I would like to improve the social-media community, by removing the LIKE button. Permanently.
There are brilliant posts that deserve a LIKE.
I love to encourage others with my LIKE.
I love when others encourage me with their LIKE.
But sometimes, the LIKE can become youridol.
Did you know that you can buy LIKES? My kids told me….I had no idea!
As Christian writers, we don’t write to get likes.
We write because it is the right thing to do.
Our post remains as a small gorgeous diamond, hidden in the grass, watching for God to join it to a soul. Not to a LIKE.
And not to the whole world!
A seed (your post)and a soul ✨️ ❤️ will only bear fruit when God plants to begin with.
Jesus must be at that root.
The LIKE itself is not the Jesus root.
It is merely someone liking your post.
It could be a carnal LIKE, a tired LIKE, a jealous LIKE, a grumpy LIKE or the millionth and one LIKE, only because the first million LIKED first and you felt the need to follow the masses.
I think the LIKES that get 5 gold stars, are the LIKES that don’t shine much on earth at all. But will in heaven.
I will make a confession….many posts I liked on FB, I didn’t even want to LIKE. I was merely falling in the trap of social media and joining the crowds so I wouldn’t feel lonely and ignored.
As Christian writers, don’t allow the absence of LIKES, to mess with your head.
I sometimes get them, I sometimes don’t. Big deal! God isn’t fussed, why should I be?
I have had over 8000 visits at helenolenjin.life and on my published writings posts, I don’t have masses of readers visiting every week. However, readers still do come, and these are the ones that count.
Short videos are very popular today but who said writing needs to become extinct?
We keep writing, because we know this is God’s desire for us.
Please do not stop writing your posts for God.
The absence of LIKES or the fact that your post is not in exciting video TikTok format, does not mean you are not doing God’s will.
Think of when LIKES and TikTok never existed.
How freeing!
Write like these never existed!
Then enjoy the freedom of Christ.
This is how God’s work is meant to be.
I like what someone said, “Go cold turkey on the LIKES!”
Once upon a time, I felt severely stressed about something. At that moment, I really begged God to show me the answer.
His response was so simple it was almost ridiculous!
He simply told me to “slow down.”
I took His advice seriously and it was life changing.
The poem I wrote below is about slowing down. I wrote it for myself firstly so that I would never forget God’s message to me personally. Secondly, I hoped a few others would read this so it would slow them down too.
Many people do not realise that slowing down is the answer to many things.
Recently I have learnt to surrender my weight fear to God.
I pray alot and I find God really helps me.
Here are my Christian ramblings tonight…
I had an irrational fear of getting fatter and fatter. Not that I am really overweight, only 10 kgs! After having four kids, it’s hard to shift! I am 52 years old and at a great stage in life but abit rounder than I would like to be.
I used to obsess a lot with losing weight and after many failed programs, I surrendered the 10kgs to God. I still haven’t lost them but instead, I put the onus on God Himself!
If He wants me to be 10kgs less, I am sure I will be. If not, the 10kgs belongs to Him and if He is not fussed about this, I shouldn’t be either. This is significant. Simply because there is a time to actually quit and give up! In this place, you give the unresolved issue to God permanently!
One day, it felt like God was speaking to me.
His words were very simple.
“I am the Program.” (worthy of a capital)
Wow!
Not Weight Watchers, Noom…but God.
Sometimes programs can be like idols.
We often trust these more than God.
Imagine losing 10kgs in the flesh…and this not registering on heaven’s scales at all.
I can’t imagine God saying, “Wow, your skinner, I love you more now.”
My “fat fear” was nothing about losing weight but rather I was not trusting God to help menot get fat!
So….guess what?
I stopped all programs. I put the scale in the garage. I stopped keeping a food diary. That didn’t work anyway. Years ago it did!
Now, thank God, I am starting to heal.
Without programs.☺️
God is my new program and nothing else.
When God is your only program, everything starts to make sense.
Maybe I will go on an actual weight loss program later down the track but that’s God’s business and His money!
Instead, the program remains Him.
God is an amazing program.
He is real.
