The Equally Yoked Series: "Two Is Better Than One"

Welcome back to a new article and a new series where I will be discussing [Godly] relationships. For this new article, I thought about dabbling a little into a question I've come to ask myself as well as people around me a lot: can a Christian marry a non-believer? I am sure you have heard it before: do not marry a non-believer. We’ve all been there and heard the infamous “unequally yoked” verse. You have managed to drill it into your head and yet, here you are, reading this article because you have inevitably fallen for a handsome man  or a beautiful woman who is everything you can ask from a man/ woman but is not a believer. And you are beginning to think of all the couples you know where one of the spouses is a non-believer and yet they still manage to make it work. And so you contemplate the idea of marrying someone who is not on the same spiritual journey you are on but swears that they respect and support you. Fair enough. I am not judging you and trust me when I say I have been there and I know it all too well: the anger, the bargaining, the compromises and then the realization that perhaps it is not going to work out so well for you in the end. And let me tell you this… Nothing hurts more than letting go of something you truly want and desire (that and being told you can’t have your favorite food because there is no gluten free version of it yet… Gosh… ) I am not judging you at all because I have been there but let me give you my take on this matter hoping that it will help you better assess the direction you want to go in from this place of heartache and confusion you stand at right now.

A few days ago while I was attending Bible study, we were discussing  Ecclesiast 4: 9-12. And although we were talking about a totally different topic still related to that passage, verse 12 caught my attention in particular as being (in my opinion) one of the keys to a successful marriage:

“Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble […] A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.”

A couple where both spouses are Christians has higher chances of standing compared to one where only one is a Christian because you both cover each other spiritually and can stand strong as a couple in spiritual warfare (yes this is a real thing… Might post an article someday about it). When one spouse is weak the other can pray and stand strong for the other and vice versa; a little bit like watching a house: if one person is tired, falls asleep or missing his/her turn at watching the house, the other person can cover for it. The second part spoke more to me as having a marriage/ relationship centered on Christ: when things will get rocky, both spouses will know where to run (in the presence of God) and who to run to (God). They will seek counsel from people who can and will (hopefully) direct them according to the Word of God. Having built a marriage on Christ assures a household built on solid foundations (both spouses in agreement with spiritual principles and acting accordingly, Matt 7:24) with the condition that both spouses are equally working on having a successful and healthy marriage, committed to God and committed to each other.

A Christ-centered and godly marriage does not guarantee that things will run smoothly. If you think it does, I got breaking news: you’re wrong. What it means however is that when things go wrong you know in which direction to go. And that is why it is important to walk in the same direction as mentioned in Amos 3:3.

“Can two people walk together without agreeing on the direction?”

What this means is that either you will go in one direction (one spouse pulling the other: towards God or away from God) or you will walk in separate directions (which totally defeats the purpose of marriage). Marrying a non-believer seems like a good idea in the moment and might even work on the short run. But down the road, issues will arise especially if you are called to go further in your walk with God: the distance of your spouse to God will be echoed in your marriage as you grow closer to God.

So now what? Well you tell me! If you are reading this, chances are you have already decided what your next step will be but you are looking for clues, signs or what not to comfort you in your decision. Marriage is a personal decision just like salvation: you marry someone who is good for you and to you, not for the people giving their opinion on who they think you should marry. Two things I will tell you however are: 1) figure out what is the most important to you between a spouse and a godly spouse and once you do, 2) pray. Leave it to God to be what He wants things to be without getting too caught up in your feelings and/emotions because they can deceive you.

Hope this helped.

Until next time,

xo

Being A Savage Doesn't Mend A Broken Heart: Only Time Does.

We hurt, we learn, we grow… But how many of us are stunting our growth by what we refuse to learn? By what we refuse to let go of? By the emotions we deny ourselves thinking that if we conceal and pretend long enough that we don’t feel them, eventually they will go away?
Oh honey... emotions buried alive don’t die: they fester and show up as inappropriate behaviors. Iyanla Vanzant said it, life taught me, way before I found those words.


