It is 6:30am local time as I type this. We went to bed after midnight. With the bright morning light and the bird salutations (among them quite a few roosters), “sleeping in” just didn’t work for me this morning.
The travel was “interesting”. I think pretty much anything that could happen did (see the prior post for the first day’s aborted trip for some of the details). Laura and I agreed that in all of our travel (including my business travel in the 80s and 90s) combined, we had never experienced so many delays, cancellations, losses and “inconveniences” as we did on this single trip! Maybe we will recount some more of the travel trauma when we have an adequate amount of time to process (embellish) it.
Oh, yeah…
Our luggage didn’t arrive.
Yet, with all the annoyances, inconveniences, crises and issues we’ve encountered thus far, we have still managed to remain friends (I really like her).
When I perform a marriage, I insist that I provide the premarital counseling. I tell the young couple that I will be interfering with their marriage for the rest of their lives. In one of the annual followups I did, one of the guys told me, “Marriage has been a continuous process of showing me just how selfish I am!”
When I consider the image of marriage as metaphor of Christ’s love for His church, I see the same opportunity. It’s easy to become mired in a sea of self-pity as we deal with our ‘1st World” problems. We miss our monumental blessing in being His beloved as we fix our eyes on what we have “lost”. Even though we intellectually understand that “knowing Christ” is infinitely more valuable than anything we may “miss out on”, it rarely feels like that in the moment of great inconvenience. We forget it is all about Him. We want to make it all about “me”.
Self.
Self centered. Self important. Self absorbed. Self sufficient. Self aggrandizing. Just plain selfish. Did you ever notice our travels nowadays normally begin and end with a “selfie”? What would a “God-ie” look like?
In our journey through this life, it is never about the great things we will get to do. It is not about our accomplishments, influence, popularity, comfort, wealth, status, etc. It is about Who we get to do it with! Forgetting what lies behind, fixing our eyes on Jesus, counting it all joy and having a peace that surpasses all understanding, we begin again with mercies that are brand new and made especially for this morning!