Gossip: Poisoning the Well of Love
Abundance Is Your Birthright
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash
“…I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” – John 10:10
God created our universe with abundance for everyone. He created an abundance of galaxies and planets for us to explore and fill. He created an abundance of animals and plants for our benefit. So why doesn’t everyone experience abundance?
Ignorance Creates Blockages
God created a system that delivers abundance to each person as they need it and to the degree that they need it. Ignorance of the system and how it works causes people to be deprived of their share of abundance.
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…” – Hosea 4:6
That ignorance creates blockages in the abundance delivery system must be removed for abundance to flow. I explain more about that here:
https://youtu.be/jslewm54ju8?si=8zjlEa-1yCvRTJTV
Love Fuels the System of Abundance
“…for God is Love.” – 1 John 4:8
God created the system. His love fuels it. When we align our lives with His will, He restores what is broken. In this video, I explain how the Our Father contains the keys to understanding the connection between God and Abundance:
https://youtu.be/omtCjGIRFdA?si=1YpYsIJIGA5ebpaN
Love Comes Through Relationships…and Religion Provides Rules for Healthy Relationships
“Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: ‘I am the Lord your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you in the way you should go.’” – Isaiah 48:17
Relationships are the garden in which love grows. Relationships can give life, or they can destroy it, depending upon their nature. Religion provides rules for guiding us in the formation of healthy relationships that give life rather than destroy it.
https://youtu.be/8LGvmfAIZuo?si=nWjMM3x8B9TBjH2Y
Which Religion Is the Right Religion?
"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." - James 1:27
The right religion for the pursuit of restoring abundance is the religion that provides us the best tools, training, and modeling in terms of how love is to be lived out. I explain why Christianity offers the superior model in this video:
https://youtu.be/FFJaFm0bU5o?si=fr-VItUoWqWBjW1x
I explain what the Catholic Church offers that all other denominations of Christianity do not provide in this episode:
https://youtu.be/o2vm7BEWwdY?si=C2m9r0ZzPAO33Pls
The 7 Sacraments: Keeping Abundance Flowing
“If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in His love. I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.” – John 15:11
Christ provides, and the Church safeguards, the 7 Sacraments to ensure that everyone can access the supernatural support needed to live out this call to love. I explain the value of the 7 Sacraments and the role they play in keeping Abundance flowing in this video:
The 5 Things That Keep Faithful Catholics from Receiving Abundance
Many people reading this are faithful Catholics. They might be reading and watching this thinking to themselves, “But I’m doing all that stuff. Why isn’t Abundance coming to me?” I know that feeling well.
God sets things up so that I experience the struggle first. He reveals to me what causes the struggle, and then calls me to teach His children how to get out of their own way so His abundance can reach them. Here are the lessons I’ve learned over the last year.
1. Your Expectations about Abundance
Our expectations often block us from being able to see how God delivered abundance in our lives. If, as mine initially was, your expectation for abundance is an influx of money, your false expectation will lead to bitter disappointment. That disappointment can cause you to abandon the path of abundance and return to your old ways of living.
2. Your Stories about Abundance
Our brains write stories about every emotionally impactful experience in our lives that explain why it happened. It does this as part of the predictive algorithm that helps us survive. That predictive algorithm allows us to anticipate danger and move away from it, as well as to capitalize on good things and find more of them.
This capacity for writing stories can work against us. Stories written based on limited information, false data, or mistaken ideas work against us instead of for us. They can place unnecessary limits on our capacity to receive abundance.
As I explained in my article, Perfection Is a Journey, Not a Destination, my own stories created many blocks to my ability to give and receive love. Finding those stories and rewriting them allowed me to open up to love and start receiving more abundance.
3. Not Knowing, and Operating in, Your Purpose
No one is here by accident. This life is a giant jigsaw puzzle and each person conceived is a piece in that puzzle. All the pieces are necessary and essential to the completion of it.
Some of us are those weird-looking middle pieces in this jigsaw puzzle. We possess all these indentations and bulbous areas. It’s hard to know what we’re meant to be just by looking at us. It’s not until we connect to the right people that we “snap into place” and suddenly everything about us makes sense.
God called each of us into being for a particular purpose and with a particular plan in mind for our lives. Fulfilling the purpose and operating in God’s plan for our lives brings joy beyond all measure. It ensures that the work we do doesn’t feel like work at all and comes naturally to us.
