“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” –John Lennon
My best friend gave me this good book for my birthday. I’ve started reading it and already I love it. One chapter is called “On Waiting.” Here is a quote from this chapter: “Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearls. And strung together, built upon one another, lined up through the days and the years, they make a life, a person.” – Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines
I’ve been pondering life’s course a lot lately. I’ve been feeling restless a lot this year and wondering what the next big moment or thing will be. I’ve also been getting caught up in chaotic emotions and thoughts trying to figure all of it out. As backwards as it may seem to me, God has a plan through all of this, all this pain I’ve been feeling, all the pain I’m avoiding feeling, God is using it to grow me up.
I keep wanting to find perspective and meaning on what is happening NOW. I want to figure it out, I want to understand why. It’s exhausting me and Satan knows it. He doesn’t even have to work hard lately to tempt me into sin, real bad ones too; ones that make me fall hard and leave me in so much pain I don’t know how to get back up. My weaknesses are clear and I’m looking too much at what I can become once I’m stronger that I’m forgetting to realize what I have become already this year and who I really am at this moment.
This is a journey and not a destination for sure. Life, for me, is about swimming upstream against the current, brushing past the many fish of the sea. I look at the fish I swim past and am filled with jealousy, lust and many ungodly thoughts. Just a tiny bit of theses horrible emotions gives Satan a foothold, then he hooks me into the decision to stop swimming. Recently, I realized how tired I have become of swimming so I have given up swimming for a while and I’ve just let the current take me away. At times, it is a very helpless and drowning feeling.
But I’m getting stronger each time I belly up in my own muck. Getting up is easier, my fins have time to rest and when I start moving it’s just like riding a bike again. Before I had this all or nothing mentality, and although I still have it at times, it’s slowly fading. Every moment is truly another chance to shine by making the right decision. I think a big part of seizing the next moment is realizing that failures will occur and that in them you need to forgive yourself. Just as Jesus forgave and didn’t hold grudges against all our horrible, disgraceful actions we too can forgive, not just others, but ourselves.
In forgiveness there is freedom, peace and joy. There is freedom and peace and joy inside when the choice to truly live is taken by listening to your true inner voice of love. Being spontaneous and taking your tiny mustard seed of faith and running with it one moment at a time. We tend to remember the fun and organic moments we have as a kid where we didn’t have responsibilities and worries. But why can’t it be like that now? Instead of constantly worrying about the stock market and bills, why not look at your money as God’s money? Let Him show you how to use it. Instead of spending so much time doing adult chores and adult things, why not spend some time out in the sunshine and grass? I recently went on a bike ride and a park trip with a great friend. I felt like a kid again and it felt AWESOME! I want to live my days with God blowing his wind in my face and through my hair, feeling the sunshine on my skin, smelling the fall air with increasing anticipation, tasting new and old favorites on my tongue and just simply BEING more. I want to exercise my long forgotten faith of a child and seize all those moments without panicked urgency. I want to BE calm in excitement and experience deep fulfilling-awe of how many moments God blesses me with throughout each and everyday; seizing those moments and those days as tiny little pearls to cherish for the rest of my amazing life.
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