How Joyful Are You?
A
joyful, cheerful heart brings healing to both body and soul.
But the one whose heart is
crushed
struggles with sickness and
depression. - Proverbs 17:22 (TPT)
This week sharing is very light for us but it is
quite difficult to implement in our daily life.
I love how the Passion Translation explains the
above verse because it explains specifically what cheerful heart can do to us
and what a crushed heart can affect our health.
I would like to share my two experiences in the past that make me realised how important of
being cheerful in our lives.
I am a person who naturally never like small
children. But here I am having 2 beautiful children with supernatural strength
that God has given me. I found that having them as babies is one of my greatest
challenges. When Hanniel was a baby, I had the biggest meltdown in my life as I
couldn’t cope to take care 2 small children.
When Hanniel just turned 1 year old, I started to
feel pain in my right jaw. I couldn’t open my jaw as big as I wanted to and I
found it hard to chew some chewy food. It grew worse as time went by.
Cut the long story short, I had to see the TMJ
specialist for my jaw problem. The problem happened because I always gnashed my
teeth during sleeping and I need to have splint done for my jaw. Splint is a
material that is used to cover my teeth during sleeping to protect the teeth
when I was gnashing my teeth during sleeping.
The specialist mentioned to me that the root
cause of this is because of the stress. He asked me if I had been stress lately.
I admitted that I had been stress with 2 small children with me. He said many
of his patients have to be referred to psychiatrist to help them resolving
their problem. He then advised me to take it easy and tried not to stress out
with my situation.
It was very true, when Hanniel grew older, I was
less stress with the children and I stopped gnashing my teeth since few years
ago.
The second story was about my stomach problem. It
started to happen few months before my brother’s passed. The last few weeks
before he went to the Lord, we have been hearing bad news after bad news about
his condition. The level of stress was so high for me and my family to endure. I
started to feel stomach pain here and there for a couple of months during
caring for him. A week after he passed, I suddenly had a very painful stomach
ache and it took a long time for it to ease down. When I finally felt ok, it
came back again the following week and it kept coming back since then. This
problem has given me all the stress because I started to be unable to eat some
foods I used to eat i.e. coffee, spicy food, acidity food, and gluten.
I have been seeing few doctors and they all
confirmed that I had GERD. GERD is a condition where your stomach produces
excessive acid and it travels to the oesophagus. I then asked the doctors what causes
this GERD. They said that GERD is mainly because of stress. All of them also asked
me if I have been stress lately and I admitted that I have been stress. One of
the doctor said when I am able to manage my stress, it will eventually go away.
My GP then has prescribed me with strong medication to treat my condition.
Based on these two experiences I had, I just want
to share to you that it is very important for us to stay away from being stress
as much as we can. I understand there are some circumstances that we cannot
avoid but to be stress. However I want to encourage you for the things that you
can let go, just let it go. As much as you can, try bring joy into your life.
I am naturally a panic person. I love to have
things under my control. So it makes me a very good planner. I like to plan
things much ahead and very details to avoid any mistake happens. If things do
not happen according to the plan, I can be so stress and not happy. But since a
couple of years ago, I have changed bit by bit. I tried not to plan so much for
something that is not important. I avoid many inflexible engagements if I know
I cannot handle if problem occurs. And I also try not to make any
promise that I am not sure if I can make it.
There are some matters that many adults are still
unable to overcome such as love of money and unforgiveness. Sadly they allow
these things rooting in their heart so deep that it becomes difficult to uproot
it. If you have these problems, only God and you can uproot it. The willingness
must come from you even if you are unable to do it. You need to ask God to help you uprooting this. Because the love of Money can create many problems if you
unable to resolve it. And the word of God mentioned that unforgiveness can lead
to health problems if you do not want to overcome it.
Now I am determine to be less stress in life and to
be more joyful. For the things that I know it will bring me stress, I am
learning now to let it go. I want to live on this verse because I know that
this word of God is true and will bring blessing to my body, soul and spirit.
I hope you will receive revelation on how
important to live life with full of joy.

I hope everyone will read this testimony written by Merry that can give us a very clear picture on how a crushed heart indeed can affect our health.
ReplyDeleteSome stress can even cause sicknesses/ailments that are irreversible, so I hope no one would experience that anymore.
Like Merry, I also hope you will receive revelation on how important it is to live life full of joy.