How often do we compare our insides (our self talk.. what we say and think about ourselves) with other peoples outsides (the image they project to the public)?
Atlas wasn’t forced to hold up the world. He was convinced that if he didn’t the world would fall.
There is a huge difference between sharing someone’s pain and bearing it. Too many times, those in pain use the concern of loved ones as a way to ground what they don’t want to feel themselves.
If you yourself do not cut the lines that tie you to the dock, God will have to use a storm to sever them and to send you out to sea. Put everything in your life afloat upon God, going out to sea on the great swelling tide of His purpose, and your eyes will be opened. If you believe in God, you are not to spend all your time in the calm waters just inside the harbor, full of joy, but always tied to the dock. You have to get out past the harbor into the great depths of God, and begin to know things for yourself – begin to have spiritual discernment.
When you know that you should do something and you do it, immediately you know more. Examine where you have become sluggish, where you have been losing interest spiritually, and you will find that it goes back to a point where you did not do something you knew you should do. You did not do it because there seemed to be no immediate call to do it. But now you have no insight or discernment, and at a time of crisis, you are spiritually distracted instead of spiritually self-controlled. It is a dangerous thing to refuse to continue learning and knowing more.