We live in a culture saturated with a “Do what
makes you happy” mentality and this is rampant in the church as well. We sometimes
can feel cheated when we are given a life where it is a struggle to find happiness.
My life was
drastically changed when I realized that God didn’t promise being a Christian
would make me happy. That life is not purely about my own happiness. That my
life is about how I am of Eternal value and how God can use my story to speak
to another person for His glory.
This freed me in so many ways, because I
stopped blaming God for my depression and realized that if I wasn’t going to
FEEL happy, I could still walk the right path and be who He called me to be and
that feeling Joy would be a daily choice I would have to make.
They are not
at all the same thing, Joy and Happiness. When The Bible says to be Joyful in
trials, in suffering, in persecution…what normal person would feel joy in those
things? No one..Because joy is not a feeling, like happiness; it is a choice to
dwell on the goodness and faithfulness of God and on our eternal hope, in the
midst of perhaps hopeless situations.
Sometimes,
we can start to sink into despair when we put our eyes on our circumstances. I
know because I’m there right now and I have been there more times than I could
ever recount in my troubled life. I am looking around at my circumstances and
not seeing an immediate way out and my eyes are starting to wander. Rather than
looking at Jesus, I am looking at the waves and I can literally feel my feet
failing and me starting to sink.
Maybe you’re
experiencing heartache, the loss of a child, the loss of a job, the death of a
loved one, divorce, abuse, health problems, financial problems…Whatever you are
going through right now and what I am going through right now, God sees it. He
knows the pain. He knows when you cannot find the words. He knows that your
heart is tired. He knows you and He sees you and He is still worthy. He still
has a good plan and He still deserves our praise. In the darkness, in the
doubt, in the endless pain; we have to choose to fall on His grace and praise
Him even when it hurts.
I used to
believe in the depths of my soul that God could never use my life as a
testimony, because I don’t have some “God cured my cancer, took away my
depression, purged me of my addiction” kind of story. I just live it and I walk
through the trials and they never really ever seem to stop. I’ve been accused
of not being “discreet” enough; because I’m pretty open and honest about what
is going on in my life; for better or worse. But there is a reason that I am
and it is a choice. How can God show His power through me, if all my prayer
requests are secret, if all my struggles are kept in the dark? I want people to
walk through the valley with me, so that when the sun breaks through and God
shines, they can see it and their faith can be encouraged as much as mine is.
So keep watching the train wreck that I feel that I am right now, because still when a train goes through a dark tunnel; you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer. I am choosing to trust that God is orchestrating all things for my good right now. Even though His plan is totally lost on me!!
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