Inspirations from Kerstin Hack

Category: Joy (Page 6 of 7)

Goal in Sight

Goal in Sight photo

The big day has arrived. First, some good news: The shipyard invoice has been paid in full.

This was made possible partly through loans, but mainly as a result of the many generous donations I received – over 15,000 euros! In the lastfew days, I have received even more support, so now the remaining sum is only 7,000 euros. It feels so good to see a four digit number!

In addition, the things that people have written, have brought me close to tears. I never dreamed of receiving so much help and support.

We believe in a great God and believe in you and that He has a plan for you and the ship. For that reason we have transferred you the money and bless you with it.

Or:

For my birthday I will hopefully persuade my guests to get inspired by the ship project. I hope that you will find peace and know that you are not alone on this emotional roller-coaster ride.

It is really unpleasant, to find yourself with a problem like a huge unexpected dockyard invoice. However it is really wonderful to experience how people are so willing to open their hearts and their purses to support the project. I have never cried so many tears of gratefulness as I have in the past few days.

If you would still like to contribute to the cause, so that I can raise the remaining funds and not have to continue to rely on loans, then please feel free to do so here. Every little helps!

 

Making Decisions with Foresight without being Manipulated

Make Decisions without being Manipulated

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone knows that situation: you come to a decision alone or with others and realise after a few days or a week that you don’t feel happy with it or feel perhaps that you were manipulated in someway. The reason for this can be the lack of focus.

When making big decisions it’s alway good to consider all the factors that are important for the project or situation as a whole, rather than what is best in the short term. There are two levels for this:

General Values/Factors:

These are the values and principles that are generally important to you and should play a universal roll in decision-making. It makes sense, to become aware of your most important 5-10 values that play a part in making your decisions. We also need to keep in mind that other people have different values.

Values and factors that are specific to the situation:

The values that are important for that certain situation.

An example: a man has the task of looking after the trainstation shown in the above photograph. He sees that there are plants that are beginning to overgrow onto the platform.

If loyalty to his employer is his highest value, then this job will not be a problem for him. If, however, he values nature very highly, it may be hard for him to rip up the plants. Another value could be efficiency – to get a lot done in a short amount of time. Or perhaps thoroughness is important to him – making sure that everything is completed to perfection.

Situation-specfic values might be the safety of the passengers, or the aesthetic…or efficient work or thoroughness.

The intensity in which and the number of plants he rips up depends on his own personal values.

Wide-perspective/ Detailed-perspective

Focus has a roll to play along with the general and specific values. Supposing the plants could speak and said ‚don’t be so cruel, we are so lovely, it hurts when you rip us out. That’s mean’

If he turns his focus to this subjective state of the plants, he will by all means come to the desicion to let them be. He will regret this later, when he realises that other aspects were important to him in that decision – aspects that he hadn’t considered at the time.

This often occurs when people intentionally or unintentionally manipulate us. They pull the focus to one aspect of the situation such as ‚things are really bad for me at the moment’ or ‚this great deal is only available this week!’ In the end we make the decision as a result of these small aspects and feel bad about it afterwards. We realise only after some distance, that we made a decision that was not completely consistent. We realise that other important aspects were not considered.

Different values – keeping different aspects in perspective

In conflicts and arguments it is generally the rule that the conflicting partners are looking at different aspects of the situation. Two people might be fighting over a holiday destination – for one of them relaxation and recovery is important, for the other person it is cheap costs and internet availability. In this situation it helps to put a stop to it!

Instead of continuing the argument about why the mountain hut or the youth hostel in the city is so great, it makes much more sense to make the factors that contribute to the decision clear. This makes it easier to find a solution

We can also manipulate ourselves. It might be that one of your general values is to continue learning and developing. You want to save money, so that you can afford to do a further education course. Then you go through the shopping center and see a fanstastic piece of clothing on sale. Super cheap. Bargain. Your inner bargain hunter focuses on the value for money and considers only the price of the item. The other values you have – sensible management of money, don’t buy anything unecessary, to further educate yourself – are talked down or not even considered – that one aspect (the bargain hunter) is exaggarated.

We generally make decisions with ease and do it pretty well. So it doesn’t always make sense to make things unnecessarily complicated. Yet in situations where the decision has left a stale aftertaste, we should reconsider the decisions carefully.

Tips for good decision making:

1. Make a list of those values that are are importat to you and need to play a roll in making decisions.

2. Make note of the aspects that are important for the specfic decision.

3. When people try to manipulate the decision, put a stop to it and say ‚I need a moment to think about the situation as a whole.’

4. Keep everything – all the factors that play a part – in perspective and then decide.

Tailwind – when others support me

Whilst renovating.

When renovating.

My sister’s charity was recently a part of a competition, where the charity with the most donators, rather than the largest sum of donations, would win advertising resources for a campaign. One of the things that really struck me about this competition was the incredible support she received from other people.

