You can’t ask something BROKEN to be FIXED!

The other day I was listening to a friend pour their heart out to me and they said, “You can’t ask something broken to be fixed!” That sentence hung in my mind like wet clothes drying themselves on a clothesline on a musty summer’s day. My mind rinsed that sentence over and over, as I begin to journey down my bumpy road of healing. I pondered over the number of years I tried to “fix” myself because I was severely broken. Molested, unfathered, abdonded, rejected, an abortioner, my life was infested with seeing abuse and being around substance abuse as a child. I was familiar with hardships and as I grew into adulthood it crippled my ability to function in a normal state of being. I was angry, depressed and broken. I desired to be fixed, but I didn’t know how. 

For some of you reading this you can relate. You’re in that broken state and perhaps even those around you are saying, “You need to fix ______ this! Why can’t you fix this _____” I’ll let you feel in the blank. And you’re looking at all life has handed you and like me you’re wondering how can something so broken ever be fixed. My friend was right, “You can’t ask something broken to be fixed!” But you can piece it back together, you can mend it and restore it back to life. 

If someone gave me a priceless vase, costing $25,000 I would want to protect that vase vehemently. I would place it somewhere that it could be seen but never touched. Perhaps my adventerous 5-year-old daughter starts throwing a ball to her rambunctious 11-year-old brother in the house, which they often do, and that ball hits my expensive gift, my vase, shattering it into to many shards of glass. I am devastated. I can’t even think to yell at my children, all I want to do is quickly pick up the pieces. I don’t want them to scatter too far or someone step on a piece grinding it further into dust. So I frantically gather the pieces hoping that somehow, someway, someone somewhere can restore it. 

That’s what happens with us, life tries to deliver us a death sentence. It slowly tries to eat away at our sanity and errod our peace with chaos, but you don’t have to be a victim to life. 

I love the cues that God has left us of how we are to respond to life’s situations, when you get a cut on your arm your body’s natural response is to heal and be restored back to its orginal state. You don’t have to ask your body to perform this miracle because inside your body it already has the capabilty to heal itself. Deeply embedded in the human DNA is resilency. There is a natural gift of healing that resides in every human soul. You no longer have to try to “fix” your broken pieces, simply gather the pieces and offer them to God so that the healing balm can be released on the inside of you to be restored. Just like the broken vase you may not look the same, but you are still in tact and you are still valuable. 

Why MUST We Choose?

This is one of my favorite blog entries that really resonates with me and I wanted to share again! If you haven’t please read… Why Must We Choose?

aneshasharp's Blog

I’m sure you’ve been asked at some point in your life the defining question? So, what do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to be A doctor, A lawyer, A teacher? What are you going to do with your life? The answer to that question is one many people wrestle with for years and for some all of their life. I think the real question isn’t what do you want to be when you grow up, but rather who do want to be when you grow up? Because there are many different ways that your life can express your “who” that doesn’t fit into being one single “what”. When people ask this question they are looking for a single categorizinganswer. I don’t think we mean to catalog one another, but there’s safety in having a clear individualized answer to who someone is and…

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I Refuse To FOR-GIVE! — Tips/How To Walk In the Freedom Of Forgiveness

Hello Everyone,

It’s great to be joining you again! This month I wanted to talk about a topic that many of us struggle with and that topic is FORGIVENESS. Isn’t interesting how the word breaks down, it’s almost like it gives us insight on how to apply it. FORE, meaning BEFORE anyone hurts you because imperfect people (which we all are) are guaranteed to do that, we are already prepared to GIVE them a pass for their sloppy humanity…FORE-GIVE-NESS!

The other day I received a call from another author friend of mine and during our call she began to commend me for being a consistent person. She went on to say how every time she encountered me I’m always consistently kind and how that was a rare trait. She said, “Even what you post on Facebook is consistent.” I laughed because little did she know moments before she had called me I was having an emotional moment. I begin to share with her how I had just typed a long Facebook post ranting about a person who had hurt me, but before I could hit send embarrassing myself with my innuendo of a post (You know the ones you read where a person is talking about someone, but they don’t say their name, however they give just enough clues so the person who they’re talking about knows its them and anyone who knows the person may know as well.) I pressed cancel instead. As we talked further I begin to explain to her that the situation just wasn’t worth me putting out more negative energy and that I had to release this person from the hurt they had caused me and let it go. My friend then says, “You need to make a video or something about forgiveness, people need to hear about that.” So here you have it, a blog. 🙂

In the proceeding paragraphs I’m going to give you some tips from life of how I walk in forgiveness. Let me first say walking in forgiveness doesn’t mean that I don’t ever get hurt, offended, mad, or upset at those closest to me who can affect my emotions in such ways. I feel all those emotions, however I work through them until eventually I end up on the side of forgiving them and letting the offense go. I’ve decided no person is worth me losing my peace, my mind, or dealing with health issues. Anyone who has ever dealt with some serious offenses at the hands of someone else’s reckless behavior understands that you leave your life open to some serious self inflicted damage when allowing un-forgiveness or bitter emotions to stay.

Below are 8 life principles I use to aid me in walking in forgiveness. (In no specific order):

1.) You must first be in a healthy emotional state. What that means is you’ve taken the time to walk down every broken are in your life. That doesn’t mean you sweep it under the rug and pretend like that whatever has caused the breach in your life never happened. That means you take the time to visit that painful place and you allow God to heal it. Now this step is not an overnight process, but a journey. But, once you make a decision to be healed you simultaneously make a decision to forgive the person who caused the inflection. Read this very careful, you are not healed if you haven’t forgiven the person who harmed you. So make a decision to deal with your pain and begin the process of healing.

2.) Understand that the people that you love will hurt you and have grace for their trespasses. This statement doesn’t mean that you allow anyone to abuse you physically, mentally or emotionally. Of course at some point in your life you will need to forgive the perpetrator, but don’t stick around and allow someone to abuse you. (Remember forgiveness is always, always for you, for your emotional well being and health.) The type of offenses I’m speaking of are the ones that come with being in relationship with people and many times they aren’t done on purpose. In fact you and I have even caused people in our life pain and hurt, not on purpose, but as a result of being an imperfect person.

3.) Now that you understand people are going to hurt you that allows you the freedom to FORE-GIVE them when they do and let it go.

4.) Number 3 works best for me when I stay in the mindset of taking nothing personal. Here is a conversation I’ve had in my head one time when someone I was working on project with was being nasty to me. I was like, “Oh they are tripping! They must be having a bad day and I’m not going to entertain that ignorance and ruin my good day!” See, how I was very clear to keep their issue, their issue and not mine. This keeps me free of taking ownership of something I didn’t cause and it releases me to still be kind because, “awe bless their heart they have issues.” I didn’t take it personal. Everyone’s issue with you doesn’t have to be your business, that’s their business to work through. Let it roll off your back.

5.) I remind myself that’s it not that deep. Everything doesn’t deserve a conversation. Sometimes, we want to fix other people’s issues with us. I know I’ve been guilty of wanting people to see me the right way and when they didn’t, I used to get upset. Subsequently, I would have these long conversations trying to convince them that they had me wrong, but I learned some people see you wrong because they want to and no conversation or amount of behavior proving your point will ever change that. Finally I decided you know what Anesha let it go, it’s just not that deep to be getting yourself all worked up over. Some conversations just aren’t worth having. If it doesn’t make something better, edify the situation, bring some light or clarity, or some positive outcome it won’t be had. I find that most little tiffs work themselves out overtime anyway.

6.) Allow yourself to feel your emotions and work through them. Sometimes we can’t avoid feeling the blow of an impact when someone has damaged us. Pain, distraught emotions and hurt feelings are a natural part of life. The bible gives us permission to be angry, but not to allow our anger to cause us to sin. Often times we think we can “stuff our emotions”, but there is no such thing as a stuffed emotion, it will eventually surface to the top again and can manifest in some pretty ugly ways. So allow yourself to feel the pain of being a hurt human, you don’t have to be SUPERwoman or SUPERrman, you are allowed to feel your emotions and even cry if you need to. Get it all out, you can even write your emotions out (kind of like I did in the Facebook post that I didn’t send, but was still able to unleash all the emotions I was feeling) and release it. There’s something about giving yourself permission to feel that allows you to heal and healing will ultimately lead to forgiveness.

7.) Don’t be selfish. Growing up as an only child it’s almost a natural response to view life through a selfish lens because you never have to share anything, not toys, not your parent’s attention, nothing. It’s just you and life is all about you! It took me well into my 20’s and after the birth of my children to begin to look at life from a perspective of not being all about Anesha. Sometimes you have to allow yourself to experience life in someone else’s shoes and feel their emotions, which can be difficult to do when we live an age where the word “selfie” was the most hash tagged word used last year on social media. Often times those who hurt us the most are wounded themselves. There’s a saying, hurt people, hurt people. One of my prayers this year has been, “Lord allow me to be more selfless and see things through other people’s perspective and not my own.” That prayer and journey has been amazing, it has afforded me the experience of seeing how selfish we can be and not even be aware of it.

8.) Whenever you’ve been wounded always remember to pray, talk to God about it. The Holy Spirit is our comforter, he will always aid us in time of pain and walk us through to forgiveness.

These eight tips that I’ve shared have totally revolutionized my life. I am a naturally happy person, but these life principles I’ve been applying to me life have not only made me happier, my life is so much more easy going, I feel so much freedom, I no longer allow people’s issues with me to trap me, I forgive more quickly and I laugh more at things that used to cause me to cry in frustration. Literally things that people used to do that would offend or hurt me, I literally find myself laughing at the situation. I work in ministry and with people, lots of different types of people, I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a friend, and so many other things, all the roles and hats I wear require me to be on the frontline in people’s lives and we all understand in war terms those on the frontline are more susceptible to getting injured. But, I’m thankful to understand that while I may get injured I can be healed and I can walk FORE-GIVE-NESS!

Love and Blessings to you,

Anesha A. Sharp

Do Black Lives Really Matter?

Do black lives REALLY matter? In theory yes, but if we are looking at the answer in realistic terms of what we see in the world today, can we really answer that question with an honest yes?

A few days ago I watched a video in horror and with tears filling my eyes, as I saw a young girl who looked to be around the same age as my fourteen-year-old son being man handled and shoved to the ground. Her face being smashed into the grass as the knees of a grown adult officer was being planted firmly into her thin body! I watched and I cried at the mistreatment of a child, someone’s baby. Who, yes I will agree should have been more respectful, but still didn’t deserve the treatment she was receiving.  She, who was being singled out of the crowd for something she has no control over–the color of her skin! I watched as the officer chased, cursed, yelled, shoved, and disrespected the African American teenagers, not once did I notice him addressing any of the Caucasian youth in the same manner. In fact it was a male teenaged Caucasian who recorded the video that has now gone viral.

The purpose of my blog isn’t to condemn the officer for obvious use of excessive force nor is it to judge disrespectful youth that come in every hue. The purpose of this article is for us to take a look within our own hearts and ask ourselves, do black lives really matter?

The night I watched the video my 14-year-old son who is 6’1 and half, weighs 190 pounds and wears a size 14 shoe came to me and said, “Mom, I’m going to go running at 7am tomorrow morning.” Instantly fear swept over me. We live in a gated community in the suburbs and with only a handful African American families within the community I began to be fearful for my child. Is my black son safe in his own neighborhood? I wondered.

I’m getting ready to be all the way real in the next few sentences. I am a brown-skinned African American woman, who is told often that I am beautiful, so white America embraces me with a different set of lens then that of my teenaged son. He has a very different experience in this world than that of myself and even my husband. When I walk into a mall, I’m not watched. I’m treated kindly and smiled at by salespeople. When I’m out shopping with my husband, I don’t notice many strange looks in his direction. He is light complicated and under six feet. However when I’m out in public with my son I notice the stares and odd looks of my darker complicated, bigger in statue son. It makes me sad, they know nothing about him and yet their facial expressions display their discontent with his presence.

No, all white people ARE NOT prejudice and neither are ALL black people ghetto or thugs. We are smart! We love, we laugh, we are human! The majority of us desire the same American dream that any white person desires. We are not dogs, monkeys, or any sort of animals! Having brown skin or black as people refer to it as, is just that a pigmentation. It shouldn’t be cause for us to be watched, singled out, profiled, stereotyped, abused, jailed, murdered, made to feel like we are voiceless, or should bow down to mistreatment. And, yes things have become better in our country, but there is still so much more love to be given, understanding and sensitivity to be shown, and respect equally distributed. And before someone says African Americans are treated fairly, I must respectfully say you can’t possibly understand the position we forced into in America until you’ve walked in the shoes of a boy whose already met with the stares of world who has already decided who he is without even knowing him. Until you’ve had to explain to your 11-year-old son why a grown man is watching his every move while we shop then you can’t understand the pilate of people pleading with America. We want to really matter and not just be tolerated and hated.

