Posted on by thornstocrowns · 6 Comments

While you wait: What is your posture?

Hello Crowned Royals! After a really busy work week, it sure feels good to relax and finally get my hands on my laptop and write to you. Talking to you through this blog gives me so much more reason to live.This week I want us to talk about waiting. We are waiting for something right? When we wait on some things in our lives to happen our posture matters because that determines our readiness for what we are waiting for. I would like to give you a simple understanding of waiting through my “shopping when hungry experiences” that often times leave me regretting what I did because I was shopping while I was hungry. If you ever shopped for groceries while hungry you totally understand what I mean by regret. When I shop while hungry, I often times do not consider what I need and don’t need when I am in the store. Every thing looks good to eat, so I buy things I don’t need, spend the money I shouldn’t have been spending and waste the food I didn’t need because it was not what I needed in the first place. What does this have to do with waiting in real life? The wait for some of us is like hunger and because we are hungry we hasten ourselves to quench the hunger without considering the reason of the wait. Our posture is then impulsive and impatience and we begin to take matters into our own hands. Things that don’t look good begin to look good, things that we don’t need are things we begin to crave for, and so we compromise our posture while we wait. Only to later regret our impulsive and impatient posture to the wait. Don’t feel bad, we have all been there, but we are going to change our posture. We will have the right posture while we wait.

Can we be honest for a second? waiting is not that easy. For those who continue to wait and those that waited before, most can admit that waiting for something significant in life can be hard. If you were to tell your story, after the wait, you can agree with me that your outcome was based off your posture. How was your posture while you waited for somethings to change? Was it good or was it bad? Here I go with my ever available examples, my job search season was good, but not always great, I would be frustrated at times, desperate and would have a negative attitude all together. I tell you right now that this is not the type of posture you should be in the whole time you wait. Truth is that the frustration and all that impatience will come, but it is important to get back to the posture of gratitude and patience while you wait. I guess what I am trying to say is that while there are several ways to wait, a good posture would be to show gratitude and practice patience. It worked for me, and I am pretty sure it will work for you too. Other good postures you can practice while you wait is prayer, fasting, trust God’s plan, encouraging yourself or receiving encouragement from others, and have an positive attitude all together. I would love to write on all of them because they all are essential while you wait, but my heart is fixated on talking about gratitude and patience while you wait.

Posture of Gratitude

I know that you are probably thinking that there is nothing to be grateful about right about now. You are in the middle of what seems to be a long wait and because you are so focused on this new thing you wait for, you are forgetting to be grateful for what you have now. There has to be at least 5 things or more that you are grateful for and should acknowledge everyday, especially while you are waiting. This doesn’t mean that when you wait is over, you stop being grateful. The posture of gratitude at least from my many experiences while waiting is that it helps focus the mind on the grand picture and not just pieces of it. All the pieces will come together, but you are to express gratitude to God for the pieces you already have in the now. Life can be challenging even for the strongest people you know, but what can keep a person going is showing gratitude. While we have experience some not so great things in our lives, we have also experiences some really amazing things too. We have been blessed in life and surely there has to be something we are grateful for somewhere. Let God know how thankful you are for what you have and what you are yet to have when the wait is over. Now that is a good posture that will please God!

Posture of Patience

By one definition patience is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble or suffering without getting angry or upset. How many of us from the definition can admit we lack patience while we wait? Have we been able to realize that there are things we have not accepted? Acceptance makes the wait much more bearable. When you understand that you are waiting and accept it, you are less likely to experience constant frustrations while you wait. Practicing patience is something some of us have to work on constantly. Just last week, I remember being in line at a grocery store and telling myself to accept the fact that the line was long, but it would eventually be my turn. Even in your wait, it will eventually be your turn, so you have to be patient. Patience is a good posture that can also help you make sound and stable choices while you wait. A bad posture that comes from the lack of patience in your life is hastiness. Hasty decisions have been the downfall of many men and women that were starting to lose their patience and decided to take matters into their own hands. You shouldn’t be that man or woman that loses their patience and misses what you were waiting for all the while. If patience has taught me one thing, it has taught me that eventually it will also be my turn. Ecclesiastes 7:8 summaries all this by saying;

Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.

Ecclesiastes 7 v 8

There is no way you could go wrong with combining gratitude and patience while you wait. It is the perfect combination that kept me going and still never fails me. The wait is so much easier when you are grateful for the present and patient for what is yet to come. Think of gratitude as your humbling tool that protects you from having a proud spirit. The end is never better for the proud spirit that doesn’t show gratitude and exercise patience. Please read Ecclesiastes 7 v 8 again for re-emphasis on all this that has been said about gratitude and patience.

My last words for the night, couple gratitude and patience with all the other good postures I mentioned earlier, and you eventually get your turn. Stop shopping while hungry, you remember what that does right? Be in constant prayer, show gratitude, practice patience, choose hope over defeat and work on self each any every day while you wait for your turn. It is time to take our rightful place. It is time to trade thorns for crowns!

