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Tuesday, 21 July 2026
On this day of your life
I believe God wants you to know ...
... that no financial crisis can overpower
the peace of God.
At a time of extraordinary uncertainty, people are
turning everywhere for answers. How about to God?
Those who know God as a living reality in their lives
are finding peace in the midst of turmoil, security in
the face of fear.
It's all, in the end, about priorities. Life priorities.
Do your priorities have to do with the body?
Or with the soul?
Reconnecting With Nature (OM)
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Why Failing at Conflict Resolution Means Failing at Everything.
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As humans, we always strive to acquire new skills.
We gather emotional and intellectual tools to help us navigate our inner and outer world. We prioritize professional growth, survival tactics, and digital insight. We constantly look for ways to upgrade our lives through deeper learning and understanding.
But here is the hard truth: no matter how much knowledge we accumulate, how creative we are, or how high our IQ scores are, our relationships can still completely collapse.
And I don’t just mean romantic ones. From familial bonds and lifelong friendships to casual encounters and workplace dynamics, connections inevitably falter without one foundational skill:
Conflict resolution.
And honestly, we just don’t talk about this enough. We don’t discuss how vital it is to learn how to navigate challenges if we want to build healthier, more resilient relationships. But it’s not our fault if we don’t know how to handle difficult situations with others.
The truth is, when someone triggers us, our brain’s immediate, primal response is to sense a threat. The moment we feel unsafe, our nervous system completely takes over. And once we are fully dysregulated, thinking rationally becomes nearly impossible.
Instead, we instinctively default to what we know best to protect ourselves: we either get defensive, lash out, or shut down entirely.
In those hard moments, our desire to win the argument intensifies. When our nervous system runs high, we throw all our healthy tools and strategies right out the window. All our mind cares about is survival—feeling protected, removing the threat, and walking away as the winner.
That is exactly how disagreements transform into ugly fights, causing deep ruptures between people in every area of our lives. It happens because our bodies aren’t trained to respond rationally in challenging moments…and because we are terrified of conflict itself.
The moment conflict arises, our entire system rebels. We don’t like conflict. We don’t even want to accept its existence. Whether in our careers or our personal lives, all we truly crave is peace. And while peace is a beautiful thing to desire—and something we can surely cultivate within ourselves—expecting it from the outside world is impossible. If it were possible, we wouldn’t see so many wars, so many divorces, or so many useless fights.
This is exactly why we ignore conflict resolution. We don’t view it as a necessary life skill because we wish conflict didn’t exist at all. We think, “What’s the point of learning to navigate something I want to avoid?” So, instead of building the needed skills to handle conflict, we run from it at all costs. We completely fail to accept it as a natural, inevitable part of the human experience.
What most of us don’t know (and you might actually hate me for saying this) is that if we lack the skills to navigate conflict properly, our creativity, our high IQ scores, and the empires we build mean absolutely nothing.
And I’ll tell you why: conflict is a certainty in human relationships, and humans are an unavoidable part of our daily life. If we cannot resolve the problems that are bound to arise, our connections will always break down. And when a relationship collapses, everything tied to it goes down with it—whether it’s a career, a romance, or a casual encounter. It leaves everyone involved emotionally drained, killing the very connection we tried to build.
This is a silent pattern in so many lives. It leaves people trapped in a vicious loop. No matter who they meet, hire, fall in love with, or befriend, things always seem to go south. They might call themselves unlucky or blame everyone else for being “difficult,” completely unaware that they are the writers of their own stories. They keep repeating the same patterns because they simply don’t know how to handle friction.
The ugly truth is that every other skill can only take us so far. The ultimate measure of our success is how we respond and react when under intense pressure. How we steer our ship in the middle of a storm tells the world everything about our leadership and emotional maturity.
If we fire back with aggression, our ego is still driving. But if we respond with rationality, it means we’ve done the heavy inner work required to navigate challenges with grace, love, and empathy.
It is time we finally face reality and learn how to resolve conflict—because a person who is constantly at the mercy of their own triggers can never truly succeed.
~
author: Elyane Youssef
Image: Bobography/Pexels
All the Love he had Within Himself, he Gave to Me: A Story of a Father’s Love.
The Flower on His Heart
There he was. My father, sitting in the grass with his best friend.
Filmed in 1988, but today I saw it for the first time. A small girl, about two years old, was hovering nearby, shy of this man she didn’t quite know yet. My father spoke to her gently. She stayed shy. But then, suddenly, she picked a tiny flower and held it out to him.
He took it. He thanked her. And then he put it on his heart.
It moved me deeply. Especially that gesture of putting the flower on his heart; it made me tear up. Because I would do that. Exactly that. I inherited it from a man I lost when I was twenty years old, and had not seen move or speak or laugh in thirty-four years. Time folded like an accordion, and there he was. As if it was yesterday.
