Do you run your emotions or do your emotions run you?
It’s a simple question that is loaded with thought-provoking, inner exploration. One that really makes us sit back and think about what really is steering course in the direction our lives are headed. Are you on track towards a collision or are you on sailing on smooth waters? are the questions you need to ask yourself.
Emotions play a major role in shaping the paths in life we take. Therefore it is crucial to be in a place of mind where we can be confident that we are letting our clear intuitive processes have the controls, rather than allowing our emotions to run the show.
Don’t get me wrong emotions are a good thing, they give us the ups and downs on the road of life. To experience joy, grief, sadness and exhilaration are what being human is all about! Yet, it’s all about sitting back and knowing that an emotion is just that: an emotion and by recognizing it, you can control how you feel and take back the seat of power in your life.
1.You’re stuck on repeat
Recreating certain scenarios in your life is a sure-fire sign that you have former emotional traumas that require healing.
You may find that you keep choosing the same partner, the same job or the same living arrangements all of which do not serve your higher good. You may find that you are prone to addictive substances and crowds of people you also are prone to this behaviour. Know that you are not weak, you just need healing.
Until you can pinpoint the root cause of your emotional turmoil, the cycle will continue to repeat itself and you will find yourself creating the same situations and circumstances in your life.
Former emotional problems that you may have thought you had conquered can come bubbling back to the surface, wreaking havoc in your current state. This can leave you blaming yourself for things that you do, without knowing why you do them.
2. Your mind is overworked
We all find it difficult to stay in the present moment. Our minds are always wandering, worrying and fantasizing about the past or the future. It seems that we do everything and anything we can not face our current reality.
We dream of the future to distract ourselves from the present, in order to forget the past and the more we use our minds to avoid our present situations the more overworked we become all in order to avoid a past that hasn’t been healed.
Be gentle with your mind, by healing the past we can live in the present moment more fully and find peace.
3. You’ve lost your intuition
When you can’t differentiate between a feeling and an emotion, we know that there are wires crossed.
Emotions are a product of thought forms and without thoughts emotions wouldn’t arise. They are the product of external and internal happenings and are reactionary. By recognizing this, you endeavor into a state of awareness, of your own emotional state.
Feelings however are your natural intuitive ability to discern a situation without providing an emotional response to it. When emotional trauma is present, one cannot discern between an emotion and a feeling and the internal compass has lost its magnetic direction. Essentially you cannot get a gage how you feel versus what you feel.
4. You’re reactive instead of proactive
As mentioned above, emotional response is reactionary to your external and internal thoughts.
Throughout your conversations with others you will find that you have triggers that you may not be aware of, as unconscious memories are hardwired to different types of thought forms coded with emotions. These then become our perceptions of the world, which become our core beliefs.
When faced with difficult situations where strong emotions come bubbling back to the surface, it is important to immediately recognize it and think before you speak. Most often, the external happening that you are perceiving is not as it seems, but merely a perception of your own belief.
When you can recognize thisunhealed emotion, you can then empower yourself to heal it before it wreaks more havoc in your life.
5. You find it difficult to trust
This will be the most obvious sign that you have unresolved emotional disturbances. The inability to trust others is a defense mechanism that we all naturally possess, as a means to protect ourselves from past emotional trauma.
Yet, finding the root of the problem is more difficult to pin down, and may not be what you think it is. Quite often we bury memories of hardships deep down into our unconscious mind where it appears to be all but forgotten. Only to manifest negatively in others aspects of our lives.
When this happens it is important to make the unconscious-conscious when you feel ready to do so. It is only by bringing our memories forward can they be appropriately healed allowing for closure and emotional progression.
“Happiness or sorrow, whatever befalls you, walk untouched and unattached.” Buddha
Watch How Doctors Heal a Tumor in Less Than 3 Minutes Using Meditation
“Mind over body,” is a somewhat overused phrase that seems to have lost its zest; zest-less or not, this phrase still holds very true.
Our bodies are a reflection of our mind, so when we get sick, it is vital that we access our conscious mind for healing, because after all, we are most likely feeling pain or sickness as a result of the thoughts we direct our focus to.
The video below features, Gregg Braden, a man who Deepak Chopra describes as, “a rare blend of scientist, visionary and scholar with the ability to speak to our minds, while touching the wisdom of our hearts.” (For those of you who don’t know who Deepak Chopra is, you must do a google search and find out, his words have been quite helpful on my spiritual journey)
Gregg explains that by applying conscious positive focus on what we want, we have the capability to manifest miracles.
