Shattered Dreams

If God didn’t withhold heaven’s best, if He gave us His Son, then why would He hold back any other good thing?  The Bible says He wouldn’t, that He doesn’t.

But we can draw up lists, long ones, of good things He has not put into our lives.  It’s hard to count our blessings when our trials seem to outnumber them.

So we take matters into our own hands.  We work hard to improve our marriage, to straighten out our kid, to make enough money to pay for the bare necessities.  We want things to improve, and now it’s clear why we want things to improve – we want to feel better.  That’s our bottom line.

We love our spouses and children and friends, but it isn’t love for them or for God that drives us.  Our misery drives us not to seek God, but to seek to feel better; not to please Him, but to use Him.

We come to a point where there is no more important fact in the world than that we feel bad and there is no deeper desire in our hearts than to feel good.  It seems that someone ought to cooperate in helping us feel better. 

We turn to God and all we hear are more instructions:  Don’t be so lazy.  Don’t eat so much.  Don’t complain.  Do go to church.  Do worship Me.  Do keep tithing.

It makes us mad.  “Fat lot of help He is,” we mutter under our breath.

We can now begin to see that we’re living to do whatever it takes to feel better.  And since no one (including God) seems to be helping much, we feel justified in our efforts.  Watching hours of television feels legitimate.  At least it dulls the pain and keeps us from fighting with our spouse and kids.

That’s the ball chained to our legs.  What I have written is a description of what the Bible calls our flesh.  It’s the way we think; it’s the energy that pushes us to do what we do, the energy that drives us to evaluate everything that happens in our lives according to how it makes us feel.

When we feel unhappy, we view that experience as the greatest crime ever committed.  We are victims of a fickle world, an unresponsive God, a variety of insensitive people.  Our chief aim is to feel better.  It seems a righteous cause, a noble crusade.  If we can make a few dreams come true that will help us feel better, we go to work.  If we can engage in activities that directly create better feelings or, failing that, numb the troubling emotions, we do it.

Look into your heart, study your interior world, and you will find that attitude.  It’s there in all of us…..

Only shattered dreams reveal the problem clearly, and only shattered dreams create a brokenness that helps us hate that attitude enough to give it up.  Only shattered dreams help us feel appropriately impotent.

 

^Pages 151 & 152 ^ in Larry Crabb’s Shattered Dreams – God’s Unexpected Pathway to Joy

Some really good truths in this book that really hit home.