Roar, page 18
Inaction and the refusal to act are the heaviest burdens we carry. Of what remains unrealized, we are only left with hypotheses, fantasies, and the enormous burden of asking ourselves, “Why didn’t I study what I wanted to?” “Why didn’t I say what I meant?” “Why was I afraid to go there?”
Regret shouldn’t anchor you to the past; it’s a way to better understand a new future. Remorse binds us to the past, from which we get nothing of value. On the other hand, repenting isn’t about thinking about what we did or did not do, but about starting the future by recognizing what was important, by knowing how to rethink what is appropriate.
Understanding which of our decisions was wrong leads us to reflect and consider a new reality. This process is only possible when an alternative future appears in our mind, and only by looking through it do we activate effective thinking.
Being resilient requires these reflections to make us more flexible, to give us a new drive to be better.
RETURN TO GOD
There are many people I know who, when reflecting on a big mistake in their lives, regret having turned their backs on God and lived apart from Him. Although He calls us thousands of times in our lives, many complain that they never receive His call because they don’t realize that in the purity of His heart is the harmony that connects with His voice. Only the affable hearts, who train their sensitivity and don’t allow themselves to be callused by the evils of the world, will manage to hear that voice that leads them to His will. But those who carry an angry and barricaded heart hide in the cliffs of their prejudices and ignore the signs, calls, and instructions of the eternal.
THERE AREN’T ENOUGH SHOOTING STARS FOR ALL MY WISHES.
Our great challenge is to stop being proud. One of the extreme sports humans engage in is keeping pride in check. Not watching over it means opening the door and letting it take over our daily lives. It’s always tough when someone exposes our mistakes, calls us out for being mean, and brings up the wound we don’t want to see. Therefore, if we’re humble enough to recognize our mistakes, we can clean our emotional garbage, bring it into the light, and walk the path of bliss.
If you allow your heart to wither, you’ll cease to feel, respond, and opt for a new direction and you’ll continue on the same path you’ve already traveled all your life. The fossilized heart is embedded in unbelief and defiance of God, becomes insensitive to reprimand, and can no longer be moved to a new and better way of being. An insensitive heart loses its fear of getting hurt. This gives free rein to debauchery to take absolute control of our lives; it leads us to imprudence and recklessness, so we break other hearts without being aware of their emotions.
No one with a hard heart could be considered a hero. They are nothing more than a fool and, without exception, someone who will face circumstances that will break them, after they have mowed down those around them.
Do you want to know if you have a hardened heart? There are notable traits that can help you discover if your heart has begun to lose flexibility, if it has started going down the short path of turning to stone. Ask yourself:
Have you begun to have more and more trouble accepting what God says?
Do you reject His authority?
Do you criticize everything you do not recognize in yourself?
Do you show an attitude of indifference toward others and their pain?
Do you justify your behavior?
Does pride prevent you from apologizing?
Do you resist being corrected and think you’re always right?
Do you begin to care more about goods and prestige than about love and goodness?
Do you have little interest in spiritual matters?
Do you act with total indifference to the affairs of family and friends?
Do you reject the reading of wisdom texts, prayer, and supplication?
You are the one who can open the door of your life to the Lord. He will always be with you, no matter how difficult your situation may be. Do not try to solve everything; participate in His work without trying to change it. You will do what is possible, the rest is His favorite toy: the impossible.
Return to God. Do it today. Pray for your anger and let it crack the scabs of your soul. Let go of your stubbornness and run forward, where His grace is. Return to God. He is able to give life to a heart buried in bitterness and dead with anger. Everything He does is new. The surgery lasts a second—the recovery is up to you.
THE PLACE YOU LEFT AT GOD’S TABLE IS STILL AVAILABLE.
If you are a believer—and if you are not—I recommend you pray. I’ve prepared this prayer for when you feel far away from Him:
Lord, forgive my wickedness, my lukewarmness. Forgive me for having let love become cold. Forgive those who with a hard heart have oppressed the weak and the poor.
I ask you to break the curses and uproot the hardness of my family line that has caused so much harm. Deliver me from the blindness of my soul, from the deafness of my heart, from stinginess and gossip. Protect me from deceit and traps. Dismantle the obstacles and straighten every bent back.
