Getting Back to "ME" Guest Post by Chasing Joy!!

Absolutely Deciding To Get Back To Being Me

Hey Shinners and Joy Chasers.  A couple weeks ago Ms. Positivity asked me to do a guest post on her themed series of getting back to me.  Of course I was honored to be asked but I also like the idea of her series.  I mean after all the entire reason I started writing the blog Chasing Joy is because I needed to get back t o being me.  I had been through the worst experience of my life (find my story on my about me page on www.chasing-joy.com) and needed to get back to being my normal happy self.

So how did I get back to being me?  How do you get back to being you when you’ve lost yourself to work, school, kids, relationships, disappointment, stress, grief, or whatever?  For starters who are you?  I think we all have to have a few absolutes we know about ourselves.  Once you have decided on these absolutes you they become your guides, your beacons in the darkness, that guide you back to yourself.

Here are some of my absolutes:

I am smart

I am a good person

I am attractive

I have faith

I am a happy person

Things will happen in life that will cause you to question even doubt your absolutes.  But they are absolutes for a reason.  No matter what happens you do not abandon your absolutes.  No matter what anyone says, anyone does, or what happens I refuse to believe anything contrary to the statements above. 

Two years ago my dad died.  I had prayed so hard for healing for him but that was not God’s plan.  I was and still am heartbroken.  Now at that time I could have given up on my faith.  I could have said how can there be a God that would let this happen?  But I didn’t.  Now I was feeling lower than ever in my life and I guess you could say I was angry with God. Regardless of how I was feeling in that moment I decided that I was not going to give up on my faith. 

So that very night I said my prayers.  Now I will admit that my heart was not in it and I kind of just went through the motions.  I think my prayer went something like “God, I don’t know what to say”.  But the point is I was still talking to him and despite all the pain that I was in I still believed.  I had made a decision that part of what it is to be me is to have faith. So no matter what I will have Faith.

The fact of the matter is no matter what happens in life, if you stick to your absolutes, what it means to be you, you will never completely lose yourself.  You will always come back to being you.  You may get of your game sometimes.  Life may get the best of you.  But, even if it takes a while, when you know the absolutes that make you who you are, you will find your way back to being you.

Who are you? What are your absolutes? What are the qualities about yourself that you can fall back to bring you back to being you???

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Getting back to Me....Guest Post by Krystle Talley

                                   Getting Back to Me....His Spoken Words

After I graduated magna cum laude from college, I went from being a full time worker to being a full time mother and army wife. Although this new situation may have felt like an awesome break to some women, I didn’t feel “like me” being stuck at home all day every day while everyone else was out presumably working hard. I’ve always considered myself a hard worker. I have held down a good job ever since I was sixteen years old as president of the cooperative office education program in high school up until I became an employee with the Davidson County Sheriff’s office in Nashville, Tennessee.

So, it’s safe to say that this transition from working hard to not working at all (so I thought) was extremely hard for me and so unlike whom I thought I would be. According to my past desires and plans, I was supposed to be a lawyer by now. As a Christian, I started praying about where my life should be headed. I realized that God was waiting on me tell him what was on my heart. So one day I went to my secret place, and I told him.

Finally, I heard God speak to me.

I felt God whisper his assurance to me that everything I had done up to this point was for a reason. He softly said that I should not keep holding on to the burden of being helpless or making ill decisions. God said, “Working hard isn’t just about being on a 9 to 5, but it is about occupying my time to help those who otherwise wouldn’t receive it from others.” Working hard is not just vindicated by getting a paycheck every two weeks but about getting a blessing from Him to spread to others, especially those closest to me.

I started to understand that I should be taking my position at home more serious. Although I wasn’t getting up and going outside my home to work every day did not mean that I didn’t have a job to do. My husband still needed to be prayed for daily and my son still needed his mother to be there to back him up educationally and emotionally. That takes work. I needed to be occupied with encouraging my husband to be the best working man outside of home and encouraging my son to be the best growing boy he can be. That takes work, primarily if we want our home to be blessed regardless of what kind of income is coming in. I mean, who else is going to really pray for covering over MY family.

Once I started focusing more on doing these things I felt a burden being lifted off of my shoulders. So I prayed to God more and thanked Him for enlightening me. He then spoke to me again, reassuring me that I was headed in the right direction. I could feel him hug me and say, “Keep going. Let them see me.”

So one morning I found myself creating The Christian Chameleon. Honestly, I don’t know how I came up with that name. In essence, creating this website and enhancing this brand was not just because I was bored, sitting at home and needing an outlet. It was more spiritually geared towards being obedient to God and finding a way to reach others who wouldn’t otherwise be reached using other avenues.

