Respect II

      My blog last week was about teaching our children "respect". Just want to talk about another aspect of respect which may be even harder for so many of us. Self-respect! It may be hard because there are usually two extremes here. One is the person who seems to think self-respect is knowing he is better than everyone else and his ego floats him above and beyond the reach of any other person on earth. That IS NOT self-respect; that is an over-sized ego. The other extreme is the person who can find nothing in themselves to respect, but feel like they are worthless and just a waste of space. This we all can recognize as no self-respect whatsoever. This is the "beat me up" attitude that too many people deal with. 

     Self respect is somewhere in between those two extremes. A person who respects themselves has boundaries they will not cross; they recognize that they have good things about themselves, but they also recognize that they have weaknesses and are not perfect nor above others. All of us have different strengths and weaknesses! All of us have different things that tempt us! AND all of us have different strengths, talents, and abilities.  To have true self-respect we focus on the good things in our lives: our strengths, abilities, talents and we try to improve on them. Not to outdo someone else, but outdo ourselves.  We recognize our weaknesses and again we strive to work on overcoming them! We learn self-control and as we learn to have more self-control, we learn to have more self-respect. 

     One scripture that always comes to mind when I think of self-control is "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." This is in no way saying, "it is okay to let the body control us." We are here on this earth to learn to let the spirit control us and as the spirit controls us we have more self-control and more self-respect. And as we learn to control our thoughts we learn to control our actions because our thoughts are where the actions come from. So self-control comes from the inside by us controlling our thoughts and emotions and the responses that come from that and as we do so, step by step, we will earn self-control AND self-respect!!!