I give You every stubbornness that causes me to retreat. Give me a heart that conforms to Yours, and the wisdom to recognize the meaning of its weight. I ask You to give me kindness accompanied by resolve and contentment, a bright attitude of gratitude for my daily bread. And I humbly ask that You imbue me with the generosity of Your wisdom.
Give me fire in my spirit, passion, and a heart that burns for how Christ moves my life. Rekindle my faith so that I understand that the mystery of the supernatural is also for me.
Bless the air that I inhale and contain. Turn it into the roar of the facts that I will build with tireless effort, with inexhaustible courage, because I bathe it in faith.
THE REALM OF YOUR EXISTENCE
Let’s talk about your silences, your laments at dawn, the lump in your throat and the pain in your neck from turning back so often, the stabbing in your chest, the trembling of your eyes, and the shaking of your hands. Yes, let’s talk about all that struggle, the preparation that has allowed you to see the courage within you and the strength you have to endure these situations with such dignity. Come. Learn to see your wounds as signs of audacity.
You have already inhaled a breath of fresh air that filled your soul with the best of you and inflamed your lungs with the necessary tools to bring out your inner roar. The time has come to love yourself for the long haul, to love your quirks, to embrace yourself out loud, to judge yourself with compassion for what you feel, to go out at night to collect stars, and to reassess your priorities. Love is a decision and the miracle is choosing it every day. Love yourself the way God has shown you is possible. It’s wonderful when things don’t go as planned but turn out the way you needed them to.
The bad days are behind you. Now you can start creating your magnificent life. It is a choice. You can either let yourself be carried away by your tendencies or emphasize the spiritual. You will be faced with determining where to find value and how to create your essential hierarchies. You can put your weight on the symbol bearers, on the idols of immediacy, on the butchers who will choose your ribs as the next piece to be displayed in the hunger bazaar. You can ride on the stock market seesaw, on the unraveling fashion carousel, on the red carpets of the abyss.
The heart has no limits, and the mind doesn’t understand that. You can raise portraits of auburn-headed or bearded despots, of those with gelled hair or spotless kepis. You can recite complete passages from the manuals of hatred or sing at the top of your lungs the hymn of the ghosts that sow misery. You will surrender to the rise and fall of empty sex, wake up next to names that were never shared with you, blur the screens that reflect frustrations. You will know how to hang yourself with the vanity of silk or lift your body with iron clamps. Those will be your choices.
Pride is an evil that arises from refusing to accept the power of God and His love, while He reveals your mistakes through a friend, an adversary, a spouse, a mother, or a stranger whom you know to be right. Therefore, we must improve our attitudes and correct our mistakes, since pride leads us to “counterattack” and immediately point out the defects of the one who questions us, uselessly seeking to refute and minimize the importance of their message instead of accepting the criticism or correction. We must apologize and strive to be better.
You flee from the truth and return with an anger that oozes from your wound, with a fury that comes from suspicion. You shelter yourself with the icy feeling of inadequacy that comes from ignoring love.
Pride pushes you to fury, to vengefulness, to the attack that robs you of the opportunity to improve. It deprives you of seeing miracles and the obvious signs of the supernatural. It has such an effect that it blinds you and doesn’t allow you to see beyond your limited personal prejudices, which demonstrate your distorted and lacking vision of life. At times, the pride that invades you is so great that it drives people away from you, making you undesirable. Despite this, you have been given a hundred opportunities to change, to improve your attitude, to live in humility, and to mend your mistakes. Pride is an obstacle, a wall between the blessing and the curse.
God’s love is very powerful, but He will act as much as you allow Him to do so. God never forces you to accept Him because He will never override your freedom. Of course He wants you to receive Him in all areas of your existence, but He will never annul your freedom. Let Him in so that He can cleanse you of everything that separates you from a better life.
Once the time comes to roar, ask yourself who runs the realm of your existence, where are the patterns that command your values. God can be the center of all hierarchy, even when you don’t believe in Him, because if you build your life honoring what is important and beautiful, delicate and sensitive, you will have put God on the first altar of your honor, even if you don’t know it.
May He be your starting point and your destination, and may you never stop moving forward.