See I am part of that generation of "savages": we laugh it all off to the face of the world only to cry ourselves to sleep in the lonely hours. We pretend to be okay because we have a duty to entertain “an audience” but really, all we are comes to two things: walking broken hearts and wounded souls; each and everyone carrying burdens and emotional baggage that we are too scared to undo. We seem to have it all figured out, with social media and the whole shenanigans, but in reality we are hollow and empty. We are shadows of who we used to be simply because we refused to acknowledge that the hurt was real and when it caught up with us the aftermath was not pretty. We deny ourselves the right to hurt and to grieve because we have been taught that to say that we are hurt is to be weak. And so we jump from one thing/ person to another to distract our mind and heart from something that is so very real, from a pain that knows no name and that pushes us everyday to the edge, the edge of reason. Physically standing but emotionally crumbling, physically alive but emotionally dying from a slow and painful death that nobody can see because we are too good at masking our pain; walking around like Superman and letting our inner Clark Kent die, only forgetting they both depend on each other to stay alive. We get so caught up playing superhero that we forget we're only humans and God forbid we admit we also need saving and rescue from the very things that eat us alive, the things that keep us up at night.


Being a savage doesn’t mend a broken heart baby, only time does; time and a little faith: Faith that you won’t stay in the same spot forever; faith that one day you will wake up and something inside you will have settled. And then on your journey to recovery you will pick up some strength: Strength to not run back to the things that broke you; strength to overcome your worst days, realizing without shame that your struggle is real but so worth it. And in those days when the pain seems unbearable, in those days where your feet might buckle under the burden of your pain and healing heart, take a look back to get some more strength: a look back to the better days to keep you going and to keep you strong. Remind yourself of the days where you successfully kept your head out of the water, remind yourself of the days where you successfully weathered some of the most violent storms designed to break even the strongest of us all.


Being a savage doesn’t mend a broken heart. Time does. Time and little bit of faith alongside with a dash of hope. We are all a little crooked and broken, but baby that’s how the light gets in. We are all a little broken in our very own ways but that how we learn, that’s how we grow.

-Excerpt from a memoir I will never write #5

Little Worrier Notes

“Worrying won’t stop the bad stuff from happening. It just stops you from enjoying the good.”

Sometimes I can’t help it. I can’t help it but be worried. I can’t help it but try to know what is coming next.

It can be crippling you know… Being a control freak: not be able to let things follow their natural course because there is always that fear creeping up on me.

That fear of things not going according to the plan because if it doesn’t happen the way it should then everything built around it falls apart.

***

It is like being a kid in a sense: like how I used to get on the tip of my toes to see over the counter what I was getting for lunch because I just couldn’t give it a rest.

It is kind of the same except that now, the anxiety is at a much bigger scale and Lord… some days… some days it is just hard to just stop thinking so much.

Yes there are days where all I want is to pump the break and remind myself to be right here, right now.

 There are days where all I want is for my mind to catch a break and for my heart to just not be constantly pounding because I can’t help but wonder what the next big thing will be or what else will go wrong or who else am I going to have to rescue.

***

Sometimes it’s just hard to just be right here, right now

Because all I can seem to hold on to is a thread made of “what ifs” and “shoulds” and “mights”

And oh my Lord… Some days it is just exhausting.

It is because it seems like behind every question mark, a heartbreak is hiding

And some days it feels like who I am is not enough to bear my worries, anxieties and fears that, at times, seem too overwhelming to overcome.

But then I remember that I don’t have to do all of that: I just need to take one step and rely on God for the next ones.

I just need to take one step and trust that if I fall there is someone who is there, always has been and always will be, to catch me.

***

And so when it is hard to be right here, right now, every now and then,

I will remind myself to pump the break and look around, be grateful for what I have

And trust that everything shall come to be in due time.

And so be it.

Peace From Broken Pieces : Review And Takeway

Welcome back to a new article and to this new segment in the blog I am trying to incorporate, hopefully being faithful to it to the best of my abilities. In this new segment I will present some of the books I have read and do a review/ give my impression of them. The first book I wanted to introduce this segment with is Peace From Broken Pieces: How To Get Through What You Are Going Through by Iyanla Vanzant.

 

In her book Iyanla shares her story, inviting people to know the truth of who she really is. She shares the raw and honest truth about her struggles from childhood to adulthood. She talks about her experience as a daddyless daughter and the dysfunction in the households she grew up in which later perspired into her decisions as an adult. She reveals to the world the patterns she went through in life, opened up about her insecurities, her highs, her lows and her rock bottom. But beyond all that and the heartbreak from losing a multimillion contract/ show, her house, her marriage, but most importantly her daughter, she also talked about the things that got her through when the going got tough and seemed almost impossible. She offered her story as a mirror to all the people going through some things so that we could look at ourselves through her and identify our own patterns and break them, figure out what the pathologies we have inherited are and avoid passing them to our children, use her story to understand how some of the decisions we make and the actions that we take consciously or subconsciously are nothing but the reflection of our inner thoughts and the part of us we cannot or do not want to see.

