Less Of Me

I have been feeling like kind of a jerk lately. I feel kind of irritable and kind of faithless. I feel like some of my most important relationships have been kind of weak lately. I have just felt kind “not myself”. I was thinking about that this morning and reading and praying and then it came to me. The real problem is not that I have been becoming less like myself, but that I have been becoming more like myself. I have been kind of selfish and I have been missing my time with God, which in turn causes me to become less like Him and more like the me of the flesh. It’s like John the Baptist talks about in John 3:30. He said of his relationship with Christ, “He must become greater and I must become less”. I see that same principle play out in my life so often. When I stop investing my relationship with Christ and stop investing in my spirit I become less and less like the person that I want to be and more like the person I loathe being. I just need to remember that when I feel miserable or I notice that I am getting upset with others with great frequency, it’s on me, not on them.

Happiness

This week in church the message was about something like"Are you Really Happy?" Something like that. I really dont know what was said because I missed the service due to a youth meeting (I need to go back and watch it) anyways It really made me think. I try to have the messages with the youth kind of follow the messages of the main service, so I thought about happiness and I talked with the students about that on Sunday. I concluded this; happiness is a strange thing and it is so hard to understand. What I can understand is this... It is good, we all want it, It is easy to obtain and for some odd reason some people just choose not to get it. They would rather feel sorry for themselves by looking at how bad things are and be unhappy about it. I know that sounds really cruel and insensitive to say, but that is the best way I can understand it. I'll say what I often say to my clients at work and what I got from a John Maxwell book; "Would you rather be a thermometer or a thermostat?" We actually get to decide that every time something starts to bring us down.