Tag Archives: healing

Exercise: It’s Good for the Heart

Most of us have already failed miserably at keeping our New Year’s Resolutions, according to the radio this morning at least 80% of us have given up on them already. This is pretty typical after the first week or two, but even if you’ve struggled with them a little so far, you have a whole year to perfect them so don’t give up hope! This year one of my many resolutions was to start exercising again. I, like most people, put on a few extra pounds during the holidays. When you have kids around there seems to be an endless … Continue reading →

Allow for Differences

Just recently I’ve been struck again by how often Christians compare themselves with other Christians. Sometimes it is to our detriment. We feel we are not as gifted, as spiritual, as friendly, as prayerful or serving as much as they are. We might feel their prayers are being answered, while ours are not. But perhaps the problem could be more than we are not listening to or liking the answer we’re getting. Just because God answered someone else a certain way in a certain situation does not necessarily mean He is obliged to answer us the same way. What is … Continue reading →

When Obstacles Come

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Obstacles can have one of two effects on a person. They can cause you to decide it’s all too hard and give up, or that can make you all the more determined to persevere. The reality is we are all going to experience obstacles in our Christian life. It might be people at church who are not welcoming and don’t seem to appreciate or even recognize your gifts. It might be a spouse who doesn’t want you to go to church. You have been praying for them for years but nothing seems to change. I know the experience of praying … Continue reading →

Getting Over Feeling Abandoned

The cold, hard reality is that many of us come to single parenting when our spouse or our child’s other parent leaves. The other person may leave us, leave the responsibilities of family and generally just abandon our child and us and that can be an incredibly difficult reality to face, let alone get over. Getting over feeling abandoned can take time, but it is important for us to move beyond it if we are going to rebuild our lives and be open to a positive future. If you have been abandoned, it is absolutely normal to feel sad, depressed, … Continue reading →

Learning to Give Things Time

Impatience can be a problem for many of us—we want what we want and we want things to happen NOW. Whether we are trying to get through a grieving period, or rebuild our lives and our bank accounts, life as a single parent can be a lesson in patience. Learning how to allow the time to pass in order to facilitate healing, growth and change can be a big step for many of us. I know that when I was newly a single parent, I was incredibly frustrated by what felt like “going backward.” I had spent all those years … Continue reading →

Where is your security?

When things go wrong in your life, where do you turn? To a friend, husband, wife, parent? Or do you turn to some activity to try and help you forget for a while what is happening? Many women have experienced the fear of finding a lump in their breast. I’ve known it myself. It my case it was a cyst and easily dealt with. For others the prognosis is not so good. Breast cancer – even the words can strike fear into a woman’s heart. Yesterday a dear friend and I went along to ‘Wade in the Water’ a function … Continue reading →

Single Parents and Guilt–Part One–Identify the Source and Symptoms

I know that guilt and single parenthood has come up before here in the Single Parents Blog, but I don’t know if enough can be said on the subject. When I woke this morning, I started thinking about guilt and the single parent family from three different angles or directions and decided to write a three-part “series” on guilt and the single parent–first, how to figure out where it is coming from and how it is manifesting itself in your life; secondly, how not to let other people add to your feelings of guilt; and finally–a subject I don’t think … Continue reading →

Healing Can Be Ongoing

I think that we have a tendency to think of healing and recovery as an obstacle to be overcome. For both ourselves and our children, if we are recovering from something painful and traumatic like a separation, divorce, death, or other major life-altering event, there is not necessarily one “graduation” point where we go from suffering to being “all better.” Healing can take time and it can definitely be ongoing. I have written before about how we can expect things that we thought were dead and buried to come up again and again for our kids. As our kids go … Continue reading →

Watch Out For The Unspoken Issues

While not all single parent families are formed by divorce–there are many that evolve because of the death of the other parent, or are formed by choice–when single parent families do come from a divorce situation, it can take years for the rift to heal and communication between the divorced parents to be healthy and optimal (in some families, it never happens.) It is the kids who suffer, however, and while you’re working through unfinished business, it is important to watch out for all those “unspoken” areas too. Just because you don’t talk about it, doesn’t mean that you’ve healed, … Continue reading →

Fitness Journal – Healing & Frustration

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One of the things I despise about taking medications is how those medications can make you feel. When you are taking muscle relaxants, it can affect your performance of physical exercise. But worse yet, when you’re taking muscle relaxants and pain medication – even in the barest minimums – it can leave you dreaming so vividly that when you wake up, you are actually disoriented and out of sorts. That’s the problem that confronted my workout today. I had a muscle spasm last night, late and the pain medication was the only thing to get through the fact that my … Continue reading →