He uses the story featured in the video below as an example. The story is about a woman who sought medical help from a medicine-less hospital in Beijing, after western medical doctors labelled her tumor as “inoperable.” The medicine-less doctors evaluated her by addressing the life-affirming changes she could make to better her life, thus her health. They taught her life-affirming ways to breathe and nourish her body, as well as gentle movements to stimulate the energy centres in her body. Next they performed a procedure that is non existent in western medicine. Three practitioners used energy work to expedite the healing of her bladder cancer. What happened next may be considered impossible by some.
A split-screen ultrasound monitor was used to illustrate the effects of the procedure. The first screen showed a freeze-frame of her tumor, and the second monitor showed real-time activity of the tumor. The three doctors worked with the energy in her body and with the feelings in their body, and then chanted an agreed word intended to reinforce the feeling that her cancer had already been healed; within 3 minutes, the tumor disappeared.
“For me, it was this kind of information that took lost modality of prayer out of the realm of academics and into something that was very real that we can apply in our lives.”-Gregg Braden
For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II
Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia’s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.
When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world–not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russia’s oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.
Karp Lykov and his daughter Agafia, wearing clothes donated by Soviet geologists not long after their family was rediscovered.
Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors’ downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.
It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.
The Lykovs lived in this hand-built log cabin, lit by a single window “the size of a backpack pocket” and warmed by a smoky wood-fired stove.
The four scientists sent into the district to prospect for iron ore were told about the pilots’ sighting, and it perplexed and worried them. “It’s less dangerous,” the writer Vasily Peskov notes of this part of the taiga, “to run across a wild animal than a stranger,” and rather than wait at their own temporary base, 10 miles away, the scientists decided to investigate. Led by a geologist named Galina Pismenskaya, they “chose a fine day and put gifts in our packs for our prospective friends”—though, just to be sure, she recalled, “I did check the pistol that hung at my side.”
As the intruders scrambled up the mountain, heading for the spot pinpointed by their pilots, they began to come across signs of human activity: a rough path, a staff, a log laid across a stream, and finally a small shed filled with birch-bark containers of cut-up dried potatoes. Then, Pismenskaya said,
beside a stream there was a dwelling. Blackened by time and rain, the hut was piled up on all sides with taiga rubbish—bark, poles, planks. If it hadn’t been for a window the size of my backpack pocket, it would have been hard to believe that people lived there. But they did, no doubt about it…. Our arrival had been noticed, as we could see.
The low door creaked, and the figure of a very old man emerged into the light of day, straight out of a fairy tale. Barefoot. Wearing a patched and repatched shirt made of sacking. He wore trousers of the same material, also in patches, and had an uncombed beard. His hair was disheveled. He looked frightened and was very attentive…. We had to say something, so I began: ‘Greetings, grandfather! We’ve come to visit!’
The old man did not reply immediately…. Finally, we heard a soft, uncertain voice: ‘Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.’
The sight that greeted the geologists as they entered the cabin was like something from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—”a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar,” with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:
The silence was suddenly broken by sobs and lamentations. Only then did we see the silhouettes of two women. One was in hysterics, praying: ‘This is for our sins, our sins.’ The other, keeping behind a post… sank slowly to the floor. The light from the little window fell on her wide, terrified eyes, and we realized we had to get out of there as quickly as possible.
Agafia Lykova (left) with her sister, Natalia.
Led by Pismenskaya, the scientists backed hurriedly out of the hut and retreated to a spot a few yards away, where they took out some provisions and began to eat. After about half an hour, the door of the cabin creaked open, and the old man and his two daughters emerged—no longer hysterical and, though still obviously frightened, “frankly curious.” Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, “We are not allowed that!” When Pismenskaya asked, “Have you ever eaten bread?” the old man answered: “I have. But they have not. They have never seen it.” At least he was intelligible. The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. “When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing.”
Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man’s name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer–a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century. Old Believers had been persecuted since the days of Peter the Great, and Lykov talked about it as though it had happened only yesterday; for him, Peter was a personal enemy and “the anti-Christ in human form”—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar’s campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly “chopping off the beards of Christians.” But these centuries-old hatreds were conflated with more recent grievances; Karp was prone to complain in the same breath about a merchant who had refused to make a gift of 26 poods of potatoes to the Old Believers sometime around 1900.
Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov’s brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.
Peter the Great’s attempts to modernize the Russia of the early 18th century found a focal point in a campaign to end the wearing of beards. Facial hair was taxed and non-payers were compulsorily shaved—anathema to Karp Lykov and the Old Believers.