As per the title, I would put this book in the self-help/ self development category. It is definitely the one your want to grab and read in the midst of a breakdown if you are in need of answers and intentional about finding them and about the journey to find those answers. If it is the case for you, I absolutely recommend this book to you. Although I would say that this is not a book for everybody, you could get your hands on it and read it if you are curious and you feel like you could use more knowledge/ tools to navigate the shallow waters of life. Overall the story is well written but as she go goes back and forth in her story, it can get little bit hard to follow at times. The beginning for me seemed a little bit slow but once I passed the slump of the first chapter, things started to pick up and make more sense as the story unfolds itself. This book was  a major eye opener for me and definitely provided me with some of the tools I needed to get through some of my toughest moments so without further due, here are the top five lessons I took away from this book.  

1- Look for the lessons and take it with gratitude

I always say that everything happens for a reason but in this book, she talked about how upon coming to this earth, each of us as a soul have a defined curriculum designed by God and that every people, situation we encounter plays a particular role in the assimilation of the skills and lessons we need to live life successfully. It made me look at life differently: it made me stop asking myself why me? And start asking where is the lesson? what do I need to learn or master to move on? And I can tell you it made a huge difference in my attitude and approach to certain situations because once I started seeing the lessons behind the situations I became grateful for the knowledge I have acquired that would ultimately allow me to make better choices and take better decisions.


2- Pay attention to what is happening: recognize the patterns and the pathologies

We live in a society that goes so fast that we do not take time to pause and see things, listen to things and pay attention. We are constantly surrounded by noise, by a thousand things we feel like we have to do to get busy. We keep on repeating the same patterns because deep down we don’t pay attention. When I got to that part of the book I had to pause and take a nap. I had to because in matter of seconds I had an ahah! Moment but not the kind that makes you jump all over the place and be happy. It is the eye opener one where you kind of go :"this is what I have been doing all this time!". But it doesn’t stop there! She doesn’t just stop at helping you see the patterns and pathologies: she helps you debunk them and shift things around. I won't tell you how: you've got to read the book 😉

3- Recognize the role you play in the patterns

One thing that I strongly believe in is that we always have the choice and recreating patterns is one of those areas where we have the choice. Patterns happen because either consciously or subconsciously, we participate in them. By the thoughts we have that translates into our actions, our words or our behavior, we either actively (by playing an active role in making them happen) or passively (by allowing them to exist) engage in recreating patterns we have either learned on our own from personal experiences or being exposed to early in life or simply been passed down as an inheritance (subconscious beliefs, thoughts, affirmations but mostly cultural baggage). Only when you recognize the patterns you can take steps and actions to correct them.


4- Find out where it comes from

Iyanla in her book, describes how her dysfunctional relationship with her father shaped all the relationships she had with man: how the lack of love and affection, the things she had seen growing up in the household she had been in shaped heavily her experience with men. And this is where some things for me started to make sense: this is how I started digging deeper than just the behavior, just the words and just what I think I see. I am one of those person believing that we attract who we are and the things that we are. So no matter how much we try to convince ourselves we are something else, our true nature will show in the interactions that we have and in the people we are around. As Iyanla said (and she says that a lot), the people that we attract in our life reflect some parts of ourselves that are in the shadows. Some parts we cannot not see or that we keep hidden. So if you say you are fine and keep attracting broken men what does that say about you? If you keep attracting emotionally unavailable men what does it say about you? If you keep on letting people abuse you, your trust, disrespect you what does that say about yourself and the relationship you have with your own self? Every relationship is a direct reflection of the relationship with have with our own self and will be to some extend dictated by the previous experiences we have had in the past. So the key to breaking patterns and stopping pathologies is finding where they originate from and correct the belief/ thoughts that we keep feeding ourselves in order to keep the patterns/ pathologies alive.


