God's Best

"People ruin their lives by their own foolishness,
and then are angry at the Lord."

- Proverbs 19:3 (NLT)

I recently had a simple realization. It probably isn't even very profound. But it was a lightbulb for me, so I decided to blog about it. The realization was this: If we want God's best for our lives, we have to live the way he says is best.

People sometimes see God as this dominating boss with a whole bunch of silly rules that don't make sense. But even when they don't seem to make sense, his rules are for our ultimate benefit. And when hardships come, it's often the result of sin. Not necessarily our own sin, but someone's sin. That's not always the case, but by and large the things that go wrong in this world go wrong because people aren't playing by God's rules. It affects them, and people around them, and people six degrees separated.

And then people get angry at God. I met a man recently who questioned why so many things had been going wrong in his life. And I don't know why each individual problem he had happened. But I got the impression that he might be kind of playing the victim.

It reminded me of this activity I wrote for a Buzz lesson where, to show kids the damaging effects of complaining, we had them list their favorite things and then find things to complain about regarding those things. So they might say "pizza can burn your tongue" or "basketball makes you sweaty." And the point is that when you start focusing too much on the negatives, soon that's all you see. And it's kind of what you expect. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you can ruin your life with these negative attitudes...which is foolishness.

One of God's "rules" is to be joyful always. To give thanks continuously. When we do this, we focus on the good in our lives until that becomes all we see. And when we get to that point, we're living God's best. There may be hard things in our lives (we'll always have problems), but we choose to focus on God's blessings and how we can help others experience his blessings too.

God has a lot of other rules. Hard ones. Like putting others first. Loving our enemies. Helping the poor. But if we want to live the good life, we do these things, knowing that God's the only one who has this figured out. And if he says that's the way to a good life, and we don't do it...well, there's no reason to be angry with him.

Glitter

Yesterday when I was waiting in line at the airport, there was a family behind me with a very worrisome mom, dad, and two grown-up kids. There was also a younger boy, about 10 or 11, in this family. The parents and two grown-ups were worrying about everything imaginable. And then the little boy chimed in. To which one of his older brothers said, "YOU don't need to worry about anything."

And I thought, "How could he not worry? He probably doesn't know any differently."

OK. So maybe I shouldn't be making snap judgements about people I don't know. People are different when they travel. Grumpier. More impatient. More worrisome. Maybe they are perfectly pleasant people under non-travel conditions.

But the fact of the matter is, our attitudes do spread to those around us. Just like glitter. You can not open a Christmas card that has glitter on it and not find it all over yourself. As Demetri Martin says "Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies." It is impossible to use glitter and not have it spread. (Which is why I hate glitter.)

And in much the same way, it seems to be impossible not to spread a bad attitude. Especially when travelling. Good attitudes can spread, too, although they're not nearly as contagious.

So the question is, what kind of attitude are you spreading? And how aware are you of the glitter all over your clothes and face when someone around you can't seem to find anything good to say?