That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”
The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was shown a picture of a horse, she recognized it from her mother’s Bible stories. “Look, papa,” she exclaimed. “A steed!”
But if the family’s isolation was hard to grasp, the unmitigated harshness of their lives was not. Traveling to the Lykov homestead on foot was astonishingly arduous, even with the help of a boat along the Abakan. On his first visit to the Lykovs, Peskov—who would appoint himself the family’s chief chronicler—noted that “we traversed 250 kilometres without seeing a single human dwelling!”
Isolation made survival in the wilderness close to impossible. Dependent solely on their own resources, the Lykovs struggled to replace the few things they had brought into the taiga with them. They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed.
The Lykovs had carried a crude spinning wheel and, incredibly, the components of a loom into the taiga with them—moving these from place to place as they gradually went further into the wilderness must have required many long and arduous journeys—but they had no technology for replacing metal. A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to cook. By the time the Lykovs were discovered, their staple diet was potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds.
In some respects, Peskov makes clear, the taiga did offer some abundance: “Beside the dwelling ran a clear, cold stream. Stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.… Bilberries and raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right on the roof.”
Yet the Lykovs lived permanently on the edge of famine. It was not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. Dmitry built up astonishing endurance, and could hunt barefoot in winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days, having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his shoulders. More often than not, though, there was no meat, and their diet gradually became more monotonous. Wild animals destroyed their crop of carrots, and Agafia recalled the late 1950s as “the hungry years.” “We ate the rowanberry leaf,” she said,
roots, grass, mushrooms, potato tops, and bark. We were hungry all the time. Every year we held a council to decide whether to eat everything up or leave some for seed.
Famine was an ever-present danger in these circumstances, and in 1961 it snowed in June. The hard frost killed everything growing in their garden, and by spring the family had been reduced to eating shoes and bark. Akulina chose to see her children fed, and that year she died of starvation. The rest of the family were saved by what they regarded as a miracle: a single grain of rye sprouted in their pea patch. The Lykovs put up a fence around the shoot and guarded it zealously night and day to keep off mice and squirrels. At harvest time, the solitary spike yielded 18 grains, and from this they painstakingly rebuilt their rye crop
Dmitry (left) and Savin in the Siberian summer.
As the Soviet geologists got to know the Lykov family, they realized that they had underestimated their abilities and intelligence. Each family member had a distinct personality; old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
“What amazed him most of all,” Peskov recorded, “was a transparent cellophane package. ‘Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!’” And Karp held grimly to his status as head of the family, though he was well into his 80s. His eldest child, Savin, dealt with this by casting himself as the family’s unbending arbiter in matters of religion. “He was strong of faith, but a harsh man,” his own father said of him, and Karp seems to have worried about what would happen to his family after he died if Savin took control. Certainly the eldest son would have encountered little resistance from Natalia, who always struggled to replace her mother as cook, seamstress and nurse.
The two younger children, on the other hand, were more approachable and more open to change and innovation. “Fanaticism was not terribly marked in Agafia,” Peskov said, and in time he came to realize that the youngest of the Lykovs had a sense of irony and could poke fun at herself. Agafia’s unusual speech—she had a singsong voice and stretched simple words into polysyllables—convinced some of her visitors she was slow-witted; in fact she was markedly intelligent, and took charge of the difficult task, in a family that possessed no calendars, of keeping track of time. She thought nothing of hard work, either, excavating a new cellar by hand late in the fall and working on by moonlight when the sun had set. Asked by an astonished Peskov whether she was not frightened to be out alone in the wilderness after dark, she replied: “What would there be out here to hurt me?”
A Russian press photo of Karp Lykov (second left) with Dmitry and Agafia, accompanied by a Soviet geologist.
Of all the Lykovs, though, the geologists’ favorite was Dmitry, a consummate outdoorsman who knew all of the taiga’s moods. He was the most curious and perhaps the most forward-looking member of the family. It was he who had built the family stove, and all the birch-bark buckets that they used to store food. It was also Dmitry who spent days hand-cutting and hand-planing each log that the Lykovs felled. Perhaps it was no surprise that he was also the most enraptured by the scientists’ technology. Once relations had improved to the point that the Lykovs could be persuaded to visit the Soviets’ camp, downstream, he spent many happy hours in its little sawmill, marveling at how easily a circular saw and lathes could finish wood. “It’s not hard to figure,” Peskov wrote. “The log that took Dmitry a day or two to plane was transformed into handsome, even boards before his eyes. Dmitry felt the boards with his palm and said: ‘Fine!’”
