Chains Fashioned by Options and Possibilities

After reading a book called Just Do Something, I decided to follow its advice. There are so many options put before us that we just don’t recognize as open doors and so we’re constantly asking God to open doors for us. I think that rather than asking for open doors, we should be asking God to shut doors... or rather in my life there are just so many options, possibilities, and things that I could do but I can’t simply do all of them and fewer choices would be better and easier. I want to empty my life of all the extra things I’ve gathered to myself ‘just in case’ something happens’. I’m bogged down because the possibilities that I’ve stored up, especially in the instance of my clothes and my art stuff. I have so much clothes that I couldn’t possibly wear all of them, I actually only wear a very small amount of the clothes that I own but I play the what if game and so I build up safety nets, collecting clothing articles for every situation and circumstance possible ‘just in case’. It’s exhausting catching up to it all and realizing that most of what I wear everyday can be converted in some way in a different order to fit the circumstance so why do I need all the clothing options? I don’t.

I took the thing of just do something to a level of seeing that I have freedom in God to choose what I want to do and so I just have to choose something. Well I did that and now realize as I try to up-right my life that I was on a different path than one I had wanted. I took it to the extreme and picked a path that was what I wanted to do but not along God’s will. It was an open door in the sense of options between God and world, not a freedom of choice between 2 things that can glorify God. I turned from God in an unintentional way and yet at the same time I think I knew subconsciously that I was just dropping off of the God path to try out something that I liked and wanted instead.

A few Sundays ago, the high-school group at church were in Ecclesiastes where it talks about how everything is meaningless and then talking about grace and how if we know God’s grace, we will be ever joyful all the time. How things are only meaningful when you have God at its center and the constant drive of furthering the kingdom and such, constant striving for and toward God. Words are just symbols, they are meaningless until we give them meaning, until we make them something. In the same way everything is meaningless until God is at our center and the center of everything and gives our actions, success, failures, time, anything and everything a meaning which is Him. He is our meaning and everything’s meaning and if he is not then that it meaningless. Then a passage was brought up in Matthew talking about how God provides for the bird and flowers and yet these are the least of things so we should not worry about food, what to wear or any of that. Keep it simple. Don’t get bogged down, rely on God for everything and trust in Him.

No promises about it being easy. I guarantee that it won’t be. The question is this. Is something worth believing in and following if you don’t have to strive to achieve it? Is an effortless faith really faith?

Take care and have a wonderful day.