As we've been going through this series at Element called "Anatomy of a Life With God", I've been reminded every week as I've been preparing for Sunday about a basic truth in my life, which is this: Every morning when the alarm clock shatters my deep sleep and pries me away from my dream (which was a strange little surrealist number last night about searching for my contact lenses in a strange house...I don't even wear contacts. Weird. A psychologist would have a field day with me), I feel like I have hope. For real. There's something about facing the day that feels somehow limitless, like I can see a whole bunch of possibilities, an incredible variety of ways my day could go. Even when the day's schedule is packed, and there's not much room to be flexible, it still feels to me like my day is wide open to see what God can do with it. I know, it sounds all "motivational-speaker-ish" to say something like that, but I really feel like it's true. That's become an aspect of my own Life With God. I really do feel an almost intense feeling of excitement when I think about my day. Of course, this isn't always true, but it's true quite often, and the difference is, it rarely used to be true at all.
For quite a while in my life, If I had something written on the calendar for some point in the future, such as a night out with friends on Friday, or a Miley Cyrus concert next Tuesday (Just kidding about the Miley Cyrus part. She wasn't around during this time in my life. Then, it was Hanson. Remember "Mmmbop"? Of course you do.), then I had something to be stoked about. But the daily grind was pretty much just that, a grind. Somewhat unpleasant...Mostly something to be endured...And I used to look at people who were happy more often than not with some degree of suspicion. What are you so cheerful about? Don't you realize that reality's no laughing matter? Even this idea of joy, this notion that God can change my outlook seemed weird...Almost as though I had to pretend that life wasn't often grim, bury my fingers in my ears, and chant repeatedly, à la Bob Wiley: "I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful..." But something changed for me several years ago, in a kind of unlikely way, and though it didn't happen overnight, my perspective on my day changed, and with it, my perspective on God. I worked for a while in a Research and Development lab for a company that came up with innovative ways to treat hard-to-heal wounds. As you can imagine, many of the case studies we did were done with patients who were facing difficult times. Now, one issue you have to contend with in dealing with an open wound that won't heal is the issue of moisture management. I don't mean to be gross here, but a wound heals best when it has a certain amount of moisture present. Too dry, and it won't heal. Too moist, and it's prone to infection, among other issues. I remember one patient in particular - She had tried many different things with very little success, and was extremely depressed. Her outlook was essentially that that her day held no more hope than the previous, because she felt like she had tried everything, and the wound still kept getting infected. Until one of our team started treating her wound differently, and brought her infection issue under control. Within a couple of days, the infection was gone, and the wound started showing healthy tissue. And though it took time, eventually the wound healed completely. I remember being told about this case and thinking, "What an incredible relief it must be to know that you're finally on the right path, physically speaking. That can't help but affect your outlook on life. You'd finally feel like you had hope." And as I thought that through, more and more, I started finally adding up the numbers in my own life. I felt like I knew God and had a relationship with Him. And if that was true, and God is who He claims to be, then I had the hope that I was on the right path. And if I was on the right path in the area in which I was struggling the most, then shouldn't that give me some hope for my daily life? Why so bitter about life all the time? The problem was that I was viewing my relationship with God as an event on the calendar in the future, so life was, at best, to be endured until then. I had to actually choose to let Him affect my outlook on life.
Psalm 34:4 (NLT) says this:
"I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me. He freed me from all my fears."
I believe that's true in my life. But I also believe that I had to let Him free me...I run into people all the time who can tell me everything there is to know about the nature of God, and yet live, essentially, without hope. I know what that's like. My prayer for us all is from Romans 15:13 (NLT): "I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit."
And just as we're looking at the fingerprint of God on these people throughout the Bible in our "Anatomy" series, I would dearly love for people to be able to look at our lives for the same kind of thing. That our lives would be evidence of a living God - moving, breathing, and changing lives. Giving hope where there once was none. I don't know much, but I do know this, and I write this as one who's been changed...
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