Hope and Encouragement to Build Your Faith

Word of Encouragement for the Hurting:

May you know that you are valuable not because of what you do, but whose you are! You may feel alone, rejected, and may be experiencing deep pain; but God desires to bring the healing balm of Gilead to your heart. God loves you right where you are at, not when everyone finds acceptance in your performance or behavior. God sees your caring heart and your compassion towards others, and knows your desires to help others. God knows your longings and unmet needs and He has seen every tear that you have shed. God says, “You are good enough, stop trying to impress everyone.”
God sees your hurting and aching heart and the loneliness that you feel. God says that “He is Emmanuel, the God that is with you.” God knows that you have tried to connect to others, only to be burned over and over again. He knows that you do not have the strength to try again and to feel rejected all over again. God has a few followers who will come alongside of you, but it won’t co…

Addictions come in many forms, such as, alcohol, drugs, food, sex, gambling, and pornography. Addiction happens when we have a compulsive, repetitive desire for a certain thing and we act on the impulse.
Nothing else will do until the craving we are after is fulfilled. Have you ever noticed how people go to great lengths to obtain their addiction? Why, you might ask? Every time we fulfill that desire for our addiction it changes pathways in our brain for pleasure. In other words, the pleasure chemical dopamine is released every time we go after our addiction. In essence we become addicted to the release of feel-good dopamine, but the problem is we need more of whatever we are addicted to each time to have the same initial “high” we got the first time. That is the craziness of addiction, you will never get the same feeling you got the first time you watched pornography, had a high from a joint, or became intoxicated when you won money gambling.
I come from a family of addicts, mainly d…