Are You Feeling Powerless?

Are You Feeling Powerless?

Are you feeling powerless?  If yes, you undoubtedly feel trapped and hopeless within your current circumstances.  The failure to receive acceptable answers to your faithful and fervent prayers to Almighty God for deliverance and resolution compounds your bewilderment.  It is as if your cumulative challenges eclipse God’s presence.  Possibly, you suspect you are wasting time and talent in your current position.  You have very little to show for your hard work and determination.  You accept aspects of your private and personal relationships because you cannot change people but you fiercely disagree with them; acceptance is a pragmatic strategy for lessening conflict in your life. 

Financially, you observe a decline in your credit rating because a tenant refuses to pay; thereby causing you to be late in remitting some invoices.  Adding insult to injury, you bear unnecessary legal and court fees to evict the tenant.  If that were not enough, a thief comes in the middle of the night and saws off the catalytic converters on your sport utility vehicle.  You have to sideline other pressing commitments to deal with your automobile insurance company.  Although they agree to pay the claim, you still bear the deductible expense.  You would apply those funds to something else.  As it relates to your health, you dislike being on medication but realize you need to avoid exacerbating your condition.  Increases in crime and airplane traffic threaten the quality of life in your neighborhood.  Though you write letters of complaints, disproportionately your neighbors appears indifferent to the rising decline in the area.  Do you feel powerless to change any of these situations?

Can it be that Almighty God, contrary to His Word, abandons you to randomness in natural forces and human relationships?  Angrily and cynically, you ask, “What is the purpose in genuinely relying upon God if nothing is going to change?”  Your prayers seem an exercise in futility.  Then, you recall faithful adherence to spiritual disciplines empower you to wait for a favorable outcome. 

As I honor your anger and frustration as I have lived with feelings of powerlessness throughout my life, I ask you to examine the origins of these feelings.   Unmistakably, intractable feelings of powerless stem from your family of origins and formative years.  Were you denied a voice?  Were you told that children are to be seen and not heard?  Was yelling an excessively used form of discipline?  Were you made to cower under the intensity of a booming voice that made you shudder with fear?  In answering yes to any of these questions, you determine fundamental causes of feeling powerlessness.  Humiliating and demeaning treatment stifled your voice.  You were made to feel that you must accept whatever anyone in authority does.  Someone instilled fear of paralyzing proportions within you.  Thus, you could not conceive alternatives to your situation.  Running away did not occur to you.  You did not rebel or sabotage.  Actually, you were told to conform uncritically to your family’s context otherwise you are not a good person.  As a child, you had to live with ineptitude and incapacities of adults in your family. 

As patterns of powerlessness calcified in your developmental setting, an attitude of helplessness emerged.  Do you recall running to your room so that you could cry stinging and burning tears about your hopeless predicament?  Approaching adulthood, you began to demolish this pattern.  However, your sporadic internal work proved insufficient to destroy the pattern.  As a consequence, a seductive and slithering king cobra of fear occasionally rears its head.  Recoiling underneath this formidable threat, you repeat the unfortunate pattern of believing you do not have any choices.

 In the workplace, you repeat this pattern by subjecting yourself to people whose talents and abilities are inferior to yours.  Ironically, someone whose best writing does not equate with your rough draft edits your written work.  Have you worked with bosses whose intelligence and character were far beneath your own?  In romantic relationships, did you allow yourself to be taken hostage because you did not have courage to end the relationship?  What explains your decision to remain in a relationship that undermines your emotional, spiritual and psychological well-being?  How could you allow someone to profess love for you in one moment and wound you with demeaning and profane language in the next minute?  Your pattern of powerlessness convinced you yet again to tolerate unacceptable and disrespectful aspects of a “love” relationship.  Summarily, within your professional and private lives, you fail to understand you right and power to choose to live differently.

You have choices!  You are not helpless, hopeless or powerless!  Today, determine in your mind and heart to live the life you have imagined in the blissful days of youthful naiveté.  You have the right to be happy, joyous and free.  Marianne Williamson posits, “If you think you are wasting your life, chances are; you are.”  You are no longer an emotionally wounded child without options and resources.  Conduct a thorough inventory of your assets and liabilities.  Therein lays the tools and possibilities of a whole new life for you.  Are you willing to embrace this new life and shoulder the responsibility of change and growth?

If you still lack the courage and willingness to live as you deeply desire, then ask Almighty God to help you.  God transforms inadequate willpower into limitless willingness to confront any adversity.  One author posits, “The essence of growth is the courage to change and the willingness to shoulder the responsibility that comes with it.”  God can eradicate your pattern of powerlessness.  Ask Him as you demonstrate genuine reliance and humility.  Prayer, meditation, counseling, journaling and other types of spiritual practices create your power to choose.  God in accordance with Psalm 139:13-16, opens the eyes of your heart to enable you to see yourself as He does.  With a genuine glimpse of your divine character, you no longer recoil in the presence of any human being.  You will not grovel as a child of God you do not have to do so.  God is your Infinite supply, protection and provision.  You need not fear what any human will say or do!  As you daily affirm your divine identity, you decimate fear and self-doubt.  Your new joy and freedom from God fulfill the often quoted dictate of Henry David Thoreau, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams; live the life you imagine.”