I have a little bit of a headache as I write this. I took a nap and I must've slept with my head in a weird position. I get it in the back of my neck, and it can turn into a tension headache. I hope it doesn't.
In examining my own walk with The Lord, it's easy to get discouraged. It's easy for me to see all the times I didn't trust God, when I did what I shouldn't have done, when I didn't do what I should've done. This perspective seems all the more real, and all the more daunting, when you are a pessimist by nature, like me.
Pessimism makes it all too easy to think ill of things, of others, even of God Himself. It's such an easy temptation when you tend to distrustful by nature. There are moments when I trust God as I know I ought to, and there are moments where it's a struggle to trust Him.
It's those moments, where God turns up the heat as He works on us, that it becomes easy to wonder what He's doing or if He even cares. I realize that He does care about me, and that He is working on me even now. I asked Him to give me a more humble heart, and part of that has been dealing with sin that still exists in my life, much if it latent.
Isaiah wrote that God refines us with the fire of affliction. If anything, this time has make it clear that I have harbored a lot of bad attitudes in my heart that God is driving to the surface. I find I've been spending a good deal of time lately in quiet prayer, simply asking God to take these rotten attitudes from me and to give me a heart of love and purity. Even though it is often painful, I am being purified.
I would guess that the biggest hazard in being a pessimist is that you tend to trust your own assessment of things, and that assessment is typically bleak. It can fail to see the goodness of God at work, because it doesn't look for the good. I pray constantly that I would learn to trust God first and only. I think I've demonstrated that I cannot and should not trust myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment