Author: Valerie Cullers

Fear, Shame and Remorse – Breaking the Bonds

Valerie Cullers 23 Comments

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Have you ever been held captive by one of the big three…Fear, Shame or Remorse? I spent years in captivity by these three. People can look at us and never see the invisible chains that are holding us back, refusing to allow us to go free. 

I think for me, the worst of the three was Fear. I left my ex-husband and took my six-week-old baby with me. He wanted us back and threatened me. I lived for years with the fear that at any time, he would come and take me or my son. Finally, several years later, when he remarried, the fear began to subside, but it still wasn’t gone.

If carrying around the chains of Fear wasn’t bad enough, I was also shackled by Shame. I was raised in a small conservative town and after college moved in with my boyfriend…soon to be husband. It was during a time when that just wasn’t done, and gossip flooded the town, and I was at the center of the deluge. At the time, it didn’t really bother me, but several years later, when I came back with my baby in tow, I felt the scourge of Shame.

Add Remorse to the equation, and you have a girl who was in bondage. I was really sorry for what I had done, but I could not change it. There was no magic time machine that would take me back and undo my bad decisions.

So there I was, full of Fear, Guilt and Shame, and there was nothing I could do about it. I did not have the power to break the bonds that were shackling me…and then I met the Bondage Breaker – The One Person, the God-Man-Jesus, who sacrificed his life for someone like me; someone broken and held in bondage by her own bad decisions. What a day that was for me. He walked into my invisible prison, unlocked the door and broke the chains that were holding me.

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It was a great feeling…He had set me free. But was that all that needed to be done? Was there something I was supposed to do? Yes, yes, there was. I had to make the decision to get up and leave the chains behind and walk out of the prison. 

Was it easy? No. Every day I had to choose to believe that I was free and I had to rely on the truths in his word. Truths like…”For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”( 2 Timothy 1:7) when I would start to feel afraid. When Shame started to hem me in, I knew that I needed to focus on “For you will forget the shame of your youth” (Isaiah 54:4).  When Remorse started to overwhelm me, I needed to focus on Romans 8: 28: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” I had to believe that I was forgiven and nothing could change God’s love and mercy towards me.

Set free…Yes, by the Bondage Breaker…once and for all. Learning to walk free…that was another matter…step by step, day by day, until I could truly say, “I am free!”  

“The Golden Handcuffs” – Breaking Free

Valerie Cullers 14 Comments

 I was talking to my son a while back and he was telling me about a man at his place of employment. The man hated his job but continued to work there. When I asked my son, “Why?” he said, “The Golden Handcuffs.” I asked him what that meant. He said, “It’s the money, Mom. He can’t leave his job because of the money.”  So that is what it is called in the corporate world. I imagine the higher up you get on the economic ladder, the harder it is to leave the money, even if you are miserable. There are a lot of legitimate reasons people wouldn’t be able to leave high-paying jobs, i.e. mortgages, college tuition for the kids, medical problems, or personal debt, just to name a few. All things being equal though, if a person could leave a job without doing irreparable harm to the family, would you do it? Would I do it? Or would we slog through life with a job we hate to have more money? Could we really break free from  “The Golden Handcuffs?”

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It’s a tough question, one I imagine those working in the nosebleed section of the corporate world have had to ask themselves many times. Most of us don’t have to make such dramatic choices. For us, we make other choices, and though not the same, are similar in their origin, but opposite in their outcome. We end up shackled by “The Iron Handcuffs of Debt.”

Should we stay where we are, in a nice neighborhood, or move to a bigger house in a better neighborhood and assume a larger mortgage?

Should I keep my dependable car that is paid for, or buy one that makes a better impression on my friends and take out a huge loan?

Should I go to a good college close to home or to the more prestigious college and end up with a mountain of debt?handcuffs-2070580_640

None of us wants to be enslaved by “The Golden Handcuffs” or by “The  Iron Handcuffs of Debt.” The decisions are out there; we just have to make them, and hopefully, we will make the ones that will not hold us captive.  

“Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” 1 Timothy 6: 6-7

Good-bye “Winnie the Pooh” – Social Engineering at its Most Ludicrous

Valerie Cullers 13 Comments

I just read yesterday that the book “Winnie the Pooh” is again on the chopping block. “Winnie” has always had a tough time ever since it was published in 1926. It has been banned in different countries for a multitude of reasons: talking animals, Winnie doesn’t wear underwear, and Piglet, to name a few. Winnie even has the distinction of being #22 in America on the Banned Book List.  

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So, we’ve established that “Winnie” has been labeled an offensive book. But now we are finding out that “Winnie” has offended even more people. A country to the east of us is now considering banning “Winnie” from their school libraries for a different reason: gender specific pronouns are named in the book. Yes, dangerous gender pronouns are in the book, pronouns like he and she. These pronouns are now deemed offensive.

I am always incredulous when I read reports like this. I mean, really, who is in charge of making these ridiculous decisions? It seems like another case of social engineering at its most ludicrous. Trying to deny that there is a difference between boys and girls flies in the face of scientific fact.

Scientific studies have revealed that there is actually a biological difference between males and females. In utero, male brains experience a testosterone wash that female brains do not. This fact may explain the difference in behaviors between boys and girls as they grow and develop. So from early on, science has found that there are, in fact, differences between boys and girls. 

For the geniuses who hope that by banning the book “Winnie the Pooh,” people will not know or observe that there are differences between boys and girls, go for it.  But know that banning this book in your schools will not change the facts about how we are biologically made.

“You’re Taking Yourself with You.”

Valerie Cullers 16 Comments

I have a good friend who is a Christian Counselor. We were talking about how many times we think that changing our circumstances, i.e.,  job, spouse or location, will make us happier. She said, “We always have to remember: You’re taking yourself with you.”

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I’ve thought about those words a lot. If I am unhappy in a certain situation in my life, my natural tendency is to think, “If only  _______ was different.” I only need to fill in the blank. Would that blank be: my job, my kids, my spouse, my house, my car? That certainly depends on what problem I am facing. If only…

My friend made me realize that the first person I need to question anytime I am unhappy with a situation is myself. What is my response to what I am going through? Am I contributing to the problem? Is there something in me that is causing the problem? Am I just plain discontented with my circumstances and refusing to be thankful and content where I am?

Those are hard questions, but real ones that we all have to think about when we are evaluating our circumstances and our discontentment or unhappiness. Who is the main contributor to our problems? Not always, but many times it is really ourselves. We are the ones holding onto a bad attitude or an intractable position.  Changing our circumstances is not really going to make us any happier…after all, we will just be taking ourselves with us!

Mystery Blogger Award

Valerie Cullers 5 Comments

A big THANK YOU to Joni for nominating me for the Mystery Blogger Award.  Joni writes Grief to Life, an inspirational blog by a single mom who is raising kids after her husband passed away. Please check her blog out…one read, and you will be hooked like I was.

Mystery Blogger Award

The Mystery Blogger Award was created by Okoto Enigma’s Blog…in her words…”The Mystery Blogger Award is an award for amazing bloggers and their ingenious posts. Their blog not only captivates, it also inspires and motivates. They are one of the best out there, and they deserve every recognition they get. This award is also for bloggers who find fun and inspiration in blogging, and they do it with so much love and passion.”

Rules:

1. Put the award logo/image on your blog.

2. List the rules.

3. Thank whoever nominated you and provide a link to their blog.

4. Mention the creator of the award and provide a link as well.

5. Tell your readers 3 things about yourself.

6. You have to nominate 10 – 20 people.

7.  Notify your nominees by commenting on their blog.

8. Ask your nominees any 5 questions of your choice, with one weird or funny question (specify).

9. Share a link to your best post(s).

So here goes:

Three things about me: 1. I love ancient history. 2. I have a vivid imagination. 3. I live on two continents (in my mind) because my family lives on two continents.

