Another Stress Reliever

There are many ways to relieve ourselves of stress. I have covered one about forgive and forget in a previous article. Another way to cut back on stress is to stop taking things people say and do personally. Have you ever heard anyone make the comment while driving that it is other people’s driving they worry about not their own because they know what they are going to do? That is true to life also. Each person is responsible for their own thoughts, responses and actions. That is enough to keep us busy. We cannot make others have our opinions, thoughts, responses and actions; they are the ones responsible for those.

We all have our own feelings, opinions, personality, etc. We all are “fearfully and wonderfully made” according to Psalm 139:14. God made each one of us unique so we are going to be different in thoughts and actions. Each one of us has the responsibility to choose the right and Godly actions, thoughts, motives, etc.

God has given us the freedom of choice so therefore we have our own thoughts, opinions, responses, and actions; whether they are right or wrong it is our own personal decision to make.

“Don’t you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, 

or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living.” 

–Romans 6:16

Did you catch this in the verse above, “whatever you choose to obey”? Another instance is in John 14:15.

"If you love Me, keep My commandments”

There again “if” giving the meaning that you have a choice to love God or not to love God. Because God gave us “free will” we have the responsibility to make the right choices; have the right responses, opinions and thoughts. It is our choices to make. We cannot make these decisions and choices for others only ourselves.

Therefore if someone is rude, mean, doesn’t agree with you, or in any way hurts or offends you it is only their opinion and response. It is not personally aimed at you usually.

Consider our lives as a book we are writing day by day. Each one of us lives our own lives and writes our own book of our lives. We are the star or main character. As a book is centered around the main character so is our book totally focused on us. We are writing our own book with our life so we do not have to let others influence our lives with negative, mean, rude, offensive actions or words. That is what they are writing in their book. We want to fill our book (our life) with positive, love, faith, hope, encouragement, etc.

So we need to remember that we cannot take things that everyone does personally. It is a burden on us if we allow this to bring us down. We have to overlook it – which is not going to be easy at first; but it will gradually become a way of life to accept what they did as their actions and their responsibilities and not take it personally. Just make sure that you respond to these rude, mean and hurtful things are the way a Christian should – in love. Sometimes it may even require NOT saying or doing anything in response. This will be very hard but some of these bad and negative actions do not even deserve a response at all. It is better to just avoid any response and ignore them totally.

Yes, these negative, rude, and mean thoughts, actions, words, etc are deadly darts aimed at us if we allow them to penetrate our heart and minds because they will eat us up inside if we dwell on them and give them life inside of us. So it is our responsibility not to take any of this personally but to let it run off our lives as water runs off a duck’s back. We have to let it go and LOVE and give ourselves another way to relieve stress.