Tag: God

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When the Focus Has Been Found

February 4, 2014 jcladyluv

I have in mind the plans for this year and what I wanted to get accomplished but my plans were somewhat generalized. I hadn’t been able to be more detailed in my plans and my goals and the focus was a bit off. Then I talked to Ms. L last night and we talked about things that had nothing to do with writing or our separate businesses, things that were personal. Eventually we did get to the topic of our business endeavors and I expressed my frustration to her because I knew the things I wanted to do and get done but I just didn’t have a concrete plan (or even a vague one) of how to go about accomplishing them.

Within a manner of thirty minutes (probably less) Ms. L helped me to develop a comprehensive plan of action to get the things I need done, more specific details on how to get the most out of those things, and a plan to promote those projects that I have to get accomplished. She even helped me to add some projects to the list which tie in really well with the other ideas and can do more for my business as a whole. She helped to focus my ideas and goals so that they weren’t so all over the place in my mind.

Ms. L is a godsend and I am so thankful that God sent me a friend like her, whose mind works similar to mine, whose bones in her body also are filled with creativity. I wrote a post about when you don’t have the right people around you it could essentially hinder your progress. However, having the right person or people around you, who have the same ideals and whose goals are not necessarily the same, but inadvertently linked with one another.

Ms. L was definitely someone sent into my life by God and she keeps me sane and she reminds me whenever I forget (and I forget a lot) that everything that I need to make my dreams a reality is already within me so long as I have the faith that it is there. Make sure that you know who is surrounding you but not only that, make sure that you don’t let their value in your life go to waste. God didn’t put them there in your life for nothing. He placed them there so they could be a vessel to use, so use them!

Jimmetta Carpenter

My Write 2 Be is…

CEO/Writer/Editor

Write 2 Be Media/Write 2 Be Magazine

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310

The Faith of a Child

February 3, 2014 jcladyluv

I remember when I was younger having such big dreams. They were dreams that honestly seemed impossible to everyone that I told them to but to me they seemed like a no brainer. You couldn’t have ever told me then that I wasn’t ever going to achieve those goals because I would’ve just told you that you were crazy for not believing in me and my talent and abilities.

As I got older and into my adulthood and life started to unfold differently than my original plan my dreams shifted, in some ways to include larger goals, and the words of those naysayers started to get inside my head. I started to think that I was wishing for too much and dreaming way too big. I started to think that maybe I should only strive for what seemed realistically possible. I guess along the way my big dreams were always still in the back of my mind but I managed to dull their shine by settling for the things that seemed somewhat achievable, the things that were safely within my reach.

I was watching Joel Osteen the other morning and he spoke about dreaming big and not being afraid to pray God-sized prayers for yourself because there is nothing so big that God can’t do. He reminded me that you get what you ask for, or in this case pray for, and that if all you ever do is pray the safe prayers and ask for the small and ordinary things, then that is what you’re going to get. He reminded me that I am not bothering God to ask for what I really want and that it is not selfish to go big rather than play it safe.

I was never one to want a mediocre life before and my dreams cannot become a reality if I only play things safe so why am I. Don’t get me wrong, I do pray, a lot, but I pray unselfish prayers and I pray things for my daughter, or for what would suffice for the moment to get me through a particular period of time. I suppose I somehow developed this idea that there were certain things that I shouldn’t ask God for, things that would sound selfish considering the misfortune of so many in this world, things that seemed too big to ask God for, things that I guess I didn’t want to believe were possible for me to have, which is funny because when I was younger I never believed that anything was impossible for me to have.

What Joel Osteen was saying about daring to ask God for the big things, the things that seem to be impossible, resonated with me. It took me back to that kid that wasn’t afraid to dream big and who wasn’t scared to pray for those things that everyone else thought I was crazy for even hoping would come true. I hadn’t realized that I was putting limitations on God and what he was able to do for me. More importantly, I was underestimating what God’s purpose for me was and not being bold enough to ask him for what he had already promised me was mine.

When you are seeking out the things you want most out of life, don’t walk in the safe zone like I have been doing. Walk in the faith zone and trust in what God has planned for you. If you have not, it is because you asked not. Dare to dream big and stop praying small. God is an awesome God who can do so many big things that he is just waiting for us to ask for.

Jimmetta Carpenter

My Write 2 Be is…

CEO/Writer/Editor

Write 2 Be Media/Write 2 Be Magazine

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You Have What You Need For the Season You Are In

January 28, 2014 jcladyluv

I have a lot of expectations for myself, a lot of big dreams that take putting in a lot of work. Unfortunately, a lot of the reason that I end up giving up on some of them is because I’m afraid that I’ll never be able to do it perfectly and of course if it’s not done right then it just shouldn’t be done at all. The problem with that logic is that nothing ends up ever getting done because perfection just doesn’t exist. Sadly, knowing something logically does not stop you from continuing the same bad habit.

