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Personal Responsibility
Week of 07/18/05
"He's always pushing my buttons!"
Your buttons get pushed every day. Yet it's your reaction to those fears that determines whether you get stuck—and you control the thoughts that control your reaction, not your external circumstances.
Just pause for a moment and ponder this statement: You can choose your reaction, and your reaction is based on your thoughts. But from all of your thoughts will come your actions and your emotions, either negative or positive. Your thoughts are the basis for your feelings and reactions. That's awesome to me.
You have a choice about how you react when someone pushes your fear button. No one else controls how you think. No one else controls how you react. You alone do that.
Suppose you're walking down the streets of New York, and some guy you've never seen comes up and calls you a disgusting name. What do you do? Probably nothing. You keep on walking. You don't want a fight, and what some loon says on the streets of the Big Apple doesn't affect you. Let him blather all he wants.
What happens, though, if your wife or your boyfriend or your coworker calls you the very same name? It probably pushes your button. Why do you react differently? The name-calling itself hasn't created a button; the button was there in both cases. But in the second instance, the name-calling tapped your fear of rejection, failure, or disconnection (or whatever). In the first case, it didn't. This means that the reaction can't be about the external; it has to be about the internal, about—what's in your mind. It's not about the existence of your button, but about the way you choose to think and react when it gets pushed.
Do you see how this empowers you? You control how you think and react. You can't control whether anyone pushes your button, but you can control how you think and react to its getting pushed. If this were not the case, then life would simply be an elaborate system of manipulation. But it isn't! II Cor. 10:5
Have your buttons been pushed lately? Have you pushed any buttons lately?
Who's responsible for your buttons?
"Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even
thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside
out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike
the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity,
God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."
Romans 12:2 (MSG)
© Copyright 2005 Smalley Relationship Center
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