up and overwhelmed. The world’s promises have all proved empty, but there’s another promise that never fails. It may sound simplistic, but it’s absolutely true: God is the only answer for our lives. God is the only thing that can fill up the hole in our hearts, the ultimate source of the unconditional love we desire. Most of us understand that love through conversion.  

My Conversion

My conversion was not something I anticipated. Nor did I volunteer for it. It was more like being hit across the back of the head with three 2x4s. I was at an all-time low. I had lost my marriage and my family as I knew it, something that I had not signed up for. My business, my pride and joy and my identity, was significantly down-sized. And I had lost a lot of money due to some very foolish decisions along the way. I was a control freak and had lost all control. I couldn’t hold it together anymore. My world was falling apart. The walls were caving in. 

I don’t know if you can relate to this, but the stress and the pressure literally forced me to my knees one night in March 2006. I couldn’t take it anymore, I broke. I fell to my knees at the side of my bed, sobbing. I couldn’t stop crying, I mean snot flying. I was a 43-year-old man and I was a mess. I remember saying over and over again, “I can’t do this alone anymore, I can’t do this alone anymore, I can’t do this alone anymore.” I only stopped due to pure exhaustion, still kneeling but now resting my head on the bed. 

I had never heard the audible voice of God, but I felt a real calm come over the room and a peace come over me. I felt Jesus Christ’s presence, a feeling unlike anything I had ever experienced before. And in my heart, I heard him say, “You’re not alone. I am here for you.” I heard it over and over again, like he was answering me in direct response. “You’re not alone. I am here for you . . . You’re not alone. I am here for you.” 

It’s difficult to truly express how I felt. That was the moment that I not only felt God’s real presence in my life for the first time, but I experienced his unconditional love. I realized I couldn’t do it alone, and I didn’t have to. He was and is there for me. A huge burden was lifted off me. I had encountered God, a God whom I could rely on, a God who loves me. I literally felt different. I was different, now knowing God’s love. 

My conversion rocked my world and changed my life forever. That’s my unique story. Yours’ will be just as impactful for you as mine has been for me. If you haven’t had this experience yet, do not give up. If I’ve learned nothing else, I know this for certain: God wants our conversion more than we do. 

The Invitation

God is constantly inviting us into a relationship with him. He uses everything that happens to us, the good and the bad. The trouble is, we’re so busy being overwhelmed that we often miss his invitation. God invites us to turn to him, to bring our hurts, fears, past experiences, our everything to him in truth. This is what we mean when we talk about “conversion.” It will change your life…it changed mine. 

If you’ve not experienced conversion yet and would like to, I point to ways to help the process in my book, as identified last week. Happy to shoot them to you’d if you like. 

As always, please email me at [email protected] with questions, comments, concerns, or prayer requests. 

God Bless you on your Path to Peace, Joy, and Fulfilment!!!

Remember…God made you for Greatness!!!

Mark Joseph

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Tragedy…What a Blessing

It’s said that we can all expect two things as part of life…death and taxes. I would adamantly argue that there’s a third…human tragedy, suffering. No one can escape it. Life is messy and it’s part of humanity, the human condition. 

It can strike as something global like war, terrorism, or a natural disaster. It can be something more personal like separation or divorce, death of a loved one, a major health issue, addiction, a rift in the family, a horrible personal failure, unresolved conflict with a friend, loss of property, or a financial crisis. 

If it sticks around long enough, it becomes personal. If it’s personal long enough, we often develop resentments. Not sure if you’ve heard the expression, “resenting someone else is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other person to die”. I’ve tried it and believe me, it doesn’t work. 

Every single one of us can point to a tragedy, either personally or in the lives of those closest to us. Many ask the question, “how does an all-loving God allow pain and suffering in our lives?” Pointing to me as an example, in addition to most who I know on this journey…it’s to bring us closer to God, to create a greater good. A couple expressions come to mind: 

  • No pain, no gain
  • No Cross, no crown

I just recently heard that we have to be emptied out, i.e., tragedy and suffering, to be filled up. 

Think about it. When things are going tremendously well, you don’t have a need for anyone else, including God. But when things get tough, that’s when you can’t do it alone. If severe enough, it brings you to your knees, often leading to an encounter with Jesus Christ, internalizing His love, and experiencing conversion. That’s what happened to me and praise God. It rocked my world and changed my life forever. 

 

Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Grow

If we allow it, tragedy can be a wake-up call, an invitation to accept the reality of our limitations, to reject the things that leave us feeling overwhelmed and to start moving on the path to lasting fulfillment. The fact is that we can’t control the future or stop bad things from happening. What we can control is the way we live in the present, and the way we accept all the things that happen to us, good or bad. The healthy response is to live joyfully in the moment and to actively engage with others on the journey. 

Some sayings we hear are truer than we know. Examples are “What doesn’t destroy us makes us stronger” or “God only gives us what He knows we can handle.” It is in our tragedies, our defeats in life, that we learn our biggest lessons. My greatest tragedies have resulted in my greatest opportunities for growth.

This may come across as odd, but I’m thankful for the tragedies in my life. If you know my story, you know that they were dramatic. You see, I believe everything happens for a reason, according to God’s grand plan. We may not know why in the moment, but God helps us in making a ministry out of our meses. That’s true for me and true for most I know on this same faith journey. As such, I live in a place of gratitude, knowing I wouldn’t be who I am today without those experiences, albeit very difficult. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today, if not for my significant struggles.

Praise God…it’s never too late to be the person you want to be, the person God calls you to be. 

