Living Today

Joy, Life, Peace 0

I find myself planning and working for the future, for payoffs and rewards in a month or a year, for which I am willing to pay with happiness now.  Only to find of course that there is always another month, another year to wait.  True, the future must be planned for, and there are surely rewards tomorrow for prudent action today.  But somehow, I am learning, I must discover how to live a life of happiness today.  Not someday when things quiet down and there’s enough in the bank and I’ve gotten beyond these problems — but today.  The idea that we can live temporarily unhappy lives in pursuit of payday/someday, when we will be set for life and ready for happiness, is a sad illusion.

Life is of a piece.  The future is woven of the thread we spin today.  It is silly to imagine that a “temporary” life of tension and stress is preparing us for a future day of relaxation and peace; that a provisional life spent compromising our ideals and deferring our deepest longings will one day give way to a future of fulfillment and deep joy.  It doesn’t work.  “What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”  You can’t live a soul-ebbing life and somehow pull out happiness in the end.

In a culture of achievement we naturally assume a path to happiness:  get on it, do the work, and — enduring a baleful journey of indeterminate years — you will eventually arrive at bliss.  But there is no path to happiness, only a path of happiness.  In other words, happiness is a state, not a destination.

— David Anderson, Breakfast Epiphanies:  Finding wonder in the Everyday, p. 88-89

Something To Look Forward To

Life 0

I’ve been noticing that most mornings I don’t wake up super-happy, and I’m not sure why.  I’ve also been noticing for some time now that when I first wake up, I find myself racing through the coming day in my mind, bracing myself for what’s required of me, but even more so searching to see if there is anything to look forward to.  It’s not really voluntary.  It’s almost as if my heart has a life of its own, and it wakes up before I do and begins to assess the prospects before me.  “I slept but my heart was awake” (Song of Songs 5:2).

By the way, I think this is how our addictions get their claws deeper into us.  Our day-to-day grind isn’t anything close to Eden, and our hurting and desperate hearts look for something to which we can attach all those yearnings.  We’ll settle for a doughnut if that’s all there is to look forward to.  We have to be careful what we give our hearts to.

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 92

Guaranteed

God, Life 0

In Christ, we have an ironclad, unfailing, all-encompassing God-given guarantee that every single circumstance in life will sooner or later turn out well for those committed to Him.

— Robert J. Morgan, The Promise:  How God Works All Things Together for Good, p. xviii

In Charge of No One But Ourselves

Letting Go, Life, Parenting, Peace, Relationships 0

It bears repeating:  We are not in charge of others!  Not their behavior, their thoughts, their dreams, their problems, their successes, or their failures.

Even the children we parent have their own journey to make, and our so-called control over them is, in fact, an illusion.  We can set an example for them, we can suggest a set of behaviors, we can demonstrate a code of ethics, we can even require that they live by certain “house rules” while under our roof, but finally it is they who will decide who they want to be and what they want to do, regardless of our efforts.  And for that we will become grateful in time.

I say:  Let’s celebrate the fact that we are in charge of no one but ourselves.  It relieves us of a heavy burden, and a thankless job, one that never blesses us.  Taking control of every thought we have and every action we take, and being willing to relinquish the past while savoring the present, will assuredly keep us as busy as we need to be.  Doing these things, and only these things is why we are here.  It’s only when we live our own lives and manage our own affairs, freeing others to do the same, that we find the peace we seek and so deserve.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow:  12 Simple Principles, p. 8-9

If Juliet Got Left

Life, Love, Relationships 0

I thought about Juliet some more.

I wondered what she would have done if Romeo had left her, not because he was banished, but because he lost interest?  What if Rosalind had given him the time of day, and he’d changed his mind?  What if, instead of marrying Juliet, he’d just disappeared?

I thought I knew how Juliet would feel.

She wouldn’t go back to her old life, not really.  She wouldn’t ever have moved on, I was sure of that.  Even if she’d lived until she was old and gray, every time she closed her eyes, it would have been Romeo’s face she saw behind her lids.  She would have accepted that, eventually.

— Bella, in New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer, p. 370

The Best Promise

God, Life, Trials 0

Everything that happens to you is for your own good.  If the waves roll against you, it only speeds your ship toward the port.  If lightning and thunder comes, it clears the atmosphere and promotes your soul’s health.  You gain by loss, you grow healthy in sickness, you live by dying, and you are made rich in losses.

Could you ask for a better promise?  It is better that all things should work for my good than all things should be as I would wish to have them.  All things might work for my pleasure and yet might all work my ruin.  If all things do not always please me, they will always benefit me.

This is the best promise of this life.

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, quoted in The Promise, by Robert J. Morgan

The Painful Reality of Sin

God, Life 0

If we think of hell as the state in which God allows the painful reality of sin to hit home, then we can understand both the terrible imagery used in Scripture to portray such a fate and the urgent warning to avoid the wide road that leads in that direction.  It also removes the objection that God is being presented as a cosmic torturer hurting people until they agree to follow him.  God does not torture anybody — he simply withdraws his protection that allows people to live under the illusions that sin is not necessarily harmful to a truly human life.  The natural (though none the less God-ordained) consequences of sin take their course, and it becomes harder and harder to fool oneself into believing the seductive lies of sin anymore.  In this way hell is educative and points us towards our need for divine mercy.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 136

Pain

God, Inspiration, Joy, Letting Go, Life, Trials 0

And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that we release our grasping of life here and now.  Usually through pain.  God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to him.  He thwarts us in our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don’t really look to God for life.  Our first reaction is usually to get angry with him, which only serves to make the point.  Don’t you hear people say, “Why did God let this happen?” far more than you hear them say, “Why aren’t I more fully given over to God?”

We see God as a means to an end rather than the end itself.  God as the assistant to our life versus God as our life.  We don’t see the process of our life as coming to the place where we are fully his and he is our all.  And so we are surprised by the course of events.

It’s not that God doesn’t want us to be happy.  He does.  It’s just that he knows that until we are holy, we cannot really be happy. . . .

We are so committed to arranging for a happy little life that God has to thwart us to bring us back to himself. . . .

Now, I am not suggesting that God causes all the pain in our lives. . . .  But pain does come, and what will we do with it?  What does it reveal?  What might God be up to?  How might he redeem our pain?  those are questions worth asking.

Don’t waste your pain.

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 87-88

Happily Ever After

Joy, Life, Love, Marriage 0

Every fairy tale, it seems, concludes with the bland phrase “happily ever after.”  Yet every couple I have ever known would agree that nothing about marriage is forever happy.  There are moments of bliss, to be sure, and lengthy spans of satisfied companionship.  yet these come at no small effort, and the girl who reads such fiction dreaming her troubles will end ere she departs the altar is well advised to seek at once a rational woman to set her straight.

— Princess Ben, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock