When things are not going to so well at a company, the owners, managers, or leaders may decide to change the direction. They may have to make difficult decisions to remove negatives. As individuals we may get too comfortable with negatives and find it hard to let them go. I remember back in the 1980’s the battle was so fierce between Coke and Pepsi. Michael Jackson had signed on to be the spokesperson for Pepsi and they were basically taking more and more of Coke’s market share. The leaders at Coke came up with this new strategy called, ironically, New Coke. Well we all know how that ended…it was a flop. When Coke did what it does best and went back to the basics and focused on its quality and American iconic traditions, Pepsi was left in a distant second.
In our personal lives we sometimes become complacent and we get involved in new strategies or things that we think are going to jump start our lives in a new direction. We allow worldly pleasures to compete with God as being our number one motivator. I can relate to this analogy in the sense of allowing doubt, defeat and the devil to compete with my faith and commitment to God.
Back in 2003-2006 when I was at my worst point of manic depression, I gave up on faith and I retreated. I was living in a cottage on Lake Wedowee in Randolph County. It was a beautiful place to live, if you had a family or maybe even to use as a vacation home or a writing retreat, etc. It was not a good place for a person who was contemplating suicide to live. However, overcome with the depression and the feeling of defeat, I hid from my loved ones, my church family, and many of my colleagues. In my mind, I think I had developed this new marketing strategy to destroy my life one day at a time so that no one would notice when I was gone. The biggest change and attribute of this new way of life for me was that faith was nowhere to be found. I truly abandoned God and was guilty of forsaking the assembly. I called my Aunt Emily one night in one of my tearful pity party’s. I was sitting in the hall closet, completely in the dark, hiding from the world, with my cordless phone. She asked me where are you going to Church? There are two people in this world I can’t tell a lie, my mother and my aunt Emily. They know me too well. I had to tell her I wasn’t going anywhere. She proceeded to lecture me about how my grandmother had raised me and how that is why I can’t get a grip on things. She scolded me for hiding from the world and from God. Angry at first, I said, where do you go to church? I asked this because I knew she didn’t go anywhere. She is a wonderful God-fearing woman, but she does not attend church on a regular basis. Her response to me hit home. She told me she had never been regular in her attendance to church, but I had. She had never reached out for edification from others, but I had. That’s what was missing. Nothing was wrong or different from her faith or her pursuit of God…it was mine. I was the one who was living differently from what I had always known!
Once you become a Christian and you worship with brethren on a regular basis, you can’t ever fall away and expect to be happy. The only choice you have is to progress and mature. I had to make major changes in my life if I was going to survive. I had to stop hiding in those woods and get back to civilization and to a place where I could reach out to others, and I had to get back in church and get my life right with God. Hebrews 11:6 says “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.”
My first step to healing emotionally and getting control of my depression was getting back in church and getting my faith in God on track. See, He never left me, but I left Him. When you find that you “earnestly seek Him” and you truly believe in your heart that God exists to take care of us, you can achieve and overcome anything. Recently my friend, Courtney Hammett and I have been having a lot of discussion about faith. She has always attended church in different congregations where I have. Her family and I have been close friends for a very long time, but she expressed a desire to get more involved and to give more of herself to God. She’s an elementary school teacher in her first year of teaching. She recently started mentoring the young girls in our Church and even teaching Sunday School. She also told me that she has improved her prayer life immensely and focuses so much on His Word every day. In a day and time where most first year teachers get pink slipped, Courtney prospered and now is going to be celebrating her second year as a teacher. She and I both believe God’s plan is for her to be successful. If you look at your life and all your successes, isn’t it true that God was a major part of it??
These days when I trip and stumble and when I go through my rapid cycling of emotions related to the Bipolar Disorder, I count on God first to get me through. Never again will I turn my back on Him and what a great blessing it is to know that when we obey the Gospel and become a Christian, regardless of where we go or what we do, He will never turn His back on us. He is always right there waiting with open arms.
Back to the basics as a Christian, every challenge or hurdle in life we encounter needs to be conquered with prayer and faith. It’s the only marketing strategy our lives need to yield the desired results of success.
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