I find that there are two things that define my life.
The biggest one is the extent of my own obstinacy, and the belief that I know best. As long as I bow to that, I can wonder in retrospect whether my decisions ever made sense, when I find out that my life is not what I had hoped. This is the biggest one only because it is my absolute right to make my own decisions, if I want, and by doing so I will find out just how fallible I am.
The second is reliance on God, which is a choice I can always make. In doing that I get short term perplexity about the insane and crazy things that happen when I pray. But the more I do it, the more I sit back and let them happen, because in the long term I see that God has done better for me than I ever could, knowing in advance the consequence of every action, things that I can never imagine. Indeed life has shown me that the things that actually happen are very rarely the ones that I could have imagined.
So the more I rely on God to guide my decisions, knowing that he can see the way ahead when I cannot, the more relaxed I get, and the better my life turns out, long term. The difficulties on the way are nothing to be compared with where I am going.
I can always look back and rue the thing I did by first convincing myself that God agreed with me, and that his warnings were just coincidences; I married Elizabeth, and through our children (who are marvelous, but abused and used as pawns) she has wrecked 18 years of my life, after which most of the prospects that I can imagine remain utterly hopeless - except that the God I rely on knows more ways forward than I can ever imagine, and that's where I am going.
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I find that there are two things that define my life.
The biggest one is the extent of my own obstinacy, and the belief that I know best. As long as I bow to that, I can wonder in retrospect whether my decisions ever made sense, when I find out that my life is not what I had hoped. This is the biggest one only because it is my absolute right to make my own decisions, if I want, and by doing so I will find out just how fallible I am.
The second is reliance on God, which is a choice I can always make. In doing that I get short term perplexity about the insane and crazy things that happen when I pray. But the more I do it, the more I sit back and let them happen, because in the long term I see that God has done better for me than I ever could, knowing in advance the consequence of every action, things that I can never imagine. Indeed life has shown me that the things that actually happen are very rarely the ones that I could have imagined.
So the more I rely on God to guide my decisions, knowing that he can see the way ahead when I cannot, the more relaxed I get, and the better my life turns out, long term. The difficulties on the way are nothing to be compared with where I am going.
I can always look back and rue the thing I did by first convincing myself that God agreed with me, and that his warnings were just coincidences; I married Elizabeth, and through our children (who are marvelous, but abused and used as pawns) she has wrecked 18 years of my life, after which most of the prospects that I can imagine remain utterly hopeless - except that the God I rely on knows more ways forward than I can ever imagine, and that's where I am going.