This new blog is my work. It’s my way of occupying God’s time to incorporate His word into mainstream media and other social issues we deal with in today’s world. Working on The Christian Chameleon was my way of getting closer to God, thus getting back to ME. I encourage anybody out there to really take time, get in their secret place, and speak to God. Tell him what’s on your heart. I promise that your words to Him will not return to you void. He listens and he hears everything we speak to him. Just wait on it. Your confirmation is coming. It may not be in the form of a blog or working a 9 to 5, but I assure you it’s coming. Don’t give up and think that you’re failing or your time is wasting, because God always has our footsteps ordered before we even know where they’re going.


Be inspired, but STAY inspired.

Greatness!!! I said GREATNESS!

Hey there Shiners....

This is one of those times where the mood is hitting me so I am going to let it flow. 

What do you think of when you hear the word greatness?? 

I am wondering if any of you added yourself into any of the list of things that came to mind. 

To many times we think less of ourselves because we may not be exactly where we want to be in life but to be honest we are exactly where we belong.  We want to move forward and that is GREAT! We want to reach higher and that is GREAT! We want to be the best and that is GREAT! Why because we are great!

You may not see it but you were born for a reason.  We all have our own little part to play in this huge movie we call life.  Each charater has his/her own role and it is important.  Can you imagine being the leading man/lady and not having eachother??  It would be a total mess.  Who would make sure that you remembered your lines, the movie would not flow properly. 

We are all born from greatness....I will say it again....WE WERE BORN FROM GREATNESS!  We are special in everyway.  I see so many young adults like myself at one point that thought less of themselves but that will stop here because we are Great! We are doing big things, turning small thoughts into big dreams, changing for the better, loving more, opening up more and even shedding a single tear because at one point we were so guarded.  This is GREATNESS!  To be able to let go and let the lord above do his works within us.  To reach and do things that we never thought that we would ever be doing. We can not stop here because it is not meant to be.  We are to reach beyond the stars and snag one for ourselves and keep our greatness shining as bright as we can.

So My Shiners...I ask you again what do you think of when you hear the word greatness??

I Pray with everything I have you are now on that list of things because you are just that...Great!

Never let no one or nothing try to tell you or show you that you are anything less than GREATNESS!
Its been in all of us since day one!

I love you all

Ms. Positivity!!!!

Getting back to Me....Guest Post by Dina

                              

                                                   

                                                             Finding Dina

Ten years ago I was in my 20s, I was a full time student and I had a part time job.  I met and started dating my husband; we fell in love and decided to get married that year. Everything was working out perfectly, almost like a modern fairytale.  The most stressful thing about my life at that time was the wedding planning because I wanted it to be perfect.  And it was that desire for perfection that led me to making the worst decision of my life: taking a break from school.

I planned on taking one semester off to have a stress free wedding, a glorious honeymoon and blissful first few months of marriage.  I saw no harm in taking a little break because I only had one more year left to get my bachelors.  I was young and I thought I knew it all, had it all under control.  But one thing you never know is what may be waiting for you around the corner.

That semester off?  You guessed it.  It stretched into years.

The company my husband worked for laid him off and then went bankrupt a few months later.  Many companies followed suit and jobs were hard to come by.  This was 2001, the year of 9/11 when tragedy struck our country and the first whispers of recession were becoming audible.

I found work as a secretary in a hospital, a great job with great benefits.  And we needed those benefits as a young married couple that hoped to start a family someday.  I worked full time and was happy there.  I quietly gave up on my dream of becoming a teacher because I thought it would be too hard to work full time and go to school.

Then one day one of the new doctors was chatting with us while he was waiting for his patient to return from a test in another department.  This doctor looked so young that we liked to call him Doogie Houser.  On this particular day he was telling us about his wife who was pregnant with their second child and by the end of our chat I knew that his wife was to become my inspiration.  This day and this conversation literally changed my life.  Why?  Because this pregnant woman who was already mom to a toddler was also keeping herself occupied by being the Chief Resident at one of the leading hospitals in the state.

And I thought my life was busy?  I thought it would be too hard for me to go back to school?  I was willing to give up on myself so easily?  No.  I needed to get back to ME.

The next day I filled out the application to go back to school and I enrolled in classes for the new semester.  It took me a little bit longer to finish as a part time student, but a couple of years later I graduated, with honors.

Finally.  I was ME again.

You can find more of Dina @30ish_Mama and also  http://30ishmama.blogspot.com where she writes about motherhood, toddlerhood and her random thoughts.  She is married to her own personal Clark Kent/Superman and is mom to one sparkly little princess.