He will help you. 🙏
He doesn’t cost a cent and He has no side effects. There is no need to keep a diary because of Him. If you weighed God on our scale, I am sure He would not even register, and my spirit/soul weight wouldn’t register either! Often weight is not important from the perspective of heaven.
As He weans me off earthly programs and plans for now I have felt great joy and freedom and have started to heal from these destructive food patterns.
Sometimes it is OK to give up, when your soul lessons are more important.
I’m sure God never looked down at me and said, “Look at Helen. Still 10kgs overweight!”
Rather maybe He thought, “She still doesn’t trust me. Her trust in me, is what counts.”
One thing I do know, is that heaven’s scale matters more and you can put the human scale away (for good). God knows your weight (without even weighing you)! I would rather Him be “my scale” when I find myself getting overly obsessive.
God doesn’t lead you to obsessions, He leads you away from them.
Trust God-in-the-moment with healthy food.
Take a break from failures. ☺️
If you trust a program, you just get a program only.
If you trust God (zero cost by the way), you get Him (all free) and nothing stands in the way, plus He may also bless you with a free program that actually works. (The 16:8 intermittent fasting works really well for me)
Now I eat-in-the-moment and eat in the present. This feels very freeing. Like a child, sort-of-ish! Remember when we were kids? We ate normally, no F.O.F. (fear of fat)
I think that’s the way God wants us to eat.
If you are struggling to lose weight, maybe this post will help you. Maybe a weight loss program is the worst plan for you. Maybe you need to quit altogether and forget all about diets. Maybe you can’t even afford to pay the fees for a new weight loss program.
God’s help is free but overlooked by so many.
God may not even want you to lose weight right now.
Ask Him to help you identify the root issues.
Sometimes they are not in your body at all, but rather your soul.
(Send me a message at helenolenjin71@gmail.com if you are struggling)
He may tell you to quit everything but Him. For now.
When this happens, you are in the best place for a miracle, way bigger than weight loss.
Enjoy my Christian poems below. They will encourage you. ❤️
They will make you think of God.
They help me forget (about food, etc….).
God takes away our hungry feelings.
Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
If these two words are used in prayer, then I would not ban them. If these two words are used to call upon God genuinely, what happens after, can result in mind blowing miracles.
However, I have noticed that most people use these two words without even thinking about God.
“My God” is thrown around, rubbed in the dirt and coupled with swear words during movies and really really sadly, the person saying it, misses the amazing prayer it could be.
Using God’s name in vain, is not what God wants.
This speech is offensive to God.
To say “My God” in prayer 🙏 is what God wants.
He is real and only answers when He is addressed respectfully. ❤️ You would be the same way. ….Imagine someone kept saying your name over and over again and never acknowledging you. That would hurt your feelings. Imagine how God feels.
God can be trusted! If you are finding this lesson of trust, difficult to learn, read my article below. It will help you believe in God. Once you believe in Him, it is easier to trust Him.
“God sits above the circle of the earth. The people below seem like grasshoppers to him! He spreads out the heavens like a curtain and makes his tent from them.” Isaiah 40:22
The ant exists in his own little world. Within himself he feels wise. He feels that he knows everything.
He thinks that his little ant brain is it. The absolute! He knows all the ant hills. He knows the ant trails. He is the smartest ant around.He speaks ant.
He loves crawling into boxes. He thinks these big structures will teach him what he needs to know. He spends a lot of time hanging out inside the square. He knows the corners perfectly. The little escape cracks that take him out of the boxes keeps him busy.
One day the ant decides to think outside the square. So he leaves his box. He figures he knows everything in life but he is getting bored.
On the way he meets me, Helen Olenjin, the blogger.
He suddenly becomes big enough so he can see me.
A big blogger faces a big ant.
We are both the same size now.
We talk.
A bit like the talking donkey scenario in the Bible.
Where you would say, “Huh? That doesn’t fit.”
The ant can understand my English with his new but still limited supernatural brain.
He hears me but he still doesn’t completely understandyet.
I get this!
As I just googled and read, “Each ant’s brain is simple, containing about 250,000 neurons, compared with a human’s billions.” (sciencefocus.com)
He has lived in dirt for so long that is all he knows.