Sometimes you feel like you just don’t have everything you need to accomplish what it is that you want to get accomplished, in order for it to be done just right. Truth is that God gives us everything that we need for the moment that we are in and if we don’t have it, it’s because we don’t need it yet. He would never give us the purpose that he gives us, the passion that he gives us, if he were not going to give us the proper tools and skillset to make those things a reality.

I talked with a friend yesterday and she asked me when I was going to start using the YouTube channel that I have and putting it out there that I can sing as well as write. Someone else asked me about recording my poetry and putting it on there as well. I came up with quite a few excuses, I’m scared of the camera, I’m afraid that people won’t like it, I don’t think anyone would even look at it, and so on, and so on.

The pressure to be accepted, or to even want to be accepted, is oftentimes overwhelming but then I had to look at it from the other side of things. What if someone did like it, what if people did look at it, what if me being less afraid could help someone else out there see that they don’t have to be afraid to do it and should just go for it. What if something I am not doing could help someone else with the same fears?

So this year I am going to put my YouTube channel to good use and promote my other talents, and I’m also going to publish that ebook for Writer’s who Self-Sabotage themselves (When Fear is Knocking) along with self-publishing my next Novel (When Love Calls) and finishing my next two novels (Through the Looking Glass, and The Weight of HER). I am not going to focus on what I don’t have, but rather focus on what God gave me for the season that I am in right now.

2014 is the year to stop striving for perfection and just strive for completion. So are you going to take whatever leap of faith you are afraid of taking this year and just get it done? It doesn’t have to be perfect, but no one will ever be able to see it if it is not at least complete!

Jimmetta Carpenter

My Write 2 Be is…

CEO/Writer/Editor

Write 2 Be Media/Write 2 Be Magazine

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310

My Past is Preparation for My Future

January 21, 2014 jcladyluv

I saw a post on Facebook that had a quote that said “don’t look back, you’re not going that way”. It got me to thinking about the past and things I’ve been through, things other people have been through and how the past really does affect our lives.

It’s true that we can’t let our past hurts and tragedies alter our lives in such a way that it stunts the growth that needs to be made throughout. However, aren’t our past experiences a huge part of who we are, of what makes us stronger and more motivated, and what, all in all, equips us with lessons and oftentimes harsh realities that prepare us for the purpose that we are placed on this earth to fulfill. What we go through in our childhood, in our teenage years, in our early adulthood, they give us tools that we need to be able to deal with the long and at times tiring journey to our destination. Particularly if our past experiences are not so ideal.

There’s a saying that you can’t have a testimony without any tests, so maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to completely forget our pasts experiences. I will be the first to admit that I am an extremely emotional person and that I have allowed certain instances in my past to affect my present way too much, which inevitably affects my future. While I know that I can’t exactly forget everything that happened, I’m not even sure I can totally forgive (just yet), I do know that I need to let go a little.

I would say that I need to let go completely but those things are what makes me the person that I am and what will give me the strength to continue my journey into being who it is I am truly meant to be. Without the past I don’t know that I would be fully ready for the future that God has planned for me. So with that said, I tell you, that while you shouldn’t keep a firm grip on your past experiences, maybe you shouldn’t completely let them go because they are what is building you up to take on whatever is coming your way as you travel to your destination. Our pasts can only hinder us if we allow it to and if we allow ourselves to only remember the hurt and not the lessons that came from that hurt.

Jimmetta Carpenter

My Write 2 Be is…

CEO/Writer/Editor

Write 2 Be Media/Write 2 Be Magazine

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310

I Hear No Differently

January 15, 2014 jcladyluv

I get so tired of hearing no. For some people, when they hear No they hear a challenge and it stirs within them motivation. That’s what you should hear when people tell you No. But that’s not what I hear.

I hear rejection over and over again. I hear me putting myself out there and putting my heart all in it for nothing. I hear you’re never going to be as good as them so why bother trying. I hear you’re never going to be good enough for anyone. I hear you’re not worthy and you have no value. It wasn’t always that way. I used to get fired up by a no and it instilled a desire to prove people wrong.

However, somewhere along the way it weakened me and certain people’s negative words and opinions of me started to seem like they may have had some merit to them. The negatives began to outweigh the positives and I bought into it. I keep hearing other people’s success stories and how they heard nothing but no’s until finally that one yes happened that impacted their lives forever. I read those stories and I think “where the hell is my yes?”

