What Do You Want Out Of Life?

 God said to me, “I know you keep feeling that something is missing in your life. What do you want out of life?”

My first thought was happiness but being happy is too shallow.  My thoughts turned to joy but that is selfish too. If God is really asking me what I want out of life, those answers didn’t seem to cut it.  I thought of love but I have love so it’s not missing from my life.

God turned my attention over to the prayers I have been sending up lately.  Prayers to sell this house and to provide another place for us to live as we move and for us to be successful at our new jobs.  So he asked me, “Is it money and success you want out of life?”  And although that was what I had been praying for, I knew it wasn’t what was missing either.  He then brought my constant prayers to my attention, the ones for my family, friends and church.  Do you want the ones you love to always be safe?  And  this one sounded the most appealing.  I especially want my children to live a long safe life but I was left feeling that this isn’t quite it either.

I thought long and hard about this and since I already have a relationship with God, I knew it wasn’t God missing from my life.  What is it that I keep wanting, but don’t quite have that I can’t put my finger on?  What is it that I know I once had but now in its absence I can’t  figure out what it is? 

Then my answer came but It came as a question, I said “Faithfulness?”

It didn’t seem that could be it.  Faithfulness?  I have faith!  I know Jesus died on the cross for my sins and I know I am going to heaven.  I read my Bible and go to church and try to do the right thing.  Why would faithfulness be what I am lacking? 

Then the flashbacks came from this entire year.  The huge disappointments, the betrayals, the way life has taken us in a direction we never thought it would take.  The hurt and the pain that has drove us to want to take things into our own hands.  The gratefulness for their being a safe place to fall but the resentment of our other plans not working out.  All of these things pointed to not being faithful to God’s ultimate plan.  That the hurt and the pain had to happen to drag us to where God wanted us to be.  We wouldn’t have left on our own and so God had to hand deliver us.  The emphasis for us the past several months has been on what God has taken from us but God is showing us He has given us more than He took away. 

So now I know what I want out of life.  I want faithfulness.  I want to be faithful to God.  I want to do His will not my own.  I want to feel his faithfulness each day.  As a by-product of this faithfulness, I will find joy, there will be days of happiness, and by faith I know God will provide for our family what we need and that He will provide safety.  I know by faith He has every detail of our life already planned out.  I know all of this because I have lived all of this.  I have had faith through everything although it was just a mustard seed.  It took faith to keep moving through the pain.  I never lost my faith but faithfulness  is much deeper.  Faith is knowing what the Bible says and finding hope in a scripture. Faithfulness is believing it and living it out in our life. Faithfulness is full surrender to His word and to His will not just knowing His Word and praying for His will. Somewhere through the journey I held tight to my faith but lost my faithfulness.  I would have never figured this out on my own.  God saved me from myself once again!  

The Broken Glass

This weekend my kids were playing with a balloon at their Gigi's house.  I told them to stop and they both set down but my daughter continued to throw the balloon up within her grasp but behind her was a large glass vase that she inadvertenly tipped over when playing with the balloon and the vase shattered.   My reaction was that I had JUST told her not to play with the balloon, yet she still did so and she broke something that didn't belong to us.  So I did raise my voice and was not to happy with her.  

Then tonight we had just finished watching a movie together and I was doing laundry and checking email when I heard a crash.  I yelled, "What have you broken?" from the office and I was pretty upset to find a softball went through one of the glass panes in the door!  I was pretty upset and began the questioning and the "How could you throw a real softball in the house?" And somewhere in it all, I stopped. I looked at my kids and saw true repentance in their eyes along with great fear of what was to happen next.  God was showing me there was a better way to handle this and so instead of picking up the glass, I told the kids to have a seat on the couch.  I came back to the office to collect my thoughts before going to the bedroom to bring in my Bible.  I set between the kids and asked them if they knew how many times the Bible talked about Obedience. We then counted in the back of the Bible the scriptures listed that talked about obeying and there was 81 scriptures!  We decided obeying must be pretty important to be talked about that many times.  We read Ephesians   6:1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 "Honor your father and mother"--which is the first commandment with a promise-- 3 "that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth."  We talked about why this commandment came with a promise and why it's important to listen to your parents and when we were done the kids offered to pay for the window, told me they should go to bed for the night, and listed several punishments they believed fit the crime. I never once mentioned any consequences for their actions, they did.

I realized as I tucked them both into bed how much they matured and I realized there was a lasting change in them but more importantly a lasting change in me.  On Sunday, all I did was make my daughter feel bad for what she had done and by her actions today it was clear she learned nothing from it but tonight with a different attitude, I got much different results. Tonight she wasn't sorry for breaking the glass, she was sorry for a long line of defiance that led to breaking the glass.  There's a big difference between the two. And my son hadn't thrown the ball but he stood by his sister and owned up to his part in it and wanted to pay half for the window.  Neither one of them tried to blame the other.  They had each others back.

True repentance isn't just about being sorry for what you have done or caused, it's being sorry for everything that has led you down that path where the wrong choice was made.   My daughter may have shattered the glass in the door, but the disobedience she has been encased in also cracked.  We decided that studying all 81 scriptures of obedience is something we should begin doing each day to shatter the disobedient tendencies. It may be a small setback since the house is on the market to sell but it was a step-up in seeing how we all handled the situation.

"It's Something We Are Praying About!"

We are moving as coaching families do and my son was asked what the mascot was for our new school.  My son looked down and sheepishly said, "They are the Demons but it's something we are praying about."  And it is. None of us like the Demon mascot.  We don't say the "Demon" part in our house and I've even considered not buying any shirts with the mascot on it and plan on wearing a cross necklace to all the games!  Some may think it's just a mascot but for a coaching family it can certainly turn into more than that.

So like my son said, "It's something we are praying about!" And in my prayers, God has been showing me areas in my life where I am off-balanced.  I've been spending more time in the word and listening to sermons online to get my balance back.  I've started a diet to lose weight to get my eating habits back in balance.  I've started changing my attitude about somethings and try to lighten up a little more with the kids.  I had no idea all of this was stemming from praying about our "demon" problem but then out of nowhere God showed me it was related. He showed me our family tends to get out of balance with a lot of things and one of those is football.  Football becomes an idol to us at times.  Every coaching family knows that when a sports season starts things change and are different but there is an extreme to the time, the effort, and the importance the entire family puts into it and our family for the past several years have lived in the extreme.  God has placed my husband to coach the Demons to serve as a very visible reminder of what is truly important to us and so that we don't allow the Demons to become an idol in our family and put us on watch so that we can guard our heart against it.  If we were the Eagles, Lions, Bears, Bulls, or Thunder it wouldn't get our attention like this does and the team could certainly once again become an idol in our life. But because it's the "Demons" and it makes me cringe it puts the decision front and center of who are we putting first, God or our team the Demons.  

Our family never tosses God out of our lives but we don't always put Him first.  We still go to church during the football season, pray, read the Bible, serve at church, and can look like God is #1 by all of things we do and even say but our time, our efforts and our heart can belong to the team. The AP polls could say God is our #1 but God can take the poll of our heart and see that He doesn't always hold that #1 spot.  So as God calls us to go where the "Demons" are I can see His guiding hand.  After all even the demons believe their is one God (James 2:19). It will be up to us to show our Demons it's not enough to believe there is a God but to show our faith through our works of God being first in our life and in heart and from there everything else will flow.