Karp Lykov fought a long and losing battle with himself to keep all this modernity at bay. When they first got to know the geologists, the family would accept only a single gift—salt. (Living without it for four decades, Karp said, had been “true torture.”) Over time, however, they began to take more. They welcomed the assistance of their special friend among the geologists—a driller named Yerofei Sedov, who spent much of his spare time helping them to plant and harvest crops. They took knives, forks, handles, grain and eventually even pen and paper and an electric torch. Most of these innovations were only grudgingly acknowledged, but the sin of television, which they encountered at the geologists’ camp,
proved irresistible for them…. On their rare appearances, they would invariably sit down and watch. Karp sat directly in front of the screen. Agafia watched poking her head from behind a door. She tried to pray away her transgression immediately—whispering, crossing herself…. The old man prayed afterward, diligently and in one fell swoop.
The Lykovs' homestead seen from a Soviet reconnaissance plane, 1980.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Lykovs’ strange story was the rapidity with which the family went into decline after they re-established contact with the outside world. In the fall of 1981, three of the four children followed their mother to the grave within a few days of one another. According to Peskov, their deaths were not, as might have been expected, the result of exposure to diseases to which they had no immunity. Both Savin and Natalia suffered from kidney failure, most likely a result of their harsh diet. But Dmitry died of pneumonia, which might have begun as an infection he acquired from his new friends.
His death shook the geologists, who tried desperately to save him. They offered to call in a helicopter and have him evacuated to a hospital. But Dmitry, in extremis, would abandon neither his family nor the religion he had practiced all his life. “We are not allowed that,” he whispered just before he died. “A man lives for howsoever God grants.”
The Lykovs' graves. Today only Agafia survives of the family of six, living alone in the taiga.
When all three Lykovs had been buried, the geologists attempted to talk Karp and Agafia into leaving the forest and returning to be with relatives who had survived the persecutions of the purge years, and who still lived on in the same old villages. But neither of the survivors would hear of it. They rebuilt their old cabin, but stayed close to their old home.
Karp Lykov died in his sleep on February 16, 1988, 27 years to the day after his wife, Akulina. Agafia buried him on the mountain slopes with the help of the geologists, then turned and headed back to her home. The Lord would provide, and she would stay, she said—as indeed she has. A quarter of a century later, now in her seventies herself, this child of the taiga lives on alone, high above the Abakan.
She will not leave. But we must leave her, seen through the eyes of Yerofei on the day of her father’s funeral:
I looked back to wave at Agafia. She was standing by the river break like a statue. She wasn’t crying. She nodded: ‘Go on, go on.’ We went another kilometer and I looked back. She was still standing there.
Sources
Anon. ‘How to live substantively in our times.’ Stranniki, 20 February 2009, accessed August 2, 2011; Georg B. Michels. At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth Century Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995; Isabel Colgate. A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses. New York: HarperCollins, 2002; ‘From taiga to Kremlin: a hermit’s gifts to Medvedev,’ rt.com, February 24, 2010, accessed August 2, 2011; G. Kramore, ‘At the taiga dead end‘. Suvenirograd , nd, accessed August 5, 2011; Irina Paert. Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760-1850. Manchester: MUP, 2003; Vasily Peskov. Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
A documentary on the Lykovs (in Russian) which shows something of the family’s isolation and living conditions, can be viewed here.
The actor revealed that he adheres to no religion in an interview with the UK’s Telegraph on Saturday. Pitt told the paper that he was raised in a Southern Baptist household in Missouri, “with all the Christian guilt about what you can and cannot, should and shouldn’t do.”
The Hollywood mega-star elaborated on the Christian guilt he was raised with in a 2007 interview with Parade.
“I’d go to Christian revivals and be moved by the Holy Spirit, and I’d go to rock concerts and feel the same fervor,” Pitt told the magazine. “Then I’d be told, ‘That’s the Devil’s music! Don’t partake in that!’ I wanted to experience things religion said not to experience.”
Still, Pitt said he learned the value of hard work from his father, who reportedly ran a trucking company in Missouri.
“He could be a softie,” Pitt told the Telegraph of his father. “But one thing my folks always stressed was being capable, doing things for yourself. He was really big on integrity — and that informed a lot of what [we] try to do now.”
Pitt also revealed that he and his wife and By the Sea co-star, Angelina Jolie, originally wanted double the number of children they currently have.
“Listen, Angie and I were aiming for a dozen, but we crapped out after six,” the actor said, adding: “Everyone talks about the joy of having kids — blah, blah, blah. But I never knew how much I could love something until I looked in the faces of my children.”
Pitt’s collaboration with Jolie, the moody marriage drama By the Sea, is in theaters December 11.
