A Comfortable Predicament

And teenagers are too easy a target. We adults do the same thing. “If only I had that house/car/boat/furniture.” “If only I had ‘x’ dollars saved for retirement or ‘y’ dollars in my portfolio, I’d be ok.” If only I could find the right person to marry, get out of the marriage I’m in, get through my kids’ teenage years with my sanity…” You get the idea.

St. Augustine said, “All hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” Indeed. Pascal said, "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus".

Anything that we depend on, anything that we trust in save the Lord who created us will lead to disappointment. Trusting in anything other than Christ is vanity and futility. Because only Christ can give rest to a human heart, and this is because only Christ created human hearts.

I have a beloved motorcycle – one that I enjoy riding on nice days more than just about anything else. I have an owner’s manual, and it says to use high-octane gas. But let’s say I decide that I need a bit more power and speed – going 85 down Denow Rd. is just not fast enough. I could head down to Trenton-Mercer Airport and get some jet fuel. Would that be a good plan? Well, my bike would run fast for a little while, I would imagine. But then it would almost certainly melt down into a puddle of molten engine parts. Why? Because it was not engineered to run on jet fuel. That’s not what it was designed for.

God allows people fuel up on jet fuel, chicken soup or anything they choose in their quest to get life to work. But that does not mean that people will find satisfaction or success in doing that. It stands to reason that our only real hope is to turn to the One who created us to find a proper understanding of how life is supposed to operate.

It is easy for us to point a finger at those who do not follow Christ as if they are the only ones investing in the wrong things. How about us? What do we really trust in for our own satisfaction? If we are honest, I think that the list does not look significantly different than the list we’d write for non-believers. We still get caught in the same trap of trusting in vain and futile things, don’t we? Jesus said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” You and I need this challenge as much as the non-believer!

So, do you want to get well? Or do you just want to continue to trust in what you have been trusting in – the things that will never satisfy you. It’s a fair question!

*What about the second kind of person – the person who does not want to change? I think it is well within the realm of possibility that our friend Thad did not really want to get well at all.

Think about it… He must have been adequately cared for, or he would not have survived. What must life have been like? Probably had friends there, had grown used to this way of life, don’t you think? Surrounded by other folks who were hopeless. The sick, infirm, lame. It certainly is possible to find ourselves in a situation where we become either resigned to our fate, or even accustomed enough to it to even resist changing it.