Not only did over 120 people contribute financially to the cause, but many wrote about the charity on their own blogs and Facebook pages as well. I cried when I read the words of one woman in particular, who said: ‘don’t wait for a miracle, be one yourself’. She was writing about a group of great women who were trying to change the world and counted me amongst them.

She wrote about my ship, the pressure of the unexpected extra costs, how I was praying for a miracle and wasn’t afraid to be open about my difficulties. She then explained how €10,000 had already come together and that she knew the project was bound for great things.

Her words gave me so much hope and reinforcement. So, if you ever feel obliged to do so, please share my project with your friends and send a gust of tailwind in my direction.

 

God didn’t just hear my prayer…he exceeded it!

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If I’m honest, when I heard the news from the dockyard, that I needed to pay 20,000 euros more than I had orginally planned, I was just schocked. Then I cried and then I talked with my God. For one, I didn’t know how I should go about getting the rest of the money together. Secondly, the idea that I was going to have to pay off €20,000 extra over the next months or even year was a complete nightmare.

I prayed that God would present me with at least a quarter of the sum required -I asked for exactly €5555. I couldn’t really imagine any more than that. As I am writing this, we have surpassed the requested €5555 and I am completely overcome and crying with happiness. I did not expect or think this would happen. It moves me, that so many people (over a 100) have contributed to the cause, from as little as €1 to as much as €1000. Lots and lots of people have contributed 1,5,10 or 20 euros and together this amounts to a lot. Others could give more and they did that, which is also wonderful! It’s such a miracle how all the little donations add up to 1,000.

With the help of the donations and a loan, I was able to pay the dockyard. The ship is now free and we can start work again as normal, welcome helpers on board and so on. This makes everything so much easier!

Encouraged by the 100+ miracles I venture to ask my God, that the rest of the money that we need will come together, so that I won’t need to spend months paying off loans, but rather use the money for further rennovation work.

What you can do:

. Contribute financially: as much or as little as you can. The best way to do this internationally is via paypal. The email address is: info@down-to-earth.de alternatively you can click on the paypal DONATE link at the side of this blog.

. Make something: perhaps you could paint, bake or make something to sell in order to raise money for the ship. Eg. Sell homemade cakes after a church service.

. Sell something: you could collect old objects, books and items of clothing and create a mini-flea market with a group from church. Alternatively you could use web platforms such as EBAY (clothes, objects) or AMAZON (books) to sell your items, and then donate the money to the ship.

. Help on Board: this is particularly wonderful in the summer. We work hard during the day, and then enjoy a barbeque on board in the evenings. Previous handywork experience isn’t required.

. Donate materials: perhaps you have some things lying about that could be of use to us. We need a lot of stuff: wood, toilets, fireplaces, lea, paint brushes etc. If you have access to building materials – please let me know. I can give you a more specific list of things.
. Become a Partner: commit to being a Godmother or Godfather of the Ship projekt over the next 10-12 months through the following:

– Praying for 5 minutes a week
– 5 hours of practical help on board a month (if you don’t live in Germany, perhaps you could commit to spending a week helping out)
– Donating €5 or more a month to the ship project fund.

Godmothers and godfathers of the ship will be the first to know of any important developments.

Heart of Berlin 2

I am ever so grateful for all the gifts and donations that I have received for the ship over the last couple of days. It’s so overwhelming!

As well as donations, there are other ways of supporting the Shipproject where you can get something in return.
I source my income primarily from the Down To Earth publishing house and coaching. At the moment, all the money that I earn that I don’t need to use for rent, food, health insurance etc. goes directly into funding the Shipproject.

You can support the Ship-project indirectly and get something in return!
– Why not treat yourself or a friend to a new book or leaflet from Down To Earth. The books are available from the Down To Earth website, as well as Amazon (although they do take a lot of money from us!) please choose whatever is easiest for you.
We currently have two English titles:
‘The Father’s Love’

The FAther's Love

Print DTE: http://down-to-earth.de/englische-titel/quadro-the-fathers-love.html
E-book DTE: http://down-to-earth.de/englische-titel/e-book-quadro-the-fathers-love.html
E-book Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Fathers-Love-Experience-ebook/dp/B00946R5MC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368007236&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Father%27s+Love+Manfred

‘Learning To Forgive. The Art of a Life of Inner Peace.’

Learning To forgive

Print DTE: http://down-to-earth.de/englische-titel/quadro-learning-to-forgive.html
E-book DTE: http://down-to-earth.de/englische-titel/e-book-quadro-learning-to-forgive.html
E-book Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-Forgive-Inner-Freedom-ebook/dp/B00946HK9K/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368007912&sr=1-1&keywords=Learning+to+Forgive+Kerstin+Hack

– We are currently in the process of translating our LEA online training course. I wrote LEA in order to help people find freedom from their physical or spiritual burdens. It has been incredibly successful in German and we are looking forward to starting our first online course in English from the 1st July. The course lasts for 3 months and costs €99. More information coming soon, but if you are already interested please send me an email.