Editor's Note: Pastor Roger Barrier's "Ask Roger" column regularly appears at Preach It, Teach It. Every week at Crosswalk, Dr. Barrier puts nearly 40 years of experience in the pastorate to work answering questions of doctrine or practice for laypeople, or giving advice on church leadership issues. Email him your questions at roger@preachitteachit.org.
Dear Roger,
Do angels leave feathers when they visit? Some people are telling me this and I don’t know what to believe.
Sincerely, Genebeth
Dear Genebeth,
I do not believe that angels leave feathers to let people know that they have been there. There's nothing in the Bible about this, so I would discount what people are telling you. Nevertheless, the Bible tells us that angels have very special ministries both in heaven and on earth.
We seem to know very little about the existence and ministry of Angels. To most of us angels are more decoration than the reality. Angels appear on tombstones, the walls of nurseries, jewelry, Renaissance art, ordination certificates, Christmas cards, and Valentines.
Angels are usually fat and naked and have little bows and arrows with wings on their backs!
These caricatures are so unfortunate. Angels have a lot to do, especially for those who have eyes to see. I believe that most of their work goes on behind the scenes where they are usually not noticed.
I would imagine that very few of us will have a dramatic encounter with an angelic spirit. But if we do, it will be a marker point in our lives that we will never forget.
One of my professors from Southwestern Seminary told a story in class about a missionary friend of his. The missionary was driving through a terrible rainstorm in southern Louisiana. He was on his way to a preaching engagement and was struggling deeply with the future of his life and ministry. He was praying, “Oh, God, please speak to me. I need your guidance.”
Just around the corner, he noticed a person hitching a ride in the blinding rainstorm. He pulled over and invited the person to get in. They began a conversation and he discovered that the person was a Christian. They had great fellowship. In fact, his newfound friend helped him sort out some of the future issues with which he was struggling. When they came to the turning point where the man had to go his way and the missionary his, they stopped for a brief cup of coffee.
As the missionary drove off he realized that he hadn’t even gotten the man’s name so that he could thank him for the advice. He returned to the cafe and asked the waitress if she had noticed which way that the fellow had gone. She said, “What fellow? I wondered why you had ordered two cups of coffee.”
The missionary got back into the car and realized for the first time that when the man had originally gotten into the car, he was not even wet.
The word, “angel,” means “messenger.” For example, Hebrews chapter two tells us that the Angels were the messengers who delivered the Ten Commandments to Moses. I believe that my professors missionary friend enjoyed an angelic encounter that night.
Genebeth, your question is an important one; therefore, let me give you a short Biblical primer on the nature and work of angels.
1. God created the angels before He created anything else in the universe.
The angels watched God work and shouted for joy at the results of the creation (Job 38:4-7).
2. All of the angels were created simultaneously.
They are unable to procreate. (Matthew 22:28). The number of angels has always been constant.
3. The number of angels is incomprehensible.
Revelation 5:11 records the number of Angels: “Ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands and thousands.”
4. Some angels rebelled against God.
Lucifer, who was in charge of guarding the throne of God and with bringing God praise and worship, and who was apparently co-equal with the angel Michael, chose to rebel (Isaiah 14).
A huge number of angels rebelled with him. Fallen angels (demons) live in one of two places today: (1) On earth, attacking and discouraging humans; and (2) In Tartarus, a prison cell in the lowest hell, waiting to be released during the Great Tribulation.
5. Angels are powerful.
Only one angel was needed to wipe out 185,000 Assyrians in a single night (2 Kings 19).
6. Angels were created to praise and worship God around His throne.
Revelation 5:11-12: “In a loud voice they sang, “Worthy is the Lamb, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”
7. Angels are charged with the responsibility of guiding the affairs of nations.
We learn from Daniel 10 that angels are intricately involved in guiding our heads of state. Every nation also has a demon charged with the responsibility of bringing that nation to destruction (Ezekiel).
8. Angels fight Satan and his demons until the victory is won at the end of time.
Revelation 12:7-9: “And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back...”
9. Every church is assigned an angel to watch over it and to help protect it.
Revelation 1:20: “The mystery of the seven stars… the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.”
10. Angels will separate the wheat from the weeds at the final judgment (the saved from the lost).
Matthew 13:38-42: “The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.”
11. Angels minister to those who believe in Christ.
Jacob’s dream of a ladder, by which angels ascended and descended between heaven and earth, is a beautiful picture of their incessant activity for us (Genesis 28:12).
