Forever
in our lives, and they never reach our standards, and we tend to get hurt or angry when they don’t. We reduce all of life to a personal comfort and pleasure delivery system, but life never operates the way we wish. Because we live as if this is all there is, we are peren- nially demanding and disappointed, thinking that we have been dealt a particularly difficult hand. We envy the people around us who appear to have what we don’t, and we find it hard to cel- ebrate the successes of others. With the assumption that this is our final destination, we constantly want more and better. We’re never able to say, “I have enough.” We possess too much, eat too much, spend too much, dream too much, demand too much, complain too much, expect too much, keep score too much, ask too much — and we are disappointed too much. You see, we don’t need a better now; no, we need forever to reshape our here and now. One of the good things the Bible keeps in front of us is that this is not all there is. The world and everything in it is march- ing toward eternity, and when we understand that, everything changes. You know you don’t actually just go around once, so you don’t expend all of your life energies trying to do with gusto all you can now. You know you won’t experience it all in the here and now. You understand that this life is but a brief preparation for the forever that is to come and that the messiness and hardship of the here and now are not an interruption of the plan, but a part of the plan. The one who is in charge has chosen to keep you in a world that is less than perfect, not because he has forgotten you and what you need, but precisely because he loves you and is delivering to you exactly what you need. As Jack, David, and Beth discovered, the pack-it-all-in mental- ity simply doesn’t deliver. The frenetic pace of the “good life” doesn’t result in the lasting peace, joy, and rest that they are seeking — for them or for the people around them. No, the legacy of destination living is drivenness, dissatisfaction, and disappointment. Sure there are temporary highs, but they are short-lived and work only to keep you driving toward the next bite of the “good life.”
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