As always, please feel free to contact me at [email protected], with questions, comments, concerns, or prayer requests. 

God Bless you on your Path to Peace, Joy, and Fulfillment!!

Remember….God made you for Greatness!

Mark Joseph

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Weekly Blog

Starting Anew

All of us want to live good lives. We want to experience success (which means different things to different people), be happy, and feel loved. Often missing the mark, year-end is a great time to refocus. Advent is a time of preparing, when God becomes man in the form of the vulnerable little baby Jesus. A period of hope, of celebration, Christmas leads to the New Year, a time to plan anew, learning from the past, but leaving it for a better, brighter future. 

Three lessons central to my lived experience:

  • In understanding the unconditional love of Jesus, the unimaginable is achievable
  • There’s a path to peace, joy, and fulfillment 
  • God made us for Greatness

Although all are integral to our faith, we never hear anything about them, including in Church. I’d suggest that if more people knew the truth of the above, Masses would be standing room only. Parishes would once again be the center of family life, like they were years ago. 

So leaving this year and going into next, I’m going to share how we achieve the above three things. I’m going to do so predominantly with “story”, from my life and others. Stories resonate with people. We learn from our own individual stories. And the stories of others…that’s my prayer with this series. 

The Problem

Let’s frame the problem…most of us don’t know how to achieve the three points above. We pursue prominence, possessions, pleasure, and fulfillment in our personal relationships, thinking these things will satisfy us. Probably not unlike you, I fully bought into these false answers for years, working very hard to succeed. Then tragedy struck, and I lost my family as I knew it, as well as the business I had spent so many years building. 

In hindsight, I was overwhelmed when things seemed to be going well, as I was when things got really bad. It just felt different. During the good times, it was all about the pace: running, running, running. There was always too much to do and never enough hours in the day. It was overwhelming, but because I felt like I was in control, it didn’t seem like it. In fact, I was energized by it. In the bad times, I was exhausted, deflated, frustrated, and very aware of just how overwhelmed I truly was. 

When my life reached the point of crisis, I began to learn the lessons that have benefited me beyond belief. As I have learned how to remove the shackles that the world puts on us, I have been blessed with profound peace, joy, and fulfillment. 

Before we can address any issue, we first need to understand it, so the first 5-6 blogs will look at why we are the way we are and how we got here. The second 5-6 will lay out the path the Lord took me on, to resolve our issues, positioning us to live lives of peace, joy, and fulfillment. 

It is my hope that this blog series will serve as a resource to you, that it will help you find relief from whatever life circumstances are overwhelming you. I pray that it will allow you to see yourself as you are: a person worthy of love precisely because you exist, and not for what you achieve. I hope that the principles I lay out will do for you what they did for me, setting you on the path to finding your life’s purpose. Because whether you’re aware of it or not, you were made for greatness. 

As always, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] with questions, comments, concerns, challenges, or prayer requests.  

God Bless you on your Path to Peace, Joy, and Fulfillment!!!

God made you for GREATNESS!!!

Mark Joseph

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Weekly Blog

What’s Really Meaningful? 

What do you read to inspire you? Or listen to? What inspires you? I love reading books about our faith and leadership, my favorite topics. I’m on the email distribution lists of my favorite authors. One of them, a great inspiration, is John O’Leary. A burn victim as a youth, John has mastered making lemonade out of lemons. You can find John’s books (great reads), blogs, and other products at https://johnolearyinspires.com. 

In his September 20th email, John told a story about a young girl he met at a burn camp for children. This courageous girl was burned years earlier, sustaining injuries similar to his, and had lost the fingers on her right hand. Because of that, she wore an oversized sweatshirt at camp to cover the scars on her arm and hide the extent of her injuries. John explains further below.

You don’t have to be a child to know sometimes it feels safer to simply hide scars.

At camp that day, I shared with the kids what I went through as a child and the gifts that came from it. I reminded them of the beauty of scars, the resiliency they possess, and ultimately, that they are being prepared for something bigger and better than they can currently fathom.

Afterwards, this beautiful girl approached in her sweatshirt. She stood in front of me, took a deep breath, then exhaled as she rolled up her sleeves for the first time that week. She then proudly lifted her scarred arm and hand.

You don’t have to be a child to know sometimes it’s liberating to honestly reveal your scars and embrace who you really are.

As we hugged goodbye at the end of that meeting, I told her we weren’t done being friends and the next time I was in her part of the state we were hanging out.

That’s how a few weeks later, at a little restaurant off the interstate, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with this brave girl. Her grandfather sat nearby as we visited about her experiences, what she had endured, the struggles she faced in recovery, the concerns she felt moving forward and the dreams she still had for her life. In other words, we had an awesome visit!

That interaction, with that young girl, reminded me it’s seldom in the massive events and huge gatherings where we change the world. It’s the regular moments, in unexpected spaces, with ordinary people that the best of our work and lives is revealed.

Too often, we race to what we thought was the real work, but it’s seldom found in the big stuff – the big trip, the big project, the big win. No, the best and most meaningful aspects of our lives are discovered in the seemingly ordinary experiences, tender moments of grace, and ordinary human interactions with others throughout the day.

If you want to read John’s post in total, you can read it in full here.

Not only does John’s story speak to the Great Commandments…love God and love others, but it’s the only Path to Peace, Joy, and Fulfillment!!

As always, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] with questions, comments, concerns, challenges, or prayer requests.  

God Bless and remember…God made you for GREATNESS!!!

Mark Joseph