Today was, what should have been one of the most dreadful days of my recent life. I took my sister to the dermatologist to have a skin tissue removed from her face. When she got up from the waiting room chair she was sitting on, upon being called in, she fell and broke her hip on the floor.
An ambulance had to be summoned and she was taken to the hospital ER. Now she faces surgery tomorrow and later on, a few weeks in a rehab therapy facility.
Lately, I had been in a depressional funk over life not having turned out okay for me. Motivation almost nonexistent, health more or less so-so, finances a joke, but faith in God good. And that spelled the difference that led me to the eureka moment of a lifetime.
I'm sharing it with you now because of what I think can spell the difference for you all between suicide and a life worth being grateful for.
It's this: I remember that Jesus Christ exhorted us all to seek first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness, the righteousness of God. Then all the other things we need would be added.
Too many of us regular people concentrate our hearts on the part of all other things will be added.
Too few of us who focus on the language alone relate to the Seek First the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness. And I'm part of the majority that just didn't relate to that earlier part of the exhortation. We didn't see that this part of the exhortation applied to us directly. We saw it in a religious sense, a tit for tat, a tradeoff. We saw it as bribing God by sacrificially seeking His Kingdom and His Righteousness. And then sit and wait for the other things we need to be added to our lives.
Again, I plead guilty. Yes, I saved.
But then I did it because the idea of going to Hell scares me horribly. It's an eternity that I'm not at all prepared for, neither are you, neither is anyone else. And we shouldn't be. God didn't create us to go there.
But I digress. Let me now spell out the Eureka moment.
What if Jesus meant, by our seeking the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness -- that in the seeking of that - there awaits us a big reward in and of itself?
How can that be?
Here's what happened with me that clicked me into a different way of seeing it.
For most of my life, I've been rather dissatisfied with my life; I've grumbled that being in the world, being thrust into life is something that I never signed up for, that there's really nothing in life but a process of just coping with it and waiting to die.
That's a lousy perspective, and it's also ungrateful.
What if the Life that I've been grumbling about, bitching about, is actually Not the Life, is not the Life God ever intended for me?
Let's say that if I'm supposed to have joy despite all things if I'm supposed to be of good cheer, that if I'm not to let my heart be troubled, then I'm living a life that -
Is Not - God's intended, willed, life for me to live.
And in seeking God's Kingdom and His Righteousness, what is called for - is for me and you and each and all persons - to trade in the lives we've lived, the process of living we've lived that God never intended for us - and after surrendering our lives to the Lord Jesus, we'll get the Kingdom of God and God's Righteousness in the form of a whole package deal of a life that He's always had for us and has wanted us to live all along.
And in giving up our lives in exchange for this Life that God has for us- we get the rewarding life, God's intended Life for us, based on His holiness, His Peace, His Joy, His Love, and His Rest.
That's what I think that Jesus Christ meant when He told to Seek First God's Kingdom and His Righteousness - to Seek to enter into this God-intended Life for you, for me, for each and all of us people. That's what's in the Bible when we're exhorted to not conform to the world and the things of the world.
The world offers a life that's very inferior in quality to the glorious life that God custom-designed for each of us. Let us renounce these crappy lives, give them up, trade them in for the real life, the Life that God Has custom-designed for each of us.
That's where we find in itself the reward of Seeking First the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness and then, coming in, a distant second in priority, are all the other things that are to be added.
When someone is living an unsatisfactory life, and he or she says to himself or herself, "There's got to be a better way. There's got to be more than this" that person is right on the money, right on target. There is a better way to lead a life, there is far more than the life lived thus far. It's just that we have to set aside our prides, our egos, our earthly priorities and see that the whole package of a life, the whole thing that has to be more than this, that has to be a better way - is just that - the Life that God always intended for that person, for you, for me.
I'm going to leave you all now to think for yourselves and understand fully well, that God's thoughts for you are for good, not evil - and the live He's always wanted for you is far better than the one you've been living up until now.
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