The Grace Perspective
Volume 4
(February/March 2008)
The Grace Perspective 8C01
1) More important than our service to others is our connection to God's provisions for our own health needs so that those we serve are supported.
2) The husband is not called to die to his investment needs but to his user wants.
3) The Lord gives and the Lord takes away (Job said). But God does not take away the provisions he has given; instead, he allows for the removal of the possessions we use that put us in bondage.
4) Disclosure: I am a recovering user of people and control freak (same affliction), so when wife, Carole, needs to travel away from home for an extended time, it's tough. But it gives me another opportunity to live out the grace Christ works in me to invest in her inborn temperament needs (health and happiness) and also to reflect for better understanding on 1) the appropriate measure for my involvement in her life with respect to information, decision-making, and affection, and also, more importantly, 2) the measure to which her confidence level has grown that I support those needs.
5) Used wives may themselves need recovery from codependent behavior to enable their husband's using.
6) The best marriages never stop growing.
Don Loy Whisnant
The Grace Perspective 8C03
1) Leadership does not make decisions for others, but influences their choices.
2) The first call to leadership is to make choices for our own health that enable our investments in others.
3) Our goal for grace counseling is for every parent, husband, and pastor to find support, beginning with relationship to Christ, to meet the deepest needs of their own lives so that those they serve will not be failed.
4) My pastor friend says God uses our ego and greed to motivate our choices for success. He believes also that God uses fear and guilt to motivate our obedience to the rules.
5) God exists to meet our health needs. But our expectations for him to be a grandfatherly old gentlemen committed to our "gimme needs" will be disappointed.
6) The counselee reported that her bondage to guilt, fear, greed, lust, and anger could not coexist with the Truth, that it was not the dead facts she had figured out that was setting her free, but Christ living in her imparted by the Holy Spirit through his Word during her quiet time.
7) The life supported by God's provisions for health is free to be about others, but the broken life will be absorbed with unmet needs.
8) Hard work is not the killer; rather it is our unmet need for renewed strength.
9) You will lose more than weight by dieting (food restrictions): You will also lose your health.
10) Stimulants shortened my friend’s quality of life. He resisted the suggestion that nutrition, exercise, and sleep were God's provisions for his health, so he worked late and got going early each morning with a pot of coffee, sometimes a large cola and honey bun.
Don Loy Whisnant
