PRGoretti

 

LETTING GO

By T.. D. Jakes

There are people who can walk away from you.

And hear me when I tell you this! When people can walk away from you: let them walk. I don’t want you to try to talk another person into staying with you, loving you, calling you, caring about you, coming to see you, staying attached to you. I mean hang up the phone.

When people can walk away from you let them walk. Your destiny is never tied to anybody that left.

The bible said that, they came out from us that it might be made manifest that they were not for us. For had they been of us, no doubt they would have continued with us. [1 John 2:19]

People leave you because they are not joined to you. And if they are not joined to you, you can’t make them stay.

Let them go.

And it doesn’t mean that they are a bad person it just means that their part in the story is over. And you’ve got to know when people’s part in your story is over so that you don’t keep trying to raise the dead.. You’ve got to know when it’s dead.

You’ve got to know when it’s over. Let me tell you something.. I’ve got the gift of good-bye. It’s the tenth spiritual gift, I believe in good-bye.. It’s not that I’m hateful, it’s that I’m faithful, and I know whatever God means for me to have He’ll give it to me. And if it takes too much sweat I don’t need it. Stop begging people to stay.

Let them go!!

If you are holding on to something that doesn’t belong to you and was never intended for your life, then you need to……

LET IT GO!!!

If you are holding on to past hurts and pains …….

LET IT GO!!!

If someone can’t treat you right, love you back, and see your worth……

LET IT GO!!!

If someone has angered you.

LET IT GO!!!

If you are holding on to some thoughts of evil and revenge…..

LET IT GO!!!

If you are involved in a wrong relationship or addiction… ..

LET IT GO!!!

If you are holding on to a job that no longer meets your needs or talents

LET IT GO!!!

If you have a bad attitude…. …

LET IT GO!!!

If you keep judging others to make yourself feel better……

LET IT GO!!!

If you’re stuck in the past and God is trying to take you to a new level in Him………

LET IT GO!!!

If you are struggling with the healing of a broken relationship. ….

LET IT GO!!!

If you keep trying to help someone who won’t even try to help themselves.. ….

LET IT GO!!!

If you’re feeling depressed and stressed …………

LET IT GO!!!

If there is a particular situation that you are so used to handling yourself and God is saying ‘take your hands off of it,’ then you need to……

LET IT GO!!!

‘The Battle is the Lord’s!’

LUNG – BURSTERS AND DRUNKARDS:  WALKING INTO CAMEROON

Crossing into Cameroon proved challenging. Aside from the fact that no-one could provide an accurate approximation of travelling time or distance to the border, the road was terrible – really terrible. When unpaved roads in tropical countries aren’t graded to level out the bumps and ensure surface water runs into ditches at the side, heavy rain soon destroys them. Crevasse-deep gullies form between football-sized rocks and the way ahead ends up looking more like a dry mountain river-bed than a road. Such has been the story for much of the past week.

A small river at the bottom of a steep palm-forested valley provided the demarcation between Nigeria and Cameroon. This came 40km, or a day’s journey from Gembu, where my passport had been stamped out of Nigeria. Up until this point I’d just about been able to cope with the steep gradients and bone-numbing tracks without descending from the bike and pushing. Entering Cameroon was another matter.

Before arriving in Cameroon I had been a little confused as to where the boundaries between the English and French-speaking part of Cameroon lay. What was once a German-administered colony was later divided by Britain and France following WWI, although the majority of the country is Francophone.

The French-speaking official finished his gourd of palm-wine, poured himself another then took it along with my passport inside his office. “Donnez moi 2000CFA. It is for my boss”. I wanted to ask what it was about Francophone officials in Africa that made them so much more demanding and less polite than their Anglophone counterparts. But it would have been lost on this drunk, just as the whole thing seemed to pass over Hiromu’s head that we were each being asked to pay a $4 bribe.

I think being Japanese in Africa helps my cycling companion, although everyone assumes he is Chinese. Not only does Hiromu fail to pick up on the nuances of many a situation, atmosphere, tone, or meaning in the voices of people talking to him, but he comes from a country, which far from having an innocent past, has no history  of  wrong-doing from  on the African continent. People regard him much more an alien oddity than me, the white-man from England.

