UNsatisfied

What do you do when you are unsatisfied? What makes a man unsatisfied? Even more so what do you do when you do everything, working hard for the Lord and you are still unsatisfied? Sin is conquered, you are a strong man. What is satisfaction? I think true satisfaction comes when we know God. We sometimes view God as formulaic, and a relationship with him is reduced to mere mathematics. I sometimes have to envision a marriage, or dating relationship to understand my God., simply because they are so similar. Can you imagine working hard for your spouse/sig. other, working hard to have them notice you or exerting a lot of energy into cultivating relationship and it seems in vain or it seems to go unnoticed? You lose sleep over pleasing them and you feel weary. So weary, the grind of life, the grind of love and sacrifice is wearing you down into dust. On top of all that life is moving at break-neck speeds. You are missing out on everything, everyone it seems, you feel like an old soul, people looking up to you isn't as glamorous as you thought it would be, it's actually very taxing. People think your awesome, people think your doing just fine all the time, and it's partially your fault because you don't want to open up, and when people ask how your doing you don't want to say 'bad'. Not sure what people think when they interact with me, but I'm pretty sure it goes along the lines of "he is always doing so well", which could not be farther from the truth. I'm doing well about 5% to 10% of the time, the rest of the time is not doing well, and just doing well at looking like I'm doing well, or I'm bad and doing well at doing bad. It's a doing poorly with finesse.

I wonder how often our being unsatisfied is linked directly to how we ignore how much God is pleased with our work. And then our ignorance of his delight and joy in us, actually leads us to work for him and not talk with him. We neglect prayer by being too busy. "Hurry kills prayer." I think that we also work in order to ignore, sometimes God tells us something crazy, so we write it off as something we imagined. I mean God ALWAYS works the same way right? Well if God made woman and woman is a part of the reflection of God then God probably never does the same thing, and is pretty crazy, because women are freaking insane (no offense ladies, but sometimes I would rather be thrown into a room with a ticking bomb and try to learn how to diffuse it than try to understand or predict you). I mean God would never ever tell us to do anything seemingly insane, right? I mean it's not like he told Jonah to go tell an entire city to repent, a city that would cut peoples heads off and puts them on a pike to decorate the road entering their city. Crazy.

Don't get me wrong we shouldn't jump at everything that seems crazy. There are times when God is hard to hear. In my experience it's usually sin, ignoring God, lack of trust in God, or busyness. When it comes to discernment, sometimes our heart jumps at something and we must restrain it with Logic and Prayer. Sometimes though it is our Logic that we let get in the way. We say that we would rather serve God in another matter. Listen to God whether it be seemingly dull or crazy. Just make sure that your doing the work that he has permitted or instructed.

Sometimes we do good things for people to get them to notice us, sometimes just to please them. It's fine to try to please someone but we must be sure that we don't super impose a view of how people can treat our good work for how God treats our good work. God will never, ever see our work for him, our trying to please him and be dissatisfied, at the same time our work will never, on it's own bring us closer to God. Coming closer to God will bring us closer to God. Not quite sure all that is entailed in that but I have some ideas, like prayer, rest, community, active listening and sometimes working for the Lord.

Doing good things isn't bad (obviously), but it sure feels like it. It feels like a cold cup of water poured on a vast and infinitely thirsty desert. Or as Paul would use, as a drink offering. A drink offering is a drink that instead of drank for personal enjoyment and satisfaction is dedicated to God. How do you dedicate a drink to God? Is he going to come down and drink it, give you a thank you and a high five and say see you later? Nope, you pour it on the ground. The drink is set apart, poured out and not used for personal gain. It seems like a waste. It seems like death. Yup, there it is, the good ole dying to yourself, that illustrious 100 lb cross. And your going to carry it for what seems like forever, but no worries, it's actually not that long. And oh yeah, when your done carrying it your gonna die on it. That is the life of the Christian. I'm not quite sure why we glamorize it.

But there is the resurrection of course. "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, being made like him and somehow attaining to the resurrection from the dead." We lower ourselves in faith and by grace we will be exalted.

Oh yeah, and BECAUSE HE LIVES, I can face tomorrow. And life is worth the living BECAUSE HE LIVES.

And honestly, most days that is the only thing that gets me through the day. Before I had the luxury of worrying about tomorrow, now I'm just trying to make it through the day. How's that for health & wealth gospel's 'victorious living'.