I’ll admit that the better part of last year I literally just gave up (whew, there I said it). The no’s just bogged me down and sent me into a state of depression and I just didn’t feel like fighting for my dream anymore. I started to fabricate in my mind that the no’s were a sign telling me that this just wasn’t meant for me and maybe I’m not a talented enough writer to really make it. I just wasn’t motivated anymore.

The negatives became more believable than the positives because there were just not enough positives to go on. I kept waiting for something to happen, perhaps a yes would just fall into my lap because I felt like I could no longer just keep putting in my all only to get back nothing. Luckily for me, my love and passion for writing and for seeing all of my dreams come to fruition never died. It remained just as strong as it had ever been, it just got pushed down by all of the negative stuff that I was letting cloud my head.

As I stated in my previous post I have recently come to some realizations about myself and in reevaluating a lot of things, truths that weren’t clear and obvious to me before, I see that the yeses weren’t coming because I never truly believed they would. If I wasn’t going to believe in me how could I expect anyone else to?

Self-evaluation can be really good for you and in my case it kind of woke me up to all of the opportunities that I was missing out on because I didn’t really believe I was good enough to receive them. I was sabotaging myself with my own self-doubt. I’m not saying that I won’t still have my days where the doubt creeps in there. But now that I can see clearer what I was doing to my own dreams I am more aware of what needs to be done to get the yeses that I know I deserve to hear.

Of course there will be more no’s along with way but I have to keep in mind that if I hear a no it’s because God has something better and that it wasn’t for me to begin with. Are your own doubts and fears getting the better of you too? Just keep in mind that every door is not meant for you to open.

Jimmetta Carpenter

My Write 2 Be is…

CEO/Writer/Editor

Write 2 Be Media/Write 2 Be Magazine

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310

Making Declarations

September 4, 2013 jcladyluv

So hopefully everyone enjoyed their long Labor Day weekend. Yesterday didn’t particularly feel like the Tuesday that it was, but rather it felt like I was still in the Monday mode and for those of you who follow me and my patterns you know I don’t usually post on Monday’s. Having said that, I have been thinking today about the declarations that we make on and for our lives. How we don’t really realize the true power that our words hold, or better still, the power the lack of our words have as well.

I watched a Joel Osteen sermon a couple of Sunday’s ago and he spoke on declaring the destiny that we seek within our lives. You know we say our prayers and we get specific with the things that we pray for, and we put our faith in that prayer but sometimes what we forget to do is just to breathe life into those silent prayers that we make.

When God was creating the earth and all of the living creatures within it, he didn’t just silently pray and hope and believe that there would be light, he spoke the words “let there be light” and then it was done. We want things and we pray for them to come to fruition and we even say that we have faith that they will but we need to remember to just speak on those things as if they have already become a reality.

What we put out there as a reality will eventually, if it is truly meant to become our destination, become the reality that we are already proclaiming it to be. Don’t wait for things to keep going wrong and to get in the way of what you want, just speak it into existence and embrace everything that is working out in your favor.

Jimmetta Carpenter
Writer/Editor
The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)
Writing as “Jaycee Durant”
https://write-2-be.com/
http://unpleasantlyplump.wordpress.com/
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There are new things to be found in Write 2 Be Magazine so please go check it out at http://write2bemagazine.com/. Also please go and join the magazine on twitter https://twitter.com/write2bemag, join the email listing for the magazine or submit a request for an author interview at Write2bemagazine@yahoo.com, and also like the Write 2 Be Magazine fan page https://www.facebook.com/Write2BeMagazine. Please help support my endeavor and my new journey and help me spread the word about Write 2 Be and its meaning.

Ordered Footsteps

August 28, 2013 jcladyluv

“In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.”
~Proverbs 16:9

When I saw the picture above it made me think about just how much we ask God for something, or we ask him to give us direction and then often times we completely ignore the direction he wants us to go in simply because it didn’t fit in with what we had been planning for our own lives. What we seem to have a hard time grasping is that when we plan, God laughs. Not because we shouldn’t have goals and things that we aspire to do, but because a lot of the times our goals and dreams are on such a smaller scale than God has mapped out for us.

In many cases we know when we are not on the path that we are supposed to be on. We can feel our direction being changed and redirected. However, we are so stubborn and set in our ways that we try to forcefully stay on that same path not even realizing when our steps are being guided in a different direction by someone who already knows the goal that we are destined to achieve. If you are going to ask God for an answer as to which way you should be going, then you have to be patient in waiting for his answer.

Don’t go off and make up in your mind what you think his answer is. Wait for it. While the answer that you are looking to receive may not come right away, it most certainly will come, but in his time, not yours. Don’t be so used to things being one way. If you keep trying to reach your goals by staying in that same mindset then you won’t be able to open yourself up to the change that God is steering you towards. It’s a struggle to be patient and not always do everything your way (trust me I know) but it is so worth it when you do things his way!