We retrieved our passports without opening our wallets and continued into Nwa, which was having its market-day. There was nothing remarkable on sale; the usual wooden-stall or empty raffia-mat on the ground with a spread of cooking essentials: maggi stock cubes, sugar, small red onions, tinned tomato paste, re-cycled bottles filled with palm oil. More interesting was the fact that surrounding the market square were a number of small shops filled with people drinking palm-wine. Both men and women.

I had read somewhere that more alcohol is consumed in Cameroon than any other Africa nation. The small town of Nwa and many others I passed in the days to follow would certainly live up to this theory. I don’t mean to exaggerate, having barely been in the country a week, but it’s hard to find a sober Cameroonian; half the population appears to be continually drunk.

Lets take Jackson for example, who called himself the living ‘Michael Jackson’ and stumbled out of a lively bar on a Sunday afternoon to wave me down. We had now left behind the lung-bursting ascents and joined the grassfields, or ‘ring-road’ area of Cameroon, which is noted for its scenery. How the Lonely Planet can describe the section of road we were on as ‘decent’ I don’t know. Perhaps the author had also travelled the same road from Nigeria to Nwa and was being ‘relative’ in his/her description. It was comparably horrendous. Not horrendous of the 20% gradient and herculean boulder-type, but horrendous in that a 6” layer of powered dust provided a cushioning over the bumps. Not so bad if there is no traffic on the road. But it only takes one vehicle, of which there is an increasing number as you head south from the town of Ndu, to raise up a thick cloud of red-brown particles, which then slowly descend to fill and cover every surface around. The tea-plantations and slopes of eucalyptus trees would look a whole lot more scenic if they weren’t covered in this film of red-dust. And a touring cyclist could much more appreciate his mountainous surroundings if he weren’t blinking, rubbing his eyes and spitting out mouthfuls of the stuff every time a vehicle went past.

Continue reading here

 

 

An article written by Daily Mail’s Frances Childs. Kinda like an eye opener. Enjoy…

We’ve all heard – or perhaps experienced – a version of this story: man meets woman, they fall in love, date for a while, move in together. They frame photos, arrange them on the walls, pick out furniture, make a nest.

A few years on, marriage is on her mind. But she puts no pressure on him – he’ll ask when he’s ready, right? He doesn’t. She doesn’t push it. The relationship stagnates. Man leaves woman. Man swiftly marries subsequent girlfriend, leaving ex mystified and heartbroken.

This is what happened to Laura Hall, a 34-year-old financial adviser from London. Laura had been living with Douglas for four years when he walked out. ‘I just let the relationship drift on, hoping he’d pop the question in his own time. But he never did. I was devastated when he left.’

And she was even more devastated when she heard he’d proposed to his next girlfriend within a matter of months. But why her and not Laura? Does it mean there are some women who are acceptable as a girlfriend, but not really quite the ticket when it comes to getting hitched?
A recent celebrity example that comes to mind is Pippa Middleton. With her long, luscious hair and legs to die for, Pippa is one of the most eligible women on the planet. The sister-in-law to the future King of England possesses an undeniable sex appeal, not to mention perhaps the most lusted-after derriere in the world.
Yet, according to reports, Pippa’s 18-month romance with Old Etonian Alex Loudon recently ended because his family considered her not quite ‘wife material’ — a phrase guaranteed to make female hackles rise. In this supposedly egalitarian age, is there really such a thing as ‘wife material’?

Well, yes, according to John Molloy, author of Why Men Marry Some Women And Not Others. Molloy claims there are definite types of women that men marry — and, equally definitely, women they do not.
Molloy interviewed more than 3,500 people in his quest to discover exactly why men pop the question to some of us and not others. When he asked men who were about to be married to describe their fiancees, only 20 per cent said ‘gorgeous’ or ‘sexy’. The others focused on their future wives’ personalities.

One man summed up his future bride as ‘the kind of woman you can take anywhere and be proud of’ — a sentiment echoed by many other men in the course of Molloy’s research. More than 30 per cent of the men Molloy interviewed who were about to get married said their family’s positive opinion of their future bride had helped them decide she was ‘the one’ — and most parents aren’t looking for an incredibly sexy or very attention-seeking spouse for their son.