He was forty-eight when he died.
After my mother had left, my father became a single parent at a time when children normally stayed with their mothers. He was not a complicated man. He did not reflect deeply on his inner life or dive into his own wounds. He just…was.
But he was unconventional, genuinely and by choice.
He liked going against the grain, not to make a point, but because the norm simply never struck him as particularly convincing. By day he was a civil engineer, building dikes and dams and bridges, a man who genuinely loved boats and water and the particular problem of keeping a country from flooding. By evening he pulled on his farmer’s overalls and went outside. When I was small, we had moved to the countryside to live in an old farm with an orchard and a vegetable garden.
My father became, in his spare time, an organic farmer before organic farming was a word anyone used. When he came home to dinner, he smelled like someone who had his hands deep in the soil, then made a wood fire, and didn’t care whether it had rained or not. That smoky, earthy smell was the safest thing I knew.
What he gave me, more than anything, was freedom. Real freedom. He trusted me to make my own decisions when I was very small. I took public transport alone from the age of six. I decided when to go to bed, when and what to eat. Or not. And if I made a mistake, or suffered the consequences of my decisions, he was kind and supportive, and helped me figure out by myself how I might decide differently next time. The village we lived in was small and people occasionally side-eyed our unconventional household. When other parents suggested I was too wild, that I made up too many stories, that I was perhaps a little much, he never agreed.
My father never asked me to contain myself. He let me be me, flaws and all, promise and all.
And, especially looking back at the responsible, strong, care-taking, empathic kid that I was, I realize it was the best gift a parent can give their children: he loved me unconditionally.
The night before his operation, I visited him at the old farm where I grew up. Pancreatic cancer. He had been in the hospital a long time and had come home briefly, already weakened. I was about to leave to catch the bus, which came every two hours, and he held me and said, “You are the only reason I want to live, the only reason I am doing this operation tomorrow.”
I heard the love in it. It made me cry. He, as always, made me feel as if I was special. But I also felt pain. Something was missing. What about my sister? What about his girlfriend? What about him?
Especially that. What about him?
He died not long after. I kept myself strong in those days. I had learned early that being the strong one was how I could stay close to the people I loved, it was how I had survived. So I held myself like I always had, letting him feel it was okay to go, that I understood his time was up.
But then the undertaker’s car drove away. With his body.
I collapsed on the pebbled path next to the house. Crying, or better said: screaming. My legs gave out completely. I remember the sensation of a hole being beaten open in my belly, everything good flowing out, leaving me hollow. I thought:
I might just as well be dead. How will life ever be normal again? How will I ever laugh again? How will I ever know that I am loved?
That last thought, I didn’t have words for it then. But I understand it now.
Everything I had built, my optimism, my resilience, my ability to keep going through anything life had thrown at me, it had been built on him. On knowing he was there. On being seen by him the way only he had seen me. And it was so frightening to feel that broken, so exposed, that without thinking, I simply closed a door inside myself. I stopped crying abruptly.
Stood up.
And became the strong one again.
The one who could handle it.
The one who didn’t need too much.
It kept me safe. It always had.
For many years after, I protected an idealized version of him. The man who made the world feel safe. The man who made me feel special, and therefore capable of anything. I looked back at what he gave me, what he meant, how extraordinary he was, and how that reflected back on me.
Watching that video today, something changed. Time folded, yes, and there was love, and grief. But there was also something I hadn’t expected. I found myself thinking: I didn’t really know him. Not in the way adults can know each other. I was always a child looking up. I never knew what he struggled with, what he doubted, what he had learned to live without.
He gave me unconditional love, truly and completely. But I am not sure he ever turned that same love toward himself. Cutting through the idealized version of him, I now understand how hard life was for him. Raising kids alone. Working hard in a job he liked, but that also kept him away from us and the organic farm. He had dreamed of retiring on Terschelling, a small island in the north of the Netherlands, just sea and sky every day. The island he never reached. He was only forty-eight.
All the love he had within him, he gave to me.
I have spent much of my adult life learning to receive what he gave me. Not from him anymore, but from myself.
What I understand now, but couldn’t grasp yet when I was lying on that pebbled path, is that his love was never meant to be the foundation. It was a beginning, a demonstration of what was possible, a first glimpse of what it feels like to be fully seen.
The process has been building that same capacity inside myself. Learning the difference between being strong because I choose it, and being strong because I am afraid of what happens if I stop.
I no longer need the idealized version of him to believe in myself. I can love the real one, the man who did his best, who gave generously what he hadn’t quite found. And more and more, I am doing the same for myself.
~
author: Dr. Femke Bakker
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Molly Murphy
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