How It's All Going to Turn Out

Now that I'm finally going to be making an effort to read consistently again, I decided I need a place to start. Lately I have enjoyed poking around in the shorter epistles that don't really get mentioned (except James, people seem to remember James). Honestly, I was hoping to find something a little bit happy in tone with more than a little bit of encouragement to soon-to-move me. Peterson's intro to Philippians made the book seem like a slice of happy so I dove in.

Read: Philippians 1-4

Thought: I guess what I was really looking for was a pat on the head and a, "There there, it'll be okay." I'm not terribly apprehensive about moving but I do realize the enormity of the task ahead of me of cleaning and packing followed by moving and unpacking. And the whole not having a job thing. I'm not freaking out but I'm not calm about it either and just having some acknowledgement that it's all in God's hands is what I was looking for.

Philippians was a good place to look, thankfully! This is where you get the verse about praying about everything and worrying about nothing, who knew? But that's not where I'm going to focus today. Right now I'm looking at 1:18-21 (from The Message).

The crux of that passage is that we, or rather just I, do not have to worry because the ending is written already (there's that good predestination Presbyterian doctrine!). Maybe not in the predestination sense really, but more in the God wins and thus I don't have to worry about losing. The win/win situation is a good theme for this paragraph as Paul relates that his choices are "life versus even more life! I can't lose." We have the phrase that if live gives you lemons we should make lemonade (or lemon meringue pie if you're my brother). Paul takes it a step forward and says that our stumbling blocks should be our pulpits with which we preach what God has transformed in and out of our lives for our benefit and thus the benefit of others.

But that's not the amazing part to me. The amazing part is how quickly we ignore all of that and wallow in our own self-pity and take as sacred our rights to vent and whine. I don't want to make the inevitable "look how bad Paul/Jesus/etc had it and they didn't complain" comparison because I know I still have a long, long way before my life comes anywhere near looking like Paul's, let alone Jesus'. But my whining in comparison with the promise of life that we have? There's no comparison.

I'm not advocating closing ourselves up and denying what we feel. But for every second of venting, let's take another second to examine our situation and see where God can work and has already begun to work. And in the second after that let's figure out how we can use what he is teaching us to teach others.