12. Angels provide for physical needs of believers as in the case of Elijah under his juniper tree (1 Kings 19:5-7).
After a Wednesday night service several years ago, a lady told me of an angelic protection. Driving on a lonely desert road in her VW with her children the car’s engine caught fire. She stopped and tried to open the hood. She couldn’t; it was too hot. Suddenly, another car pulled up behind her. She thought that this was strange because she’d seen no other cars on the road.
He pulled out this big pair of asbestos gloves, opened the hood and used a fire extinguisher to put out the blaze. She turned to thank the man and he was gone. Both he and the car had disappeared.
13. Angels protect believers from danger as in the case of watching over the three Hebrews in the furnace (Daniel chapter 3), or by watching over Daniel in the lions’ den (Daniel chapter 6).
Once when Brianna, our oldest daughter, was just learning crawl, Julie heard me yell from the back bathroom. “Julie, come quickly!” At the same time I heard Julie call from the back bathroom, “Roger, come quickly.” We both ran quickly to discover Brianna about to tumble headlong onto the tile of our three-foot-deep sunken tub. We grabbed her just in time.
Julie said, “I’m sure glad you called me to get back here quickly.”
“I didn’t call you,” I said. “You called me.”
“I didn’t call you,” she said.
We had an angelic visitation from Brie’s guardian angel!
Experiences like these make Psalm 34:7 come alive: “Angels of the Lord encamp around those who fear God and deliver them.”
14. Angels sometimes reveal the Lord’s plans, for example to Daniel (Daniel 9:21-23), to Cornelius (Acts 10:3-6), or to Mary at the birth of Jesus (Luke 2).
15. Angels Minister To Us At Out Time Of Death.
Luke 17:22: “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side.”
A cold chill runs up many of our backs to think that sometime in the future, and perhaps in the very near future for some of us, the Death Angel will be dispatched from Heaven to Earth.
If we are Christians, we need not be afraid of the Death Angel. They may be our rod and staff which brings us through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
16. Not all angels are good.
Galatians 1:8-11: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned… I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”
17. Have you ever wondered about guardian angels?
Matthew 18:10: “See that you do not look down on one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.”
I pray often for my guarding angel. I pray for him/her (it?) to be “strong” on my behalf in the spiritual battles that I fight. When I am praying for someone about to undergo surgery, I never fail to pray for their guardian angel, assigned to them at birth, to help guide the hand of the surgeon for a successful surgery. I want him/her (it?)and me to be good friends. I am looking forward to seeing him/her(it?) in heaven.
So, Genebeth, I hope that this short primer on angelology is helpful to you on understanding the work and ministry of angels.
Sincerely, Roger
Dr. Roger Barrier retired as senior teaching pastor from Casas Church in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to being an author and sought-after conference speaker, Roger has mentored or taught thousands of pastors, missionaries, and Christian leaders worldwide. Casas Church, where Roger served throughout his thirty-five-year career, is a megachurch known for a well-integrated, multi-generational ministry. The value of including new generations is deeply ingrained throughout Casas to help the church move strongly right through the twenty-first century and beyond. Dr. Barrier holds degrees from Baylor University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Golden Gate Seminary in Greek, religion, theology, and pastoral care. His popular book, Listening to the Voice of God, published by Bethany House, is in its second printing and is available in Thai and Portuguese.His latest work is, Got Guts? Get Godly! Pray the Prayer God Guarantees to Answer, from Xulon Press. Roger can be found blogging at Preach It, Teach It, the pastoral teaching site founded with his wife, Dr. Julie Barrier.
Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.
More than a century ago, in his collection of lectures titled Life and Destiny, professor and ethicist Felix Adler reflected on what the lives of the deceased can teach the living:
Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this. For they are not wholly separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. In spirit they are with us. And we may think of them as silent and invisible, but real presences in our households.
All across Poland, more than 30 years since his murder by the secret police of the communist dictatorship that then ruled the country, the life and words of Father Jerzy Popieluszko still resonate strongly in millions of households, as it does thousands of miles away in mine.
Readers may wonder if Poles are a little overrepresented in this series on heroes. I’ve written about Stanislaw Lem and Witold Pilecki. Elsewhere on FEE.org, I’ve written of my time with the Polish anti-communist underground in 1986, and of my appreciation of the crucial role that Poles played in the unraveling of the Soviet empire. I admit that I’ve had a 30-year love affair with the Polish people, especially with the seemingly endless roster of courageous opponents of tyranny they have produced.
