Every week I make an infamous video called, “Old Fashioned Friday” where your’s truly features unlimited variations of the classic Old Fashioned. It’s hilarious, at least in my eyes. I close every show with the words, “I hope you are enjoying your life.” Old Fashioned’s certainly have the potential to help you enjoy your life (smile) but my deeper admonition is that you only have one short life to live which zips by frighteningly fast and thus must be enjoyed while you have it. This may be going out on a limb, but I would guess most people aren’t really enjoying their life. Sure, they enjoy certain aspects but spend disproportionately more time not enjoying it. It is for you that I write this tonight. Really this is for anyone that has lost that sparkle in their eye. The idea behind this life, which was not formed by random chance over millions of years, was that life was to be enjoyed. It was never intended to be a contest where most of the time you lose. We have been so schooled to accept the negative as normal instead of as an aberration; a peculiarity to be solved, that we settle for much less. We expect there to be equal doses of good and bad. We illogically conclude that some of the unpleasant parts of life are just how life is, from which there is no escape. But, my friends, there is an escape. There is a way to solve ALL of your problems leaving you free to stop trying to solve them all yourself. It is those problems, those issues, those irritations and infections that steal your life from you. Day by day it chips away at you until one day you find yourself at the “I’m Not Happy” station with no other trains planned anytime soon. Instead of offering promise, the days just sort of dredge along, new day, same shit. There is always a reason you are not happy and you likely don’t have to look too far to find some fear. You have been trying so hard to take this giant on called “life” and to figure it out on your own. Trust me, you don’t have the bandwidth to get that job done. You can answer that question for yourself simply by thinking about what it is you actually control. What do you actually control? I’ll wait… Not much. So it seems reasonable to expect that in order to enjoy this life you are going to need some help with all those things you do not control. That is the secret to happiness in this life. Learning about the One that made you and what He has planned to make you happy. Outside of that you will continue on that hamster wheel heading nowhere until you’re ready to admit you need help. I hope you are enjoying your life.
When it comes to human beings we all have something in common. Not only did we come from the factory with a major defect, but we all exist with our own unique set of bad things that happened to us. Oh you think your scenario is original? It happens to all of us, just in varying forms. People endure all sorts of trauma. Some from the hands of their parents. Some from parents that are missing. Some from oppressive religious groups. Others from bad marriages, bad work environments, bad friendships, bad providers, bad neighborhoods and on. This old world can beat you up pretty bad. It’s a cruel place at times and through repeated blows begins to wear you down.Then with our major defect and our traumas, we all have to navigate the aftermath of whatever happened, now firmly etched into our thinking. As our thinking digresses or I should say regresses, so do our core beliefs and expectations. Where once we expected success and happiness and good times, now we expect problems, more problems, more unsolvable dilemmas, more pain and futility. It was bad enough that we began defected, worse that the evil world got to us, and far worse in terms of impact, the things that were systematically built into our thinking. We traded away our own happiness for a lie or lots and lots of lies. We traded them away because we did not get the help we needed. We started bad, got treated bad, then reproduced our own bad through all of the fear living in our hearts. Despicable really, if you think about it. Yet for all this, there is and always was a solution. The solution was to find the One with all of the help. Find Him, though “He’s not far from any one of us.” Discover the One that invented the concept of life and let Him be all those things you could not be for yourself. In other words, get rid of your burdens you have been dutifully carrying around like a badge of honor and turn them over to someone capable of carrying them. The One wholly not subject to the limitations you and I face daily. Real answers for your real life. The one happening right now. The one that is getting shorter and shorter every day. I hope you are enjoying your life.
A relationship with God is as a Father with His children. Let Daddy do His job. No amount of exercise and healthy diet can keep you well like Papa can. Absent the burdens, you can feel again. Your happy sensors come back to life. But, make no mistake, absent His help and provision this old life will only get harder and harder. I don’t mean a fictional hell, I mean hell on earth driving yourself ill trying to do a job you were never intended to do. Once you finally trust God to take care of you, you can relax again. Exhale Stella. Best of all, He will give you exactly what you can believe for Him to give you with no limit. You can expect good things again. You can look forward to the future again. You can even start to smile a little more not because you solved your every problem, but because you found the One who does. I hope you are enjoying your life.
Just some good thoughts…
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