Four Ideas to Help With Focusing on the Right Fight
Fighting the Wrong Enemy – Part 1
Are you fighting the right enemy? I’ve stopped fighting the wrong enemy. Have you been fighting the wrong enemy all this time? The reason I make this statement is because for a while I thought I was in a fight against our child(ren)’s other parent. Fortunately for us, we didn’t stay in this mode of thinking very long. Sadly to say that’s not everyone’s story. In fact the majority (51% or better), never change their thinking and live life in a constant fight with their child(ren)’s other parent.
In life it’s so easy to be influenced to do and practice what’s normal, what 51% or more of the folks around us are doing. Because it’s easier, we think we must have the results they have and there is nothing we can do differently. Today, I want to help you rethink that approach.
To do so, we must start with making sure our attention is in the right place. What would happen to a country who warred against a threat in a distant land, but had an enemy positioned to attack in their own backyard? You may have been at war with one country, but you might be overlooking the bigger war that’s in your backyard. The same can be said of a family or a person who’s fighting a distant fight, but don’t see the fight that’s right outside their backdoor. We can’t be distracted by a priority that’s less important than the one that can ultimately destroy us. How can we see beyond the fight that created our blended family in the first place?
In this series, we will discuss four ideas in which one can see beyond the fight that has them distracted from the real, more pressing battle. Here are the four ideas we will be discussing:
- You need some Church.
Yes, I said it just like that. You NEED some church. BTW – there’s a reason why church is uncommon. It produces uncommon results. Normal people don’t do the church thing because that’s what normal people do. They follow what other normal people do. You see church gives you an advantage that normal people don’t have and it’s simply the beginning step for one to improve the life they’ve been given. - Learn the principle of being the same today, yesterday, and forever.
I’ll go ahead and give you my reveal. There’s one word that sums up this principle and that word is “consistent.” You must learn to be consistent. If you didn’t know this, discipline is a Godly characteristic, an uncommon characteristic. A person who is disciplined or consistent is one who’s tapped into a God-like quality which has the ability to produce God-like results in one’s life. - Trust and return.
I came up with the principle to “trust and return” when trying to explain to a family member what they should do when their child is away with their other parent. You have to trust that the other parent has your child’s best interest at heart and take two actions in return. Those actions are 1) return from whence you came and 2) return the favor you received of being a shared-time parent as well. - Put your feelings aside.
The uncommon approach is learning how to put aside your feelings. I once heard it said that we should have feelings equivalent to a dead person in that we have no feelings. What would life be like if you didn’t allow your feelings to get the best of you? How much more would it benefit in making your blended family work?
Over the next few weeks we will expound on these four ideas to help you get a better understanding of what battle you should prioritize so that it’s not the one that distracts you from the very fight that could possibly destroy you.
Question: if your focus is on your child(ren)’s other parent, what is that really distracting you from seeing?