I tell him about life above the dirt.
I tell him about humans.
I tell him about our complex networks above ground.
He hears about our cities, our countries, the internet, electricity, cars, mobile phones, planes and all the high tech stuff. He hears about social distancing. This is very surprising to him! His tribe are super squashed together.
In his world, ants can’t measure the 1.5 meters. Hand washing? Nah, never heard of it! He doesn’t even know what a hand is. Simple maths and literacy skills are incomprehensible to his tiny brain.
When I try to explain to him how to sign into Facebook, I notice he gets really offended.
He simply doesn’t get me! He even refuses to believe in Apple!
But then the ant slowly learns. The more I talk, the more his humility grows.
The ant thought He knew absolute truth. In actual fact, he was dead wrong.
He only believed a false absolute.
“A false absolute is not the same as absolute truth,” I patiently explain.
He crawls home with a huge dose of humble pie on his back.
He thinks, “How wrong I was. I thought my square was the whole world!”
This ant makes me think of a human who refuses to even logically consider the possibility of a God!
Mytheoretical ant was an atheist! But he made progress!
The iPhone talk finally broke him. He understood that if he could not comprehend the iphone, he indeed was created!
In that exact moment, he grew.
“I have a Creator!” he shouted.
“My unbelief in Him stopped me from growing for all these years!”
OK, end of my ant story.
So where does that put us humans doing SOAP?
SOAP stands for Scripture, Observation, Application and Prayer. It is an excellent study method to use at it encourages you to focus on God’s Wordand apply these lessons to your own life.
If a human had a conversation with God during SOAP/Bible study, we would be like the ant. Blown again by heavenly truths we never knew existed. I don’t think we could even understand God at his level. Just like the ant can’t understand ours.
Now is your hardest SOAP question answered?
Not so offended at the real God anymore?
Yes, yes, yes!!
Finally we start to spiritually grow. Like the ant.We finally understand that the God we were believing in previously, was fiction. God didn’t like your fictitious God either!
Becoming an ant short term was not a wasted SOAP exercise for me.
It showed me how small we really are.
And how full of ourselves we are.
And how wrong we can be about God and life.
We only see the world from our own tiny human shell.
We have a very close personal relationship with our own shell.
We know it perfectly.
We may think our shell is our whole world. We may perceive this to be everything and the absolute truth. We may centre all our thoughts, beliefs and perceptions around self.
Like the ant we may create our own personal reality through it. But is this the absolute truth? Of course not. It is only an ant’s eye view.
An ant atheist thinks the thoughts he has in his shell represents absolute truth.
“I don’t believe in God based on 250 000 neurons, therefore he doesn’t exist.”
“Or because I cannot grasp how the iPhone works, I also don’t believe in God. Simply because both are unexplainable to my tiny brain.”
As you and I struggle to write SOAP we see the reality of the situation.
We are like the ant too. But with 86 billion neurons. Still a tiny brain next to God.
We have a tiny Biwbel (Squeaky voice for Bible).
We wrote a tiny SOAP.
We are SOAPING from the perspective of tiny.
But we still keep going as the application of it makes perfect sense through faith in God.
My SOAP view trusts God and His Word. But not my human brain only.
For the Christian, faith is always stronger than logic.
But we still need to keep logic.
With this ant’s logic and faith, he would finally be able to grasp the incomprehensible belief that God really existed!
When 1 + 1 didn’t = 2, he could coolly surrender tofaith in the supernatural workings of God above the dirt!
We become like the ant too, no longer getting offended when 1 + 1 doesn’t always=2.
God’s math system doesn’t always make sense!
Hello faith!
When we use faith and logic together, others who don’t have full faith yet, are more inclined to listen to your Christian beliefs.
So keep talking to the logical atheist you know or the former burnt Christian. Remember that God Himself will open their eyes through faith supernaturally, not by logic alone.
But “logic” can still be an initial stepping stone towards faith.
“Dear God. I am struggling to believe in You. Please reveal Yourself to me. I am your creation. You are my Creator. Please show me the right way. In Jesus name. Amen.”