Answers to Joni’s questions:

1. Why did you start blogging? 

I was NEVER  going to blog, and one day I felt like I was supposed to start, so I did.

2. If you had to change your name, what name would you choose and why?

I would choose Valeria as my first name and my mother’s maiden name as my last name.

3. You are about to get into a fight. What song comes on your soundtrack? 

“Stop, in the Name of Love.”

4. If you could write one new law that everyone had to obey, what would it be and why? 

My law would read: BE KIND.

5. What’s the meanest thing you have done to someone to get back at them?

I stood on the kitchen counter and waited for my older brother to come home from school, and punched him in the face ( I was pretty small at the time). He was not hurt, but he didn’t make fun of me anymore!

Link to one of my best posts or (favorite) post: The Ultimate Flea Market Flipper.

MY NOMINEES:

R.W. Morgan – Grand Narrative

Lydia Reyes – Planted by the Rivers of Water

Dawn Running Strong

Through Ink and Image

Confessions of a Type A Woman

Quo Vadis – Jack’s Blog

Jane Duquette

The Fashioned Woman

Ruins and Rosemary

Historical Ragbag

A big thank you for the inspiration you have provided to me in the past year!

Five questions for my nominees:

1. If you could live in any other time period, when would it be and where would you live?

2. Which historical character would you have liked to have been and why?

3. What is your favorite book?

4. What is your favorite quote?

5. What is the quirkiest thing you have done?

Thank you again to Joni – Grief to Life for the nomination. I encourage all of you to check out all of these blog! 

Guilt – Discerning the Real from the False

Valerie Cullers 6 Comments

Guilt – just say the word and we think about the times we have felt it. It is an easy emotion to feel for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes we have done something wrong, but other times we have had unrealistic expectations of ourselves, and when we don’t meet them, we feel guilt. Others can have unrealistic expectations of us and try to make us feel guilty for not measuring up to them. There are two kinds of guilt – real and false, and we need to learn how to discern between the two.  

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Have you ever done something wrong and you felt bad almost immediately? That emotion is called guilt, and it is built into us. We all have a conscience, and when we do something wrong, our conscience lets us know, and we feel guilt, real true guilt. We have crossed a line we shouldn’t have crossed, we have lied, stolen, or hurt someone. That conscience has been built into us by God, and it is there to help keep us on track.

What do we do with that guilt? We feel awful about what we have done and now, how do we make it right? The Lord has given us a way to feel okay inside again in His word. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9  God, himself, knew we would transgress his eternal commandments and hurt others, and he provided a way for us to be cleansed from our wrongdoings. We “confess” our sins to him. We talk to him and agree with him that we have done wrong. Many times, he then requires that we go and make it right with the other person.

At that point, we have come full circle. We have done wrong, confessed it and made it right. The guilt we felt was a positive thing because it caused us to acknowledge our wrongdoing before God and many times to the person we have offended.

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Photo by mohamed Abdelgaffar on Pexels.com

But what about false guilt? Does such a thing exist? I think it does and I have experienced it many times. We do something right, something we were supposed to do, and we are struck by a wave of guilt. Does this guilt come from our conscience, or does it spring from our own insecurity or some other insidious force? It can come from many places. I know because I have experienced it a lot. I think we all have.

Just the other day, my husband asked me to type up a speech he was going to give at a graduation ceremony. He left, and I wanted to surprise him while he was gone, so I went ahead and typed it up. He was not there to answer any questions I had, so I just typed it up the way I thought it read. I gave it to him and thought he would find it perfect, or at least almost perfect. Instead, he started reading and correcting it. There were several corrections in it, and I could hear him writing on the printed copy. I began to feel bad. How had I missed so many things? How could I have made so many mistakes? Did I really do a bad job? For about five minutes, I felt really bad; I felt false guilt.