I first visited Father Popieluszko’s St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in Warsaw on a chilly Sunday in November 1986, just two years after his death. It was an oasis amid a desert of communist oppression, a place where Poles renewed their strength by recalling the man who had led them not so long before. The walls of the church were adorned with pictures of him — offering communion, boating with his dog, encouraging steelworkers, comforting children. Though I am not Catholic, the memory of those few awesome hours evokes powerful emotions to this day.
Jerzy Popieluszko, born in the small village of Okopy in northeastern Poland in September 1947, seemed a very unlikely hero in his early years. He was short, frail, sickly, introverted, and of average intellect. At 17, he traveled to Warsaw intent upon studying for a quiet life in the priesthood. He would only live another 20 years, but before he died, he was seen by the regime as the most dangerous man in Poland. To millions of other Poles, he had become a beacon of hope; his only weapons were the truth and his courage.
After one year at seminary, Popieluszko’s studies were interrupted by compulsory military service, a two-year requirement of all young men at the time. It wasn’t pretty. The communist regime segregated seminary students within the military to diminish their influence. They were routinely mistreated and subjected to humiliating ridicule.
Popieluszko demonstrated a remarkable resilience and a steely defiance that surprised even those who knew him best. Prayer and Bible study were strictly prohibited, but that made little difference to Popieluszko, who openly disdained the army’s coercive atheistic indoctrination. Obedient he was — but not to communist authorities.
For refusing to relinquish the cross he wore around his neck, he was ordered to stand all night at attention, barefoot in the snow. From such frequent cruelty, he emerged with his health permanently damaged, but his spirits higher than ever. The experience reinforced his life’s mission: to serve God by resisting evil, to comfort and encourage victims of oppression, and ultimately to free his country. He returned to the seminary, and in May 1972, at the age of 24, he was ordained.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union seemed to be winning its battle with a demoralized West. Its Eastern European empire, though occasionally restive, was cowed by the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. At the close of the decade, the Soviet army rolled into Afghanistan. Reeling from the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam fiasco, and the crippling effects of stagflation, American leadership wilted as the Soviets boasted that communism represented the world’s future.
Then, in 1978, the first non-Italian ascended to the Papacy. Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła of Wadowice, Poland, became Pope John Paul II. The news merely surprised the world, but it electrified Poland.
Before the end of his first year in Rome, the Pope returned triumphant to his native land. Communist authorities were at first hesitant to allow the visit. They relented in the mistaken belief that they could limit its effects and turn them to the state’s advantage. For men who arrogantly believed themselves capable of “planning” society, it was a profound miscalculation.
Poles turned out by the millions to welcome John Paul. They heard him declare, “Be not afraid!” and they knew what his message was. Father Jerzy, who assisted in the planning for the visit, took it personally. He resolved to step up his public opposition to the regime, declaring one Sunday, “Justice and the right to know the truth require us from this pulpit to repeatedly demand a limit on the tyranny of censorship!”
The Pope’s historic visit led directly to the legalization of the Solidarity organization, which Popieluszko endorsed and assisted — publicly and privately, legally and illegally. The visit proved to be the galvanizing moment when Poles by the millions began to lose their fear of the regime and contemplate the real possibility of freedom from their oppressors.
Poles had put up with communism since the Soviets imposed it on them after World War II. The tyranny of a one-party political monopoly was compounded by the stifling effects of socialist central planning — environmental destruction, stagnant living standards, inflation, long lines for simple foodstuffs and toiletries. It was a dreary, claustrophobic existence, producing cabin fever on a national scale. In clever and sometimes subtle language, John Paul II told them they could and should resist.
In the months that followed, Poles ventured into dangerous, open opposition. Workers increasingly went on strike with demands that pertained not simply to wages or working conditions, but to political, economic, and social freedoms as well. The world watched as rumors grew that the Soviets might put an end to it all with an invasion, just as they had done to Czechoslovakia a decade before.
In 1980, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski was the revered Primate of Poland, the highest-ranking Catholic in the country, with a long history of antagonism toward the communists. When striking steel workers begged him to send a priest into the huge Huta Warszawa steel mill, he chose 33-year-old Jerzy Popieluszko.
It was a daring move, the first time a priest even entered a state-owned enterprise of such size, let alone one who so openly denounced the government. From that moment until his death, he was known as the favorite priest of both Solidarity in Poland and John Paul II in Rome. Perhaps he already knew it, but his life was on the line. In The Priest and the Policemen, biographers John Moody and Roger Boyes write,
He was stalked like a game animal in the last years of his life, hunted by agents… who knew that the priest had to be silenced. Murder was not the only solution. It would have been enough to persuade the Church to transfer him to an obscure rural parish, or bring him to Rome.
