The Pack-It-All-In Mentality
be our final destination, and that God is preparing another world for us. Living with a preparation mentality also means living with the knowledge that God is using the disappointments and diffi- culties of this world to prepare us for the next. God uses the pres- sures of the present to craft us into the kind of individuals with whom he would choose to spend eternity. Living in this present world is designed by God to produce three things in me — longing , readiness , and hope . Rather than deepening my drive to have it all now, the disappointments of this present world are intended to make me long for the next. God also knows that we are not ready for the world that is to come. There are ways in which we still are too impressed with our own wisdom, strength, and righteousness. We still struggle to love the Creator more than the creation. We still want to have our own way and write our own rules. So there are important character changes that grace needs to work in us to make us ready for our final destination. And God is using this present moment to produce in us sturdy hope. As by his grace we experience tastes of what is to come, we don’t panic in the face of difficulty and disappointment, because we know that God is moving us toward a place where the suffering of this present moment will be no more. When we ask now to give us what only eternity can, we end up driven, frustrated, discouraged, and ultimately hopeless. We begin with unrealistic expectations and end feeling as though life has passed us by. We try to exercise more control than any person ever has over their circumstances and relationships in order to ensure that we get what we have set our hopes on. But we are not sovereign, and we soon realize it. Because we fall into thinking of this life as our final destination, we place more hope in our situ- ations, relationships, and locations than they are able to deliver. We ask people, places, and things to satisfy our souls and redeem our pasts, but they can’t. We require a broken world that is not functioning as God intended to make us happy, but it never can and never will. We place way too many expectations on the people
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