Although it may sound extremely difficult, keep going. You have inhaled enough air in reflection and self-awareness, you have held it in long enough while you focused and reframed your decision biases. You know that you can only release your cry with your willpower and the direction of your purpose, and even if you’ve been shattered to pieces, the union of your fragments will turn your simplicity into a fine jewel.
Truth is not a tourist destination.
From the outside, we don’t know when the volcano will erupt, but you are inside, containing the heat. Let your chest feed the detonation of your throat, and let your ideas fuel your heart. Ignite, until you reach the point of reaction.
Inhale, inflame, and roar.
The time has come for you to be heard.
Roar, or Expect to Be Devoured!
Epilogue
To live better, we must not hold on, we must let go. We must live without retaining, without clinging. Let’s live without obsessing over time. Let’s stop counting the seconds, and by living, let’s lose the notion that they exist.
Let’s detach ourselves and integrate ourselves into the whole. Let’s accept how small we are, but how much we are worth in this universe. We must wait for nothing and everything, without attachment; simply wait and, in the waiting, discover ourselves in the mystery and let the hows surprise us. Let’s do so knowing that not everything that happens to us is good, but it’s necessary. Sometimes God takes some people from us for our protection and leaves others for our learning. If some leave, let them go; if some stay, let them be.
I ask Christ to deliver you from blindness of the soul, from obsession with speed and deafness of heart, from stinginess and gossip. I ask Him to protect you from deceit, from the traps of others and from your own mind. I ask Christ that you begin to dismantle all the obstacles that hold you back. I ask Him to straighten your back bent by the weight of life.
Today, wherever you may be reading this text, give Him every foolishness of the heart: “I give it to you, Lord.” Surrender to Him every pride that makes you turn back and keeps you away from those you love and from those you are loved by. Ask Christ for a heart like His own, but above all, ask Him to give you the wisdom to understand the weight and the implications of having such a big heart. I want you to be filled with kindness, accompanied by firmness, joy, and a bright attitude of gratitude for your daily bread.
After going through these pages together, after what I’ve said to you and what you’ve reflected on, I hope that you’re filled with a longing worth pursuing and that you may humbly be imbued with virtue and with every gift of the eternal. In this moment, may God give you the fire of the spirit and an unwavering heart that is ready to burn for the movement of our Father’s things.
Nothing can threaten you anymore because you are the child of everything. Those who roar know that they will never be devoured. Roar!
I hope that after reading this book you will love yourself completely, and not in pieces.
About the Author
DANIEL HABIF is considered one of the best and most recognized Spanish-speaking motivational speakers and authors in the world. He’s collectively sold more one million copies of his Spanish language bestsellers: Inquebrantables, Las Trampas Del Miedo, and Ruge. He’s appeared at hundreds of international conferences, selling more than 700,000 tickets and performing in 170 cities in 25 different countries around the world. A longtime advocate for human rights, he’s shared the stage with presidents, governors, Nobel Prize winners, and international leaders working for change. Visit him at www.danielhabif.com.
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Notes
Step One: INHALE
1. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
2. Lise Bourbeau, Heal Your Wounds and Find Your True Self (Quebec: Editions E.T.C. Inc., 2020).
3. Lise Bourbeau, Heal Your Wounds and Find Your True Self (Quebec: Editions E.T.C. Inc., 2020).
Step Two: INFLAME
1. S. Vosoughi, D. Roy, and S. Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science 359, no. 6380 (2018): 1146–1151.
2. Francesco Cirillo, The Pomodoro Technique (New York: Crown Currency, 2018).
3. CNBC, “Jeff Bezos at the Economic Club in Washington,” Milestone Celebration Dinner at the Economic Club in Washington in Washington, DC, September 13, 2018, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv_vkA0jsyo.
4. Solomon E. Asch, “Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 70 (1956): 1–70.
5. Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: HarperBusiness, 2021).
Step Three: ROAR
1. Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-Control and How to Master It (New York: Bantam Press, 2014).
2. Marc Winn, “What Is Your Ikigai?” The View Inside Me (blog), May 14, 2014, https://theviewinside.me/what-is-your-ikigai/.
3. Mike Michalowicz, Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine (New York: Portfolio, 2017).
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Copyright © 2023 by Daniel Habif
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