It would have sufficed to put him on trial and sentence him to prison for his political preaching, or to strain his delicate health (exacerbated by a diagnosis of Addison’s disease) to the breaking point, so that his death could be passed off, in the words of one agent (of the secret police), as “a beautiful accident.” The police tried all these methods but found it was impossible to silence the priest, who declared modestly, “I am only saying aloud what people are thinking privately.”
All through 1981, Poles pushed the envelope, forcing the dictatorship to grant basic liberties and daring the state to take them back. The world watched the unfolding events with mixed emotions — hopeful for freedom in Poland but fearful of a backlash. Then, on December 13, Moscow’s puppets in Warsaw removed the threat of a Soviet invasion by doing the dirty work themselves.
In a massive crackdown, martial law was imposed. Thousands of dissidents were rounded up and jailed. Solidarity and other pro-freedom groups, like the one that organized my visit, Freedom and Peace, were officially banned. Poland descended into a long, dark, eight years of renewed persecution.
Father Jerzy didn’t fold or retreat. He summoned every ounce of energy his ailing body would allow. He denounced martial law and aided the underground resistance. His sermons were routinely broadcast by Radio Free Europe, making him famous throughout the East bloc for his uncompromising stance against the communists.
The secret police planted weapons in his apartment, then staged a raid for the television cameras to “prove” on national television that he was a subversive revolutionary. He was arrested several times, but pressure from the clergy helped each time to secure his release. Without skipping a beat, he would then renew his pleas for freedom.
St. Stanislaus Kostka Church was routinely jammed as people traveled from all over the country to hear him speak every Sunday; they even packed into the nearby streets by the thousands to hear his words broadcast over loudspeakers. He was granted permission to leave Poland to visit a beloved aunt in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then went right back home to resume the struggle.
“It is not enough for a Christian to condemn evil, cowardice, lies, and use of force, hatred, and oppression,” he once declared. “He must at all times be a witness to and defender of justice, goodness, truth, freedom, and love. He must never tire of claiming these values as a right both for himself and others.”
A visiting Western journalist asked Father Jerzy in 1984 how he could continue to speak so boldly without fear of retaliation. His reply was, “They will kill me. They will kill me.” But, he went on, he could not remain silent as members of his own congregation remained jailed, tortured, and were even killed for nothing more than wanting to be free. “We must conquer the bad through the good,” he often implored.
In 1984, the communist secret police contrived a scheme to take out the young priest in what would look like a car accident, but the plot failed. Less than a week later, while riding with his driver back to Warsaw from priestly duties in Bydgoszcz, Father Jerzy was ambushed. He endured torture so fierce that one of the secret police agents would later remark, “I never knew a man could withstand such a beating.”
Tied to a heavy stone, the mangled and lifeless body of Father Jerzy was tossed unceremoniously into the Vistula River, where it was recovered 11 days later. Poles were heartbroken, and copious tears were shed, but in keeping with the spirit of the martyred priest, the fight for Polish freedom only gathered steam.
In early 1989, the communist regime announced to the world that “Poland had become ungovernable.” Hardly anyone paid much attention any more to its edicts and decrees. Even many of the government’s own employees were thwarting their bosses and joining the underground. Free elections were scheduled for June, for the first time in all the decades of communist rule. The communists lost every seat, bringing to fruition a prophecy of Father Jerzy of a few years before: “An idea which needs rifles to survive dies of its own accord.”
I returned to a free Poland in November 1989, just as the rest of the East bloc was unraveling. At St. Stanislaw Kostka Church, where Father Jerzy’s grave is marked with a massive stone cross, I stood with the parishioners, lit a candle, and cried with them — not so much because he was gone and in a better place, but because of that for which he gave his life.
Emotions play a major role in shaping the paths in life we take. Therefore it is crucial to be in a place of mind where we can be confident that we are letting our clear intuitive processes have the controls, rather than allowing our emotions to run the show.
of people you also are prone to this behaviour. Know that you are not weak, you just need healing.
We dream of the future to distract ourselves from the present, in order to forget the past and the more we use our minds to avoid our present situations the more overworked we become all in order to avoid a past that hasn’t been healed.
Throughout your conversations with others you will find that you have triggers that you may not be aware of, as unconscious memories are hardwired to different types of thought forms coded with emotions. These then become our perceptions of the world, which become our core beliefs.
Yet, finding the root of the problem is more difficult to pin down, and may not be what you think it is. Quite often we bury memories of hardships deep down into our unconscious mind where it appears to be all but forgotten. Only to manifest negatively in others aspects of our lives.
Dr. Roger Barrier retired as senior teaching pastor from