Much Love,

Xholiwe

Posted on by thornstocrowns · 2 Comments

Problem Solving: Do you have the right tools?

what happens when we are uncomfortable and the discomfort is coming from an unresolved problem? we immediately want to fix it. But are we using the right tools? -Xholiwe

Hello crowned Royals! I hope you all are doing great! I am beyond great because my favorite season is upon us. It is fall season and I couldn’t be more excited about this change. I could talk about fall all day long, but I would we have more pressing matters I would like to share with you in this blog. I was recently thinking about problem solving in a much different way than I usually do. While thinking about problem solving, what came to my mind was the memory of me as a little girl and how I always wanted to fix broken things in our little apartment. I did that with the sense that I did not want my mother to incur another expense over a broken door handle, clogged bath tub or leaking tap. So I usually would take matters into my own hands and use the wrong tools. The tools I used were either ineffective to solve the problem or too complicated to solve a simple problem. Because of using the wrong tools, I did not solve the problem, but rather made it worse in most cases. Fortunately, that did not make me give up my desire to help take the burden off my mom incurring repair expenses. So I started to get curious of how I could fix stuff around the house and what tool would be effective and not complicated. So I would closely observe what tools the professional repairer would use. I started to pay close attention to what the professionals did to solve the problem and I slowly became better. Eventually, I was changing door knobs, unclogging bathtubs and fixing leaking taps. I did that for some time and mastered ways to solve small house repairs that now that I live on my own, I can get the job done! I gave you this entire example, just so that we can connect my example to how most of us solve our life problems. Can we talk about how many of use continue to use the wrong tools to solve our life problems?

This blog is for all the problem solvers, which I think is all of us. We are constantly trying to fix stuff because we are wired for comfort. So what happens when we are uncomfortable and the discomfort is coming from an unresolved problem is that we immediately want to fix it. We want to fix it as soon as possible so we can be comfortable again, but unfortunately certain problems do not get resolved as quickly as we imagined. We then get frustrated from the problem, which often times worsens the problem. We often worsen our problems because of our lack of understanding on how best to address it and what would effectively solve the problem. If we were honest with ourselves, we would be able to admit that most of us are not the best problem solvers. We have been doing it wrong or have not been effective and now we deal with the same problem over and over again. So how do we change that?

Change starts to happen when we acknowledge that there is a problem. While most of us can’t compare our life problems to me fixing door knobs at 8 years old and getting good at it, we solve of our life problems in a similar way. We mess up at first, worsen the problem, learn and lastly we practice then get good. The question is do we eventually get good at it? Funny thing about problems is that you just can not pretend like there are not there and hope they disappear. It takes a little more than just wishing on stars. Solving problems comes from experience and since experience is the best teacher it may be time for you to jot things down. Ask yourself what did you do last time that did not solve the problem, but made it worse. This is not rocket science, from what you learned from your experience, do you do things differently? Do you now know how to manage your finances? Do you know how to handle your emotions? Do you now know how to speak your mind in a non-toxic manner? There are many more questions I could ask, but based off these questions, there has to be something done differently for someones response to be positive and change.

It all starts in the mind, the mind is a very powerful tool that God gave us, but if it is used ineffectively to solve problems it benefit us nothing. There is a reason why God asks of us to renew our minds (Romans 12:2). Why should we renew our minds? Because some of our minds may have learned the wrong ways to solve problems effectively. In some cases it is was not even our fault, but it is what we saw the family do and so our minds only know of that way of solving problems. While all of us have minds, not all of us have the mindset to solve problems effectively. It is unfortunate to see the right tool being wrongly used. Just imagine what the world would look like if we had more people solving their problems with a right mindset.

Another tool we use wrongly and ineffectively is people. We can learn a thing or two from people. I learned how to fix things around the house from observation. There are people in your life you should be observing that will help you solve problems the right way. You can also observe people that dance around their problems so that you make the choice not to do so because you see the consequence of not solving problems effectively. Many of us fail to realize who we should be learning from on how to solve problems effectively because again the mindset might have to unlearn some things so it can learn new things through other people. Who are you learning from? Are they the right tool?

As we get our mindset right and learn a thing or two through other about solving problems, we have to get Jesus on this journey! We can’t effectively solve our problems without getting God involved. Why do I say this? Well, a couple of times in my own life I tried to solve the problem without God’s help and let us just say I paid for it in tears. God has a way of solving problems that no other person can. It is solid, effective and all the way right when you God is part of your problem solving. He is a God that is bigger than our problems! There is nothing he can not do!

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

Psalm 121 v 1-2 (KJV)

Where does your help come from? is it from the temporary tools the world has to offer? You can go on as many spa dates and still not deal with half the problems that has been a thorn in your life. Who are you looking to? If it is not to God, you might be dealing with that problem for what will seem like forever. Let me just tell you that problem solving with God involved, the right mindset and learning from the right people will change your life! Guaranteed that problems will come, but you will be working with the right tools! You might have some work to do if you have been using the wrong and ineffective tools to solve your problems. But it is never to late to work on that mindset, learn from the right people and most importantly to get God involved. It is time to take your rightful place! It is time to trade thorns for crowns!

Much love!

Xholiwe