Some things I've been realizing...
1. I have no right to complain about my job. Not only am I extreemly blessed to even have a job right now, but this is a good job that pays well, suits my schedule perfectly, is very low stress, doesn't involve any questionable situations, and keeps me fufilling the God-given ordinence of work five days a week. My co-workers are nice, reasonable people who don't swear or anything like that.
And with that, just because I'm not having fun doesn't mean I have a right to be miserable. I need to stop viewing life as a hay ride designed for my enjoyment. I need to stop determining the value of experiences by how much I enjoyed them; I want to take myself out of myself so that I don't even think about it.
2. It is not my place to question the future. God will work things out. I have all these doubts about weather I'm doing the right thing in going to New York (did I mention I might go to New York to be a nanny?) or not going to school, but really I have come to the place in my life because of different circumstances and even when those circumstances had to do with my own failures, they MUST have been for a reason. I just need to keep pushing forward, making decisions with the best wisdom and judgement I can find at the time, and trust that God will guide me even through my faulty human choices.
I guess what I mean by that is that even though I don't know if God wants me to go to New York or not, I really want to go to New York and by all appearences it looks like the oprotunity of a lifetime, so I should go. I shouldn't sit around hemming and hawing, waiting for a flashing red sign. Same with other decisions in my life. I'm so reluctant to move, sometimes, I'll just sit in these ruts doubting and worrying. Really I think it should be simple to follow a path that is upright and sensible, without needing to hesitate around every corner. Although prayer is enormously helpful and a very good thing, too, because somehow I'm sure God will make everything clearer.
3. Jacob-inspired: Prayer is a tool. I never use it as a tool, I use it as a way to communicate with God and as a spiritual dicapline, but not really as a tool. I mean, I will pray that God would help me in this task or that task or keep me safe or that he would make me more like him, and I do pray for my friends in a general way, but I don't think my prayers ever have much real faith in them. Take my family, for instance. We're not perfect and a lot of times we're downright disfunctional, and it occured to me (when Jacob pointed it out, haha) that I never really beleive that I can change things with prayer. I read the story of David and Goliath last night and I was really astounded at the amount of faith David had. To say with such confidence that he KNEW God wouldn't let his armies fall... I could never say that. I wish I had a sliver of that kind of faith in my prayers. I can only imagine the difference it would make if I did.
4. I've also been thinking about my perception of God, because I've been reading through I Samuel and sometimes I feel like I've been slapped across the face because of the God that I find there. He seems totally different from Jesus or the loving God that is described in the Psalms. He commands the Isrealites to masacre whole communities, right down to the babies, and once he turned his back on Saul and was going to utterly destroy his life just because of one mistake. I know it's justice, but it throws me. It really really upsets me. I find that I don't want to serve a God like that and a lot of times I'm not serving a God like that, I'm serving someone who is all love and wants only peace, the God of the hippies.
I think it's so important to get out of this rut of viewing God as one thing or the other. C.S. Lewis talks about this in the Screwtape Letters. We need to pray to someone that is REAL, instead of someone who is a picture on a wall or a vauge imaginary creature floating way up in space. The more I realize how little I really know about that person, perhaps the more I will realize that he's real, that he's actually listening to me and to thousands of other people at the same time. My expectations of him are based on something, and that something has to be sinful because they are false expectations and God is perfect.
5. This isn't so much a realization... but I'm stick of just talking about making a difference. I want to start something that sends money to somewhere important once a month. Any ideas?
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
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