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” Albert Einstein

Why MUST We Choose?

I’m sure you’ve been asked at some point in your life the defining question? So, what do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to be A doctor, A lawyer, A teacher? What are you going to do with your life? The answer to that question is one many people wrestle with for years and for some all of their life. I think the real question isn’t what do you want to be when you grow up, but rather who do want to be when you grow up? Because there are many different ways that your life can express your “who” that doesn’t fit into being one single “what”. When people ask this question they are looking for a single categorizing answer. I don’t think we mean to catalog one another, but there’s safety in having a clear individualized answer to who someone is and we all like safety, right?

…And She Laughed – Why the title AND encouragement for writers!

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters.”  – Epictetus

Why the title?

No matter what language you speak, there are some things that are simply universal like a smile, a hug, love, and laughter. Laugher is a sign of joy, fun, excitement, light heartedness, and amusement. In all my life it has been one of my most favorite things to do! I love laughing and I enjoy having fun and amusing those around me. But, I had a season where I had lost my laugh, I could still smile, but I didn’t laugh. I remember one morning waking up and wondering what was wrong with me. I was so overwhelmed with all that was going on in my life and then it dawned on me, I hadn’t laughed in days—at nothing. Even things that would’ve normally made me laugh didn’t amuse me. I was in a dreadfully gloomy place. Anyone who really knows me knows I can be walking down the middle of a life wrenching trail, but I still know how to enjoy life, relish in the moment and laugh! I know for sure it is my joyous disposition that causes me to WALK through trails and not sit down in them–meaning I don’t stay in them long. But, during this particular season I sat down and I suffered because now what life was doing to me was now happening in me and I couldn’t muster up any joy!

Having Faith Is NOT About Having it Perfected!

 

When I first heard the faith message, I must admit I was intimidated by it. It seemed like there were too many steps, too many rules, and too much perfection involved. And I’m just not that girl.

Having faith is not about having it perfected! Some of you read that line and immediately red flags went up!

Come, read further, let me explain why….

Recently, I’ve talk to several people who are experiencing some very traumatic things in their life and they felt really bad because while they are believing God concerning their situation, they are afraid! The Bible teaches us that without faith it’s impossible to please God, right? So, what are you talking about, Anesha? Sometimes, as believe we put the emphasis more on faith and less about who the faith is in.

Are we putting our faith in faith or are we putting our faith God?

Faith is the substance or the essential of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. It’s a substance. But, often times we see faith as something like meter starting at 0 and ending 100 and  if our “faith is high” then God will answer our prayers, but if it’s not then our prayers must wait in a magic prayer bin in the sky until our faith level reaches at least the 90 percentile mark at which time our prayer request can be answered! What does that even mean…we as believers may have either heard or have even been quoted as saying, “My faith is high…” However, the bible teaches all we need is faith the size of a mustard seed to move mountains, that doesn’t sound like big faith, but the small mustard faith is in a BIG GOD!

So the question must be asked, what do I do with my fear (unbelief) when I’m in faith? Ask God to help you with it. In Mark 9 we find a father who is believing for his son to be healed, but he has some unbelief; unbelief is really a result of fear. He goes to Jesus and cries out for him to help his son! Jesus explains to him, All things are possible to those who believe, in response,  ^“The father instantly cried out, ‘I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief!'” – Mark 9:24  Jesus didn’t respond with depart from me you have unbelief! NO, He healed the man’s son! Why? Because he had faith in God (where the Bible teaches us to house our faith in Mark 11:22)! His unbelief wasn’t that God couldn’t heal his son, his fear or nonbelief was in the circumstance his son was facing!

Because here is the thing when we recognize there’s fear of what we’re facing we then convince are our self that we are out of faith and once we do that now we really are.

I want to leave you with this…the next time you are facing something scary in your life try not to focus on the object of faith more than you focus on God’s ability to fix what ever your situation is. When we are head to head and eye to eye with life’s destruction it’s only human to have some fear, life can throw some dirty blows, but fix your eyes on God, His answers, and His promises!

Have faith in God and when you have fear of your circumstance, ask God to help with your unbelief, your fear! Having faith is not about having it perfected!

My LOVE to  YOU,

Anesha A. Sharp