It’s so easy for me to buy into this worlds mind-set of unneeded wants and desires. I am after all a material girl man. The advertisements for the latest cars, or until recently motorcycles, can set my heart a flutter and my mouth salivating. Checking out my bosses $8K Mac Pro, I can envision all the kewl things I could program, create, do. Watching the latest House Hunters International show on HGTV makes me yearn for that beach house on Caicos and an early retirement. I can just imagine kicking back on the veranda sipping my umbrella drink – after all, I think to myself, “if we had THAT we’d be….(fill in the blank)”. Yes I need these things, well OK, I don’t really need them, I want these things because if I have them I’ll be… what? Happy? Joyous? Satisfied? really???
Reality however has a way of rushing over these delusions/allusions/fantasies like a tsunami. Thankfully the good Lord in his mercy didn’t allow the flood waters to wash over me. Instead God has had other people share their all too real – realities with me.
While I can thankfully say that:
I don’t have my in-laws living with my family in a house not really designed to hold that many people.
I don’t have a mother-in-law who just found out she has ovarian cancer. I didn’t have my spouse pass away a week before our 25th anniversary.
I didn’t have my 8 year old son killed in a car accident.
I haven’t had to live thru the pain of having a third pregnancy end in a still birth.
I do not have a pregnant 16 year old daughter to contend with.
What I do need to say is, “I have to get over myself and my petty little wants and realize how incredibly and undeservedly blessed I truly am.” And it’s not for any of the reasons that I just listed.
What if my wife and I did need to open our home up to my widowed mother-in-law
What if my un-wed daughter broke the news that she was pregnant and the guy she just dumped was the dad?
What if my father suddenly developed dementia and I had that to deal with?
What if I were to lose my job tomorrow?
What if my world was turned upside down tomorrow morning?
And, in this fallen world we all know that something tragic can happen in the blink of an eye. In all my “what-if’s” there is thankfully one who “always IS”. He is my true blessing. My joy need not be in the material things of this world nor should my joy be found in personal comfort. My joy comes from a gift given to me by the grace of God thru Christ’s saving work on the cross and in the promise I now have of eternally living with Him.
2 Corinthians 4:18
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
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