[This article was emailed to me by ~]
This is my very real question.
There are times when you seek family or friends and there is time when you seek God. My question is when you have tried all known routes and still things appear not to work – where do you go then?
Is life just hard work? Am I being silly to expect that life can be fun?
What is wrong with hoping life to be full and rich?
Will you share biblical pointers or personal experiences?
This is a difficult one. My own experience has led me to ask exactly the same question at several points in my own journey. The difficulty is that the way forward usually depends on what God has been doing in your life up to this point. In other words, before I comment I would love to know more about you and your story.
If you wanted to follow this up without putting more details on the site then you could e-mail me at revgiblet [AT] gmail [DOT] com.
Don’t let me stop anyone else from commenting. I’m sure there’s plenty of wisdom out there.
I really want to reply to this but I’m afraid I need to get on with preparing a sermon for this Sunday, otherwise I’ll start to lose sleep worrying that I’ll have nothing to say, and make people look stupid for asking me to speak. I’ll try to write soon! It’s on Psalm 131 by the way.
I had a bit of a smack-in-the-face-from-God moment the other day when I read James 5:7-8:
which I found really encouraging in the face of the discouragement and sadness I was feeling, but the smack came with verse 9:
This was particularly relevant to how I was feeling about some fellow-Christians, and I took it as a rebuke against what I was allowing myself to think about them.
James goes on to talk about Job, who we all know is my favourite, so it totally won me over.
I’m not sure – are you saying life is falling apart, or just that it isn’t fun?
I get the impression that the Bible does promise us peace and joy and a new quality of life when we become Christians, but like freedom from slavery to sin, it’s not something we experience all the time. Sometimes we feel good and strong and we seem to have these things, sometimes we can go for months without feeling them.
Some people seem to have more of these things than others, and it’s easy for them to tell other people they can have peace and joy if they only believe etc. etc. One thing I’ve noticed in my own life is how much we’re still trapped in our ‘mortal bodies’, and groan, yearning for God to finish his new creation (Romans 8, 1 Cor 15 etc.). When I’m under pressure or burnt out, it’s not easy to feel peace and joy and freedom, even if it’s our ‘right’ in our status as God’s children. But hopefully (if I still have hope), as we go on in life, God helps us to move more towards realising and experiencing these things.
(Some other thoughts of mine about life from 2 years ago are under ‘What difference does it make?’ below.)