Are you Mary or are you Martha?

In the Bible, there tells a story of Mary of Bethany and her sister Martha. Jesus visits them a few times and every time, Mary stops what she is doing and sits at Jesus' feet. Martha always scrambles trying to be the woman of hospitality and trying to hard to make sure everyone is amply accommodated. Mary's disregard to help Martha irritates her and she asks Jesus to tell Mary to help her. Jesus responds to Martha and tells her "Martha, Martha. You are too worried and bothered."

You see Mary had a Type A personality. Someone who has the gift of hospitality, but is easily distracted by truly listening to others because she was too busy and worried that she needed to accommodate her guests. She wasn't a bad person; she just didn't do or say the most ideal things. I'm Martha most of the time. I'm not a terrible person, in fact, I really care about other people sometimes more than me. But that sometimes be misinterpreted as less than positive. I need to make a personal committment to not worry about pleasing so many people and instead enjoy those that choose to let me into their lives and vise versa.

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I encourage to read from the book of Luke Chapter 10, versus 38-42 to read the story for more detail.

Some of the things I have been learning are when you are faced with a challenge, an emergency, or any type of crisis, you need to follow certain steps to refrain from becoming overwhelmed:

1. Be Cool - don't let your temperment dictate your agenda. If you let it dictate your agenda, then it dictates the circumstances.
2. Call a Time Out - Get your priorities right. Think of it as being a coach for a football or basketball team. The team is down by points that could make or break the win for them. The coach calls a time out to pull his team in and give a pep talk or say what needs to be done from a perspective that's not on the court or field.
3. Get the Big Picture - Get everything in perspective before you react. Make sure that you are not speaking or doing anything that will do more harm than good.

A few things to remember: Every thought we think is creating our future. Negative thoughts can be turned around. We need to release the past and forgive everyone, including ourselves.