He handed the papers back to me to correct. I looked at them and there were not nearly as many corrections on them as I thought there would be. Some of the things he had written were additions, but my mind had imagined they were corrections, and I had done badly. Where did those feelings spring from? My own insecurity, perhaps? I don’t know, but I know that for a while I felt really bad. I felt that false guilt that can attack us for no reason and pummel us with negative feelings.

False guilt can also be put on us by others. Perhaps our friends or family members have expectations of us that are unrealistic, and they want us to meet them. When we don’t, they can say things that make us feel guilty. But have we done anything wrong? No. We have just not lived up to someone’s idea of what we should be doing. “Should” is a word that is often associated with false guilt. We say to ourselves, “I should have done something different. If I had, others would be happy with me.”

We have to be on the lookout for false guilt because it can attack us at the strangest times. We can do something good or something right, and we can begin to feel guilty for no reason whatsoever. We can question our motives and let that questioning take us down the wrong path. We have to be really discerning about the emotions we feel, because many times what our emotions are telling us is not true.

How do we do this? Well, we can speak truth to ourselves and try to listen and hear that truth.  If that doesn’t work, we can call a friend. I have one friend I can call, and she will listen to whatever I am feeling and help me sort out my feelings. She will tell me if what I am feeling is false guilt and that I need to let it go. If you can’t hear the truth from yourself or a friend, go to God. Ask Him to help you discern what you are feeling and let go of the false guilt. He is always there to help you!

Guilt, it’s a big one…we all feel it and we all have to learn to deal with it. How do you discern between the real and false guilt in your life?     

 

Faux Feelings

Valerie Cullers 14 Comments

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Faux…the French word for false. We have been using it in the English vocabulary since the 1600s. Since the 1980s, it has been used in the general vocabulary to denote something that is a false version of the original. It does sound so much better than “fake” when we are talking about marble, leather or fingernails. It verbally puts a shine on whatever we are referring to. Unless, of course, you are talking about fur. Faux fur is in…we don’t want to see people walking around wearing the real thing (unless it’s raccoon, then we can laugh our heads off). So faux fur is a positive thing…nothing wrong with a fake in this category!

So the word faux can refer to something positive or negative, depending on what it is modifying. Have you ever thought of faux in regard to your feelings? Or, more to the point, have you ever thought about the word faux when you expressed an opinion on something you didn’t really care about? It has happened to me a few times, and this is how it happened.

I would be sitting with a group of ladies having lunch or dinner, and a subject would come up in the conversation. Maybe I would not have any opinion one way or the other, but because I wasn’t expressing myself, I felt like I wasn’t contributing to the conversation. So I would say something, something false, something faux, that I wasn’t really feeling, just to be part of the conversation.

After I left the group, I would begin to feel uneasy about the way I spoke on that subject. I knew I didn’t really care about that issue, and I expressed a false opinion. It happened to me a few times, and I decided to change the way I handled the situation. Now, if I am in a group and a subject comes up that I really don’t care about, I just sit and listen. If I am asked about an opinion, I can tell the truth, whatever that is. Even if it means saying, “Oh that? It doesn’t really bother me at all!” I know, it does bring the drama quotient down a few notches, but I feel much better about just being honest.

It’s not always easy, though. A lot of the things that may bother others may not necessarily bother me. When I sit there quietly, I don’t feel part of the group, and I feel different, especially if the subject is discussed for any length of time by all the girls, and if the emotions get higher and higher the longer the conversation goes on.  I am getting used to being a bit uncomfortable for the sake of not expressing a faux opinion about something. I’ve decided it’s okay to be different and to think differently.

How about you? Do you struggle when you are in a group? Have you ever expressed a faux opinion just to be a part of the group and take part in the conversation? How did you learn to deal with it? 

Connections

Valerie Cullers 26 Comments

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There are a lot of things I don’t understand. There are also a lot of things that I know exist, but I cannot see them, and I don’t understand how they work. Take the connections between people, for example; I know they exist, but I don’t know exactly what they look like in the unseen realm. 

