Let’s play a game. I want you to read these next few sentences and make them positive:
- Rain ruins everything.
- My car is broken and I’m stuck inside.
- I have a lot of student loans.
Okay, Now I’m going to give you my answers for the above 3 sentences:
- I’m thankful for the rain ending the drought we were in, even if it did ruin my plans for the day.
- My car is broken, but I’m grateful for the relaxation that being inside offers.
- I do have a lot of student loans, but I’m so blessed to have the opportunity to attend secondary education.
What did you get? It’s difficult isn’t it? At least it was for me…… Now some of these are random sentences and some of them are ones that actually apply to my own life and I’m sure that you could think of a bunch of negative things that are happening in your life right now. It seem that is human nature. We can so easily see the negative in our lives. I think that’s also one of the downfalls of living in America and hearing all about the elusive “American Dream”. This can be especially difficult for Christians.
“Some people look for a beautiful place…..Others make a place Beautiful.” ~Hazrat Inayat Khan
Saw this quote today and fell in love with it. (p.s. Don’t ask me who the sayer of the quote is, I have no idea. I found the picture on pinterest.) It seems like lately God has been hitting me on all sides with this point. When I’m at school, I find things about it that I don’t like and I want to be home, and then when I’m home, I miss school. It’s a vicious circle of negativity, when in reality, I’m perfectly happy and content at both places, but I just don’t share that part. It doesn’t make sense. You’d think that I’d want to share about the amazing experiences that I’m having, or the awesomeness of being home with family and getting to see Ben, as beyond happy as those things make me, I still long to have those things mushed together so my life could be bowl fulls of happy. The reality of the situation is that when I’m at school, I’m at school and when I’m home, I’m home. These things are never going to be mushed together. More often than not, I forget that I have the joy of Jesus in me. The things of this world are fleeting, but only a moment in time, a vapor in the wind…you get the point. When I became a Christian and developed a personal relationship with the savior of my soul, my abba father, I had a joy that was deep set in my soul. I was on fire for God. I was bowls full of happy, all the time. Then real life set in, I got older…I’m still getting older. With each added candle on the birthday cake came more and more responsibility and stress. I took my life into my own hands, put God in the backseat, and messed the whole thing up. Gave God the driver’s seat again, He’s still workin’ on cleanin’ that whole mess up. This whole process dulled that everlasting Joy that I took for granted. And I’m only 18 for pete’s sake! Today, I was doing the typical lazy day activity for me. I was putzin around on pinterest quotes, read this quote, ”Some people look for a beautiful place…..Others make a place Beautiful.” ~Hazrat Inayat Khan, and stopped short. I realized that ya, this was a great quote and all, but for Christians, it packs a way more powerful punch. I could give you the cliche, be thankful, other poor countries, starving kids, bigger issues, blah, blah, blah. (Now don’t get me wrong, those are things that need to be addressed, totally, but I’m not gunna touch that one right now.) I can guarantee that a majority of the people reading this right now are middle class Americans. We know all about the issues that face our economy, our country, the world. We know all about the conspiracy theories, the current events. We have access to a lot of information that makes us feel like our life is mundane, routine, ordinary, *gasp* Normal! Oh, how dreadful it is to be us!! (I do this quite often….I’m a melodramatic, jump to the worst conclusions, thinks life stinks when it doesn’t, kind of person) But honesty, why is it such a bad thing to be “normal”? So you go to work, school, whatever you do, you come home and live life, sleep in a house, under a roof, in a bed. You eat food, good food, and especially this weekend, more food than you can fit. So maybe you don’t have a huge house, you have a medium house or a small one. So you don’t have the best job in the world, but it’s a job and in this economy, that’s more than a lot of people can say. Maybe school is boring and the people there aren’t great, but it’s an education and that’s a pretty great thing to get. I’m not being judgmental here at all, I promise you that. I have a lot to work on. I come home from school and get bored with the same daily routine of getting up, cleaning, and then laying around my house. Honest to goodness, I complain about LAYING ON MY COMFY COUCH! So I have a long way to go myself. Chin up my friends! Stop comparing your life with all the people around you and realize that you’re life, no matter what’s going on, is FANTASTIC! You wanna know why, cause the God of the stinking universe decided that he loved you so much that he would send HIS SON to DIE for YOU! Like, how can anyone be sad about that! That’s so EXCITING!!!! That’s like Jump up and down, shout it from the rooftops, face-splitting smile exciting!! This is such a hard concept for me to grasp, but those few brief moments that I do, I just wanna scream cause my sins are cast as far as the east is from the west and I can’t not be stupendously excited about that fact!
This is a difficult concept to grasp most of the time though and I think I know why. It’s cause we don’t understand the fact that we are to trust God. Completely. With your entire life. I don’t think we truly grasp how scary that can be. Amazing? Of course. Worth it? You Betcha! The end result? Perfection. Completely and utterly, knee-buckling terrifying? That’s an affirmative, my friend. It’s the scariest and most amazing thing that you’ll ever do with your life. It’s giving him every little detailed part of your daydreams and life. You give him your past, present, and future. It is out of your control. That’s enough to make me cry in terror. I don’t know about you, but I am a planner, not a day-today planner, but a future-planner. More often than not I fall asleep daydreaming about my future and the thought of giving God that perfectly thought up plan of mine and telling him to change it to fit him scares me. I have doubts and fears and I’m just plain scared, but that’s cause I don’t understand it. God already knows what my life is gunna be like. He’s seen the ending! He knows the whole thing. I only know the past 18 years that I have lived and that’s not a lot when you think about it. So it’s silly for me to want to keep a hold of my dreams and tell him that he can’t have them. Yet, it’s still so hard for me to let go. Blame it on what you want, but it boils down to a pride issue. I’m to prideful and I love the perfect picture in my head and I don’t think that God should change it. Although, even if I had control I’d mess it up and it wouldn’t turn out the way I have it in my head anyways. Isn’t that how every project goes though? Anyways, I’m still working on it. It’s gunna be a life-long process, but I’m clinging to the words of Jeremiah 29:11, Where God Promises that He has plans for me and He won’t harm me. Positivity is infectious! So smile, share the positivity in your life, and make the negativity a little more positive! We all have struggles, but how we handle those struggles, defines us. Look for that Silver Lining. It’s always there.
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