5- Have your best interests at heart

By not having your best interests at heart, you teach people that it is okay for them to treat you the way they want to and I have learnt this one the hard way. It has nothing with being selfish: it has to do with being clear about what you want, will or will not do, accept and/or tolerate. It has to do with being honest with yourself and others by asking what you want and if you do not get it, decide if it will serve your best interests or not to engage in any type of experience that is outside of what you know/ want. Having your best interests at heart is understanding that you cannot pour from an empty cup and that to be able to pour into other you have to refuel, care for yourself and your soul. You have to do what you think is best for you. After years of putting people before me and catering to their needs and happiness before mine, deciding to do things the other way around made me feel weird and guilty at times, but I had to understand that if I do not have my best interests at heart, nobody else will. I have lost a lot of people along the way, fighting to keep my best interests at heart but you know what? I found myself and to me nothing is more important at this stage of my life.

I am sure there are many more lessons but these are the ones that make the foundations of my life shake and shifted my perspective/ outlook / comprehension of what life is vs. what it is supposed to be.
Overall, I'd rate that book  ⭐⭐⭐⭐/ 5 , the last star being knocked out because the story got a little difficult to follow at times. Other than that, I would definitely recommend if you are on a journey to find yourself and find answers to questions you can't seem to shake off.

Peace From Broken Pieces: How To Get Through What You Are Going Through by Iyanla Vanzant is available as a hard cover, paperback, audiobook and pdf. All you have to do is type “Peace From Broken Pieces” on google and you will find it! I hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as you had fun reading this article. And if you ever read it or have read it, please feel free to share your thoughts.

See you next time and until then, “stay in peace, not in pieces”
xo

We hurt, We Learn, We grow

Ten years ago I had a totally different idea/ conception of love. I guess because I was young and resilient or maybe because my heart hadn’t been through the wears and tears of time OR maybe because it hadn’t been dragged through the mud yet. I used to dream of that wild love. The one that leaves you drunk and drives you completely crazy, the one that just hits your brain and your heart in a split second and that you can’t get enough of. I know... It was a very naïve conception of love but I was a pretty young thing and I didn’t know better. But I learned. I learned through the lonely nights, the nights where I couldn’t sleep because I was wondering who he was with; the lonely nights where I would cry myself to sleep, wondering how he could put me through so much shit and go to sleep as if nothing happened. I learned through the lonely nights where the only thing that seemed to mend my heart was praying and writing my pain and heartbreak away because really I didn’t know what else to do. I would try to speak and words would just be stuck to the back of my throat. I would try to breathe and it would feel like I was drowning in my sorrows and my tears. I would try to eat but I couldn’t: it seemed like all the butterfly that were flying in my stomach every time he would smile to me and tell me he loved me had just died. My stomach was a funeral home: dead butterfly all over the place. My heart was broken, my soul was a wreck and my life (along with my hair) was a mess.


I hurt. I ached. But I learned. I learned that after being drunk in love comes the hangover and it is never a pretty sight nor is it a good feeling. I have learned that love is like a drug: getting high feel exhilarating at first but the aftermath is chaos and darkness. I wish somebody had told me about the violence of the crash. I wish somebody had told me : "baby take a parachute just in case. Just in case you go too high. Just in case you fall from up there, we don’t want to see you die". I wish somebody had explain to my why we say "fall in love", I wish someone had told me that the crash could be as unpredictable and violent as a tornado wrecking havoc everything crossing its path. I wish somebody had warned me about the fall, the one that shattered my heart and my soul in the process.


But even then I grew and I learned. I learned that a broken heart lets in the light and that at some point the light replaces the darkness. I learned that for a while you cry yourself to sleep and one morning, you wake up and all of the sudden something has settled in your heart. You can smile and laugh again. You can be yourself and alive; striving and kicking when a few years, months, days ago you were barely living, sitting on the edge of reason, only surviving. You open your eyes one day and despair has given its sits to hope. You think about love and you don’t get angry anymore. You think :" Perhaps one day I’ll be able to love again" instead of disappearing into a puddle of tears and acting like a lunatic. All of the sudden, you are on the other side of the storm. You don’t know how you made it through but you just know you’re on the other side because you can finally look back and not be sad. Or bitter. Or hurt. You’re finally at peace and you won’t let the past nibs its way through your newly found heaven.


Love was never easy to begin with. It is one of those things we gamble with, betting our hearts out of sheer madness, hoping and praying that things will work out. Love is one of those crazy things that we can’t live without. It’s one of those things that can freeze your heart or set your soul on fire.
To each one its own hell and may the odds be ever in our favor as we attempt to turn hell into paradise.

 

- Excerpt from a memoir I will never write #4