What Do You Expect When You Are Already Planning to Fail?

July 3, 2013 jcladyluv

“You can not expect victory and plan for defeat”

~Joel Osteen

I saw the above quote and in many ways I felt like it tied so well into what I wrote about yesterday. Something that living in the past causes us to do as well is to play things so safe that we end up planning for the worst that could happen instead of trusting in the best that God has for us.

As I read the quote I realized that when I am making back up plans and when I am cautioning myself for the other shoe to drop I am essentially expecting to be defeated and in turn planning for that defeat. I can’t believe that I never saw it that way. I just always thought I was just preparing for all of the possible scenarios, or for the inevitable pitfalls that can often times happen when we least expect it. Instead I have been discounting my future victory by having the attitude of one that has already been defeated. Yet another way that I have been sabotaging myself without even realizing that was what I was doing.

Why do we have so many back up plans when we claim that we know what it is we want out of our lives? When we already know the purpose that God has put us here for, why would we keep making plans for a different route then the one that he has already mapped out? God didn’t give us our gift so that we can serve his purpose only for us to question the direction that he wants us to take. Had he wanted us to go in the opposite direction he would have steered us that way to begin with.

As I realize the things that I am doing to work against myself and my own goals I make the very best attempts to get back on track and to keep walking in the right direction. I am still a work in progress on trying to conquer the many fears that I have and trying to maintain that unshakable faith in the direction that I am being steered in. When you feel like you are getting off track, don’t plan for what you can do once you’ve been defeated. Instead, plan for how you can get back on track to the purpose that you are destined for. I think that all we can do on our journey is to trust in the direction that God has us walking on enough to plan for our victories instead of preparing for our defeats.

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)

Writing as “Jaycee Durant”

http://unpleasantlyplump.wordpress.com/

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310

Write 2 Be Magazine is now out so please go check it out at http://write2bemagazine.com/. Also please go and join the magazine on twitter https://twitter.com/write2bemag, join the email listing for the magazine or submit a request for an author interview at Write2bemagazine@yahoo.com, and also like the Write 2 Be Magazine fan page https://www.facebook.com/Write2BeMagazine. Please help support my endeavor and my new journey and help me spread the word about Write 2 Be and its meaning.

Stepping Out of the Shadow of Yesterday’s Mistakes and Into Today’s Opportunities

July 2, 2013 jcladyluv

“Don’t dwell on the negative. Program your mind with what God says about you and a transformation will take place.”

~Joel Osteen

We all have past regrets and past pain that we have to live with. We may have even been dealt a bad hand in life that was beyond our control that still haunts us throughout our journey. We tend to go over it in our heads about what we did, what we should have done, what we could have done differently, or what was done to us that we allowed to happen, and we get stuck in that repetitive cycle. Without realizing it, we carry that pain with us and we sometimes stay stuck in our mistakes and we end up hindering our own progress by living our lives with the thoughts of that pain and those mistakes in our minds.

We don’t mean to, but we allow our past to dictate our future in such a way that we actually hold ourselves back. We don’t want to be hurt again so we just don’t allow anyone in and we don’t trust. We don’t want to keep making that same mistake so we become overly cautious to the point of not really living. We don’t want to get rejected as we have been in the past so we just stop trying altogether. We wear those mistakes like a badge of bravery as something to take with us on our journey, something to toughen us up, and we don’t even realize that what we are really doing is settling into our regrets and reliving that past pain constantly. All this does is hold us back in our past instead of moving us forward into our future.

I know that for far too long I let my childhood and the emotional and physical abuse that I endured from my mother hold me back from moving forward. At times I even used it as an excuse for some of the big mistakes that I have made in my life. I have, at different times in my life, used what my mother put me through in my childhood as a reason that I didn’t try to achieve certain goals, all because she said I never would. I have allowed that past pain and my past mistakes to make me so cautious as to not be hurt again or to not make any more monumental mistakes that I end up missing many opportunities. It is true that I couldn’t really control what happened to me as a child but all of the choices made as an adult were mine and mine alone. I got stuck in my past and for so long it kept me from progressing towards my future.

Everyone has something that they regret and that they would go back and change if they could or a past pain that they would erase if given the chance. In order to succeed in accomplishing our goals and our dreams we can’t keep allowing ourselves to be stuck in the mistakes of our past or the pain that we’ve been put through. We have to use those things for the lessons that they are and transform those teachable moments into opportunities to grab ahold of the destiny that God has promised to us. We can’t control the things that have already been done to us but we do have the power over our own choices as to how we move forward into our future. Don’t settle into your past, there’s nothing left there anymore to go back to!

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)

Writing as “Jaycee Durant”