I hope that you will enjoy these products, along with the joy of knowing that you are helping to build something that many people will use and benefit from.

Feeling Responsible

To start off with:feeling respon 2013-11-04 17.59.58 sible is not a feeling. This might surprise you because “feeling responsible” feels like a real feeling. Yet, when we examine it carefully, this feeling is made up of two parts: -the thought: “I think I am responsible.”

  • -a feeling: pressure, anxiety,stress, excessive demand, sadness.

I am not a person who usually splits hairs, but in this case, this is important to me. This differentiation can open the door to freedom. When we realize, “I think I am responsible,” we can critically evaluate:

  • Am I actually responsible?
  • To what extent am I responsible?
  • Do I want to be responsible?
  • Who else is responsible?

This alone can take the pressure off. There are situations in which we are actually responsible. For example, parents are responsible for their children: more when they are small and less the more they grow. But what is with the feelings that we feel? In most cases, the “feeling” of responsibility is nothing more than empathy and resonance bound with sadness. We sense that the other person isn’t well. We feel it with them, and we have our own feelings about it as well: sadness, helplessness, pressure, or something similar (depending on the situation and thought patterns.). We then call this thought-feeling-conglomeration and hodge-podge “I feel responsible.” What can we do? In my opinion, adults carry the responsibility for their own lives themselves. I can’t and don’t have to carry the responsibility for anyone who is an adult. It is their responsibility. At the most, I can take partial responsibility – during a coaching session, I have the responsibility to create a good process. As a publisher, I have the responsibility to train my employees well, etc. Once in a while, it happens anyway that I “feel responsible.” A good friend is stressed; I perceive this and think that I have to help him. A good friend isn’t doing well; I slide into feeling responsible. When I notice myself doing this, I always do two things internally:

  • consider if and in which forms I would like to support the person and communicate this to him or her
  • say inside: “I put the responsibility for your life back into your hands.”

My friend, Rosemarie, recommended a third sentence that I find wonderful:

  • “I bless you that you can carry the responsibility well.”

I especially like this third step. I can and may bless, which strengthens and supports others in their ability to master their lives. I find this relieving and exhilarating. By the way, the photograph above is two barges from an aerial view. It is good when a barge only carries its own burden; otherwise, it would sink. – See more at: http://kerstinpur.de/besser-leben/sich-verantwortlich-fuehlen/#sthash.cvzs4ag9.dpuf

Books I read

Buchcover Have you read these books?  The BBC believes that people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

5

2 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazu Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Well – I guess that the BBC is wrong.  Or I am not “people”. And I am surprised how many of these books I read in shool and university. Some good education, I guess.

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Edit your life

I just read an article by my collegue Erica Kramer from Ark Media in the Netherlands they are the nice guys who published some of Spieler konnen in einer virtuellen Welt aufgehen, in der das traditionelle auf die Macht des Online Glucksspiels trifft. my Micro books / Impulshefte in Dutch. She wrote about editing texts. Not only edititing texts authors wrote, but allowing people to “edit” your life. You find her article here.

Merry Christmas

We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year..:” You may wish to praise God that this blog does not have sound…(i.e. it is not me singing)…but it comes from my heart anyhow.
I hope that this Christmas and in the coming months you will experience the God who is so real that he did not care about being God but became real man….

Right now I am not in Berlin, but in South Germany. Celebrating Christmas with my family (parents and siblings). Today we will clean the house. Then we will have the traditional lentil soup for lunch. This is tradition as it is the last “poor” meal before the season of “rich food” starts. We all love it.
Later in the afternoon we will go to church togehter (traditional Lutheran chuch)…have a simple, but good meal (usually fish and toasted bread) and then share gifts. (For those who do not come from a German context: we celebrate Christmas on Christmas eve). In my family one person is chosen by lot who is first allowed to give her / his gifts. Then we chat, drink wine (if you are from North America and have a problem with this passage simply change it to “grape juice of a special kind)…and enjoy being together…
The next two holidays are spent chatting, eating (yummy), going for walks and most of all reading…we all love books and usually we kuddle together in the afternoons with the books we have given each other for Christmas and read. I love it. The only big question is: Who will get up and make coffee for all of us. The same procedure as every year….

The eternal God

This morning I read some passages in the book: I am fascinated about the things Jesus sais about himself and the positive results of when God takes rule. So often we think about God in a restrictive way. We think he is messing up all the fun and putting life into boxes. But exactly the opposite is true. Jesus sais: When God comes near (i.e. when the kingdom / rule and reign of the eternal God becomes visible on planet earth) the following things will happen:

– sick people will get healed – people in bondage to whatever-stuff-that-ru(i)ns-their-lives get free – sadness and depression gets transformed into joy – rules and regulations get destroyed by life – hopeless people will find something / someone to look forward to – rejection and condemnation get pushed aside by love and acceptance… WOW . what a God we serve. It makes me cry:I want to see the live that is in God touch and transform the people in my city.

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