When we aren’t operating in our purpose, or don’t know what our purpose is, our lives remain a mystery to us. We don’t know what we should be doing with our lives and they can begin to seem meaningless to us. We can feel like we don’t fit in anywhere and don’t belong anywhere.
Discerning your purpose requires connecting to community. Getting plugged into the Church community helps you discern where you fit in that puzzle. As you step up to serve, notice what attracts you and what gives you joy to do. What contributions can you make that you would happily make for the rest of your life if given the opportunity? That is your calling.
4. Trying to Operate in Someone Else’s Gifts
Everyone gets different gifts by God depending on their calling. Some gifts bring obvious benefits. Others can seem to be worthless until they are examined in the right light.
I think about these gifts as rough gems, before they are cut and polished. If you receive a box of rough emeralds, before they are cut and polished, you’re going to reject them as worthless. They don’t look like much to the untrained eye.
To the experienced gem dealer, a box of emeralds is worth more than a box of diamonds of the same weight. That’s because emeralds are 20 times rarer than diamonds.
Gem dealers also know that if a diamond is flawed, you cut away the flaw because it detracts from their value. However, all emeralds bear flaws. These flaws become character marks that enhance the value of an emerald.
Evaluating an emerald by the same standard as a diamond leads to tossing the emerald as worthless. Evaluating a diamond by the same standards used for an emerald will lead to missing out on what diamonds do best.
Some people’s gift is in the area of making money. They make it in their sleep without effort, but those people often struggle in the area of relationships and love. They need greater support connecting to their hearts and the hearts of others.
My gifts lie in the areas of creative strategy, writing, and teaching. The years I spent trying to operate in the gift of making money made me miserable. It did nothing but ensure lots of failure and heartache followed. Helping people share their stories and teaching them how to identify and remove their blocks, though, energizes and empowers me. It’s what I would do all day every day for free and never tire of it if the bills were kept paid.
5. Keeping Your Gifts Hidden
Fear can lead us to keep our gift hidden out of fear of being hurt or taken advantage of by others. For decades, I allowed fear to convince me that if I succeeded in operating in my gifting, others would demand more of me than I could give. I also feared others would reject my gifts as worth less than theirs and reject me at the same time.
Keeping our gifts hidden or holding back from sharing them with others is also known as burying your talents. I wrote about this on Saturday as I reflected on Matthew 25:14-30. It’s a great mistake, an offense against God, and leads to a lot of misery for you and everyone else.
I can’t keep my gifts reserved for those with money. That would be wrong. My gifts are meant to help all people, not just those with the gift of making money. God called me to be more like the sower of seeds who sows on all the ground, not just the good ground.
Commit to Sharing in Abundance So You May Receive in Abundance
I encourage you to be generous with your gifts. A farmer who wishes an abundant harvest does not sow sparingly. He sows all that he has into the ground.
The one who sows sparingly reaps a sparing harvest. He runs the risk of everything he sows being lost before the harvest arrives.
Those who don’t respond to your gifts with reciprocal generosity are your tests of commitment to this path. God ensures that your sharing is not wasted. It teaches you something of value that you’ll use later when someone who values what you do comes along.
When you get hurt in the process of sharing your gifts, forgive them so you don’t get hardened to love. Choose to continue sharing so that love can continue flowing into and through you.
Need My Help? Comment Below or Email and Let Me Know
If you need access to my gifts, I offer them to you. Comment below and let me know what your need is if you need help with your story or with identifying your blocks to love. If you aren’t ready to share publicly, I encourage you to email me. Let’s engage in a private conversation. Send it to 40daywriter at gmail dot com. Put in the subject line [BREAKING OPEN ABUNDANCE].
Join the Crusade for Love
If you value my work and you wish to support it, visit my BuyMeaCoffee.com page or simply share this message with people you know. Let’s work together to share more love with the world.
Want More Abundance Content?
Last year, Path To Publishing's Joylynn Ross and I hosted the first-ever Breaking Open Abundance webinar. You can watch the replay here: Abundance Now! 7 Steps To Begin Breaking Open Abundance
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About the Author
Award-winning international speaker and author, Brandy M. Miller is a Catholic revert. Raised in a culturally Catholic home, she left the faith at 16 in search of the truth and returned 12 years later when she found it right where she left it. Today, she is convinced that the Catholic Church is the cure to society's ills and is eager to help share the Gospel truth to those who have ears to hear it. When she isn't writing for or about the Catholic Church, she offers her writing talents to Catholics who would like help sharing their witnesses of Christ's work in their lives.
