Information on popular complementary and alternative medical topics

Although marriages are made between people who have significant differences in personality, and I believe this to be part of God’s overall design, it is essential that there be common ground and common interests.A love relationship can be seen as a plant with a life of its own; the good soil it needs is the soil of common goals and ideas. A marriage cannot survive easily between people with greatly differing cultural values and concepts. We need a fair amount of things in common, although, as I said before, we tend to be attracted to people who have qualities we ourselves lack in our personalities.One of the effects of stage three breakdown is that a person is no longer capable of holding strong views on any subject, views which would require that person to use psychic energy to negate an opposing view. A person in third stage breakdown is more easily talked out of holding political views contrary to his own; thus, brainwashing techniques usually require the breaking down of the person emotionally until he is experiencing stage three symptoms.Likewise, religious and racial intolerance is likely to be unable to be sustained by a person in stage three stress breakdown. Some people have even regarded their coming through a stress breakdown and experiencing their own inability to hold strongly negative views as a purifying experience which has ultimately done them some good.Some of the concepts by which some people are united in marriage might come into the category of binding concepts, imposing a negating obligation on each person. Marriages contracted under rules and customs of different religious groups, where roles and responsibilities differ from those otherwise held in society, might therefore come under threat from a change in the person’s ability to accept some binding contract requiring that person to negate normally held views.For example, if a strict Roman Catholic couple felt their marriage was valid only if no contraceptive technique were used, then stress breakdown symptoms in the wife might cause her to reject this view; because the validity of the marriage rested on that view, she might reject the marriage as well.Some fundamentalist Protestant sects do not encourage women in further education. If an intelligent woman in such a marriage, experiencing stress breakdown symptoms, began to doubt the wisdom of such a belief, she might let the marriage go as well, if the husband strenuously insisted that she could not educate herself while she stayed married to him.Or a couple might have been married with the resultant union having the effect of uniting the collective hatreds of two families of bigots. A stress breakdown affecting the husband’s 0r wife’s ability to hold such bigoted views might put him or her at odds with the entire clan, forcing an end to the marriage. Such happenings are not unheard of.
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Let us walk through a typical daily battle. You have just come home for the day, you are physically tired, and three old lies pop into your head:Lie #1: You have made it through a tough day at work; therefore,you deserve to eat food. Lie #2: When you are physically tired, the food will make youfeel better.Lie #3: You have so much to lose, what does it matter? You may as well eat when you are not hungry. There you have it. The battleground and the test are set up for you, specifically for you. You are standing in front of the refrigerator and you feel this overwhelming, magnetic pull toward the food. Here is what you should do.1. Identify the lies and quote the truth. The first strategic move is to get out of the kitchen and immediately identify the lies of Satan. Note the time you begin this battle. Quote the truth against the lie. The truth is that eating is not something we deserve to do; it is something we are to do when and because we are hungry. Food makes us feel worse, not better, if we are nothungry. And the amount of weight we have to lose is not thecriterion which we use for whether we are going to be obedient. Tell Satan we are to obey the Lord, our God. Matthew 4:4 says, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”Many times Satan does not even have to hang around. After all. He talked us into believing these lies some years ago when he started us out on our first so-called “deserved overindulgence.” Since everyone else in America seemed to be doing it and endorsing it, then we did not even put up a fight. After many years of overindulging, it has become what we call a “stronghold,” and this is very serious business.Get on your knees and submit your will to God. Tell Him what your desire is, and be honest. Say, “God, what I want to do is to go to the refrigerator and eat the rest of the leftover turkey–and the dressing—and some ice cream—to be exact, approximately a half-gallon! And I am pretty sure that if I get started, I will probably finish off the rest of the homemade chocolate pie. At least that is what I want to do. But I know that Your will is for me not to eat a bite of this until my body calls for it. I submit my head hunger or desires to Your will, not mine. I am learning that what You are having me do is life, life, life, and peace. And God, I realize I have been following Satan’s lies and my will, and that is miserable. It has gotten me nowhere but in trouble. So, please, take this desire away and give me a ‘full’ feeling from You.”Submit, and eat less food. Use your remaining strength to determine that when you walk out of your bedroom, you are not going to eat until you feel a growl. You will then start to feel your prayer being answered or the magnetic force of food ending, to the point that you do not even want to eat. You cannot even imagine wanting to eat the food. God has heard your prayer and has taken the desire away and your heart starts feeling happy. One hour later, you fit into an outfit that you have not been able to get into for years! Again, note the time on your watch. You can expect your battles to become less time-consuming as you become more practiced in submitting your will. I know that my battles can last anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, depending on how quickly I go through the steps.Write these three steps down on your bathroom mirror or on your refrigerator. Memorize them for life. The problem with our battles is that we feel so confused and emotional while we are fighting them. But if you follow these steps, watch how the layers of confusion clear up.It is really hard even to know what God’s will is until we have a broken and contrite heart—a deeply sorrowful heart, as shown in Isaiah 66:2b, “‘This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.’ “By the way, contrite means “sorrowful to the point of repentance or change.” The main thing to know is: the quicker you give up your will, the sooner the battle will be over. Once you have truly determined never to give in to food again, the less Satan will even tempt you in that area. Eventually, you will be out of the battle zone for food—and what a glorious day it is to announce perfect peace with food!*57\237\2*

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Now you have most of the painted picture. We are at war. The battleground is located in the mind and heart. Our assignment is to put to death the deeds of the flesh and put in their place the precious, wonderful will of our Heavenly Father. Last, but not least, Satan has a vested interest in sabotaging the whole mission by using very clever, deceitful lies.Now that you know the fundamentals, how can you survive and be victorious in warfare? It is going to take your strength—spiritual strength. Let us look at Ephesians 6:13-18:Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit [which means praying for what God wants and not what your flesh wants] on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.Once again, Paul warns us to be alert. And you thought all you had to do today was to go into work, try to please the boss, then go home, cook supper, prop up your feet, and watch the news. That is exactly what the enemy wants us to think! No, you must have an alert heart and mind looking for what pleases God, and be ready for the attack. When you hear the lie, quote the truth and then stand firm and watch God fight the battle.*56\237\2*

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