There’s another good reason why men eschew sexiness in favour of other qualities when they look for a wife. ‘Men don’t look for very sexy wives, because — at a very basic animal level — they want to be sure the children they are raising are their own,’ explains psychologist Dr Jane McCartney, an expert in human behaviour and relationships. ‘Men are attracted to qualities such as loyalty, discretion and kindness when they look for a wife. Feisty and flirty is fine for a girlfriend. It’s just not what men want in life partners.

Just look at feisty, flirty, gorgeous Cameron Diaz. Men fall for her in their droves, yet she always ends up single again. If we believe Molloy’s thesis, Cameron’s just too sexy — on some deep, evolutionary level, the men she dates don’t believe she’ll stick around.

But while men apparently don’t want sexy wives, they do want women who take care of themselves. Molloy found women who are slim and well-groomed with nice hair and nails are prized, although those who wear revealing, attention-grabbing clothes are not.

It all sounds a bit schizophrenic: men want to marry women who are sexy and fit, but not too sexy and fit.

Another reason women find themselves without a ring on their finger, Molloy says, is that many simply do not push hard enough for it. He found 73 per cent of the wives-to-be he spoke to had forced the issue themselves rather than waiting for a romantic proposal.

This rings true for Laura Hall. ‘I should have been clear about how much marriage meant to me,’ she says now. ‘I was living with him, doing all the things a wife does, but without a ring on my finger. He could just walk out and in the end that’s exactly what he did.’

While she concedes things had become stale between them, she says it happened precisely because the relationship had lost its momentum — the explicit acknowledgement of commitment that typically leads to engagement, then marriage, then children.

Experts say this is common when couples live together. According to Dr Joel Block, psychologist and author of the book The Real Reasons Men Commit, women need to be wary of serial co-habiters. If a man has had more than one live-in relationship, he is less likely to marry than a man who hasn’t or who is in his first co-habiting relationship.

If you are with a man who has lived with someone before and you want to get married, you need to say so and stick to your guns early on in the relationship. Make your wishes known. It worked for Gemma Jones, 30, a childminder from Kent. ‘I lived with Mark for a year and then I told him I wanted to get married. He was a bit fazed at first and came out with lines like “it’s only a bit of paper” but I explained that marriage was important to me and to my family, who are Roman Catholics.’

‘Mark agreed to set a date when he understood that I really wanted to get married and that I wouldn’t be happy if the relationship just carried on,’ she explains.

Research also demonstrates that men prize women who don’t cook and clean for them as a matter of course. As one man in the survey ungallantly put it: ‘No one marries a servant.’ It seems that men are attracted to women who are aware of their own self-worth. But nowadays isn’t co-habiting merely a sensible step to take before vowing to spend the rest of your life together?

Psychologists agree that moving in together is fine — as long as both people are clear about where they think it will lead. ‘Simply put, most men place marriage on a higher level of commitment than just living together,’ explains Block. ‘While women might think that living together is a step towards marriage, many men view it as a way of buying time — or worse, a good option until they find their
John Molloy is equally blunt. ‘The statistics say most men propose after 22 months. For the next three-and-a-half years, the prospects of marriage gradually diminish. After seven years, the likelihood you’ll get married is virtually nil,’ he says. ‘If you want to get married, statistically speaking, you should start to look seriously for a husband at 28.’

Molloy also advises a little lowering of standards. Some women never get married, he says, because they are simply too fussy. Of the women he interviewed who were about to get married, 20 per cent admitted disliking their future husbands when they first met them. ‘Of course, you should have standards, but it sometimes pays to give men a second or even third chance,’ Molloy advises.

Web designer Nicki Carter from Reading, who at 41 has never been married, worries that now she never will. She ruefully admits: ‘I was probably too picky. I finished with one boyfriend because I thought he wasn’t focused enough on his career. And I finished with another one because I decided he was too possessive..

‘In fact, he was madly in love with me, handsome, funny, well-educated and kind. He wanted to marry me but I wasn’t interested. I always thought I could do better and now I wonder if I was wrong.’
Joel Block argues that there is no such thing as perfect. ‘I think that women who are growing older as they search for Mr Right should reconsider. Would finding Mr “Almost Right” be better than a single life?’ he asks. For some it wouldn’t. ‘Some women just don’t want to get married. They aren’t the marrying type,’ Molloy says.