In Reply to: Re: Growing up, my journey, responsibility posted by Laura on November 01, 2004 at 06:42:00:
I agree with you that "living in the moment" type stuff was emphasized in the Family, Berg's went on on once about having faith for today.
But character building, self help, thinking positve things about yourself, etc., my recollection of Berg's teachings is that this was useless because only Jesus was good, self was your worst enemy and that since there was nothing good about you and Jesus is supposed to get all the credit you couldn't make yourself better. If you can find one Berg quote that said we should work on improving our own characters so that we could think well of ourselves I'll send you $50's. Everything I remember from Bergism was how it left me with now self esteem.
I'm a lot into personal development now. I participate in seminars, a lot of really valid stuff that suits me, in the Family I used to pooh pooh stuff like that because it was the Devil sugar coating his lies.
About living in the moment, and Berg's teachigs on having faith for the day and sufficient unto the day is the evil there of. Jesus is the one that said it to begin with. But as hard as I tried in the Family to live that way, and not to live with fear and worries about the future and just to take one day at a time, I never was able to do it. It wasn't til I left the Fam behind and have approached this from an entirely new angle that I'm learning something about really taking it just one day at a time in a realistic way.
About retirement, I worked some more on my retirement plans today, but the overall situation isn't very good, because of all the years I was in the Fam. I'm not talking about the pie in the sky kind of living in the moment. Living just for today for me is something really down to earth. My thinking and life is so completely different that what it was before. Eventhough the bank account and the retirement funds are pretty skimpy can't let my "worries" about it stop from enjoying this moment.