Happiness

I'm really enjoying the beauty outside the last couple days. Went for a longer bike ride by myself yesterday...it was awesome.

I took these thoughts from the guy who writes the newsletter from our church in Denver. It is a good challenge for me.

"What greater tragedy than to go through life soured at the lack of needs, wants, or desires, being met in our own life - only to find you had squandered, or buried, the very gifts God had put in your life in order to meet the needs of others.

The parable of the talents is not just a pretty little story. We shall in fact stand one day before the Lord, and give a very thorough account of the way in which we handled the gifts that he has given us; those gifts being for the distinct purpose of the building of His Kingdom.

How much time and energy is wasted in the pursuit of meeting our own often "imagined" needs for happiness and fulfillment - that we then neglect to simply be about that for which we have been called? We can often live in a perpetual state of anxiety over our "needs" and "feelings", and pay little but lip service to the full and real sufficiency of scripture. Rather, we should live in full obedience to that scripture, and then truly experience its sufficiency.

When Jesus tells us in Matthew 6 to "...be anxious for nothing..." I think he may have actually meant it. However, this is not simply a state of mind in which we abstractly turn off our stresses, and switch emotional modes. He tells us how we actually do it. "Seek first the Kingdom..." Again, this is no abstract term, or a game of supernatural hide-and-seek. It is quite literally to "be about the Kingdom", doing the work of it, and not sitting back allowing ourselves to pity our own circumstances.

In the act of being about the work of the kingdom, we are then promised that "...all these things shall be added unto you..." (food, clothing, shelter, etc.) It does not promise us "happiness", but rather what we need. There is though, and a peace that truly transcends understanding (and circumstance) when we walk according to, and in obedience to, the word of God. When we become bogged down with the cares of life, and concerns over our own comfort and happiness, we are actually walking in disobedience, and are then of little use in kingdom construction."

-Simon Lovell