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When two people marry, they become connected. The Scripture says, “and the two shall become one flesh.” Mark 10:4 We know that marriage produces a physical union, but there is also a union of the spirit, soul and mind. Within a few years of being married to my husband, I could be sitting in a room thinking of something, and he would bring up that same thought or subject within a few minutes. Now, after several decades together, it happens all the time, and I know we have a real connection. This connection I understand because we are so close.

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What about the connection we have with our children? They are our own flesh and blood, and there is a bond that is undefined, but it is almost as strong as the bond between husband and wife. It is not the same kind of connection, though. Even when my sons were living at home, I could be thinking about something, and rarely would they bring up the same subject. And even if they did bring up the subject, we didn’t necessarily agree on the topic.

What astounded me about the connection, though, was when I saw it in action. Years ago, our youngest son was stationed in Kuwait somewhere along the Iraqi border. He was in a time zone that was eleven hours ahead of us, and he rarely got to call home. There was a SAT phone in the compound, and every few weeks, at a different time, he would call us. Day or night, we would speak to him for about twenty minutes. Without fail, within about fifteen minutes of that call, our oldest son would call. He was living in another city, and of course, was concerned about his brother. We would tell him the news, but I was always surprised that his call would come so soon after his younger brother’s.  Why was he prompted to call us? It must have been the unseen connection he had with his brother and with us.

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Photo by MabelAmber. Courtesy of Pixabay.

What about the connections we have with our close friends? How does that work? The Scripture gives us an example of this when talking about Jonathan and David. In 1 Samuel 18:1, it says that, “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”  I have had a few friends in my life with whom I have had that kind of connection. For whatever reason, we have connected, and as time passed, our souls became more and more knit together. Many times, I will be thinking about my friend, and she will call me or vice versa. What does that look like in the unseen realm? I don’t know. If I did, I would draw or paint a picture of it.

Connections…I don’t really understand them. But just because I can’t see them doesn’t mean I don’t believe they are real and that they exist. What about you? How would you explain the connections you have with others?

All Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used with permission.

First there were The Thought Police, then the Political Correctness Police and now The Cultural Police….What’s Next?

Valerie Cullers 13 Comments

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Many of us went to colleges and universities and took classes from certain professors who insisted we think the way they do. They had a prescribed philosophy and gave us books that agreed with their train of thought. If you didn’t agree with the professor when you turned in your papers, you were downgraded to a low C, D or F.  These professors were part of “The Thought Police,” and they were sanctioned by the university to penalize you if you didn’t fall into line with them. 

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We got out of school, and we thought, “Great, I don’t have to be subjected to that kind of thought control anymore.” But no, that didn’t happen. We got out in society and we found out there was a different kind of police, “The Political Correctness Police,” and they were very real. If you got close to anyone on either end of the political spectrum, be it on the right or left, you could be arrested by one of “The Political Correctness Police” because you didn’t actually believe exactly the way they did. What a shock it was to find out there were people outside of academia who were trying to control what we thought politically.

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Now, there is a new kind of policemen in our midst. They are known as “The Cultural Police.” Step out of line, and you will be shamed for improper cultural appropriation. The fact that this is all subjective, depending on the policeman who arrests you, is immaterial. You break the law, boom! You are arrested and shamed on Facebook, Twitter or other social media.

So what kind of policeman is next on the horizon? Who knows, and what can we do about it? How can we stay ahead of whatever will be the next kind of thought control that will be thrown our way?

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If we want to stay ahead of the next kind of policeman, we must begin to think critically. Ask questions, do research, and don’t fall into a hive mentality where we go along with the crowd just because it is the easiest thing to do. It will take guts to think outside the box and take a chance on not agreeing with whoever is trying to force us to think the way they do. Remember, as my father used to say, “God gave you a good brain, use it!”