I wonder where God has you right now?
I’m not so much wondering about your physical location, though that’s certainly part of it. I’m more wondering about your entire season of life—where you live, who you’re caring for, and what you’re doing (and perhaps what you’re not doing).
How are you doing in your current season of life?
There’s something in human nature that makes us always reach for something else. Something other than what we have. We look with jealousy at a past season, at someone else’s season, or at an unreal season that exists only in our imagination.
And with all our looking, reaching, and imagining, we’re not fully living in the season where God has us right now.
I read a poem by Margaret Atwood that encouraged my thinking along these lines. Entitled Salt, it begins like this:
“Were things good then?
Yes. They were good.
Did you know they were good?
At the time? Your time?
No, because I was worrying
or maybe hungry,
or asleep, half of those hours.”
And I read these words in Ecclesiastes 3:
“I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.”
There is nothing better than to be joyful, right now, this very moment, in what God has given me.
Joyful in what he has not given,
trusting that he knows better than I do.
Joyful in what used to be that isn’t anymore,
believing his will is best.
Joyful in my unmet desires,
knowing my fragile heart is in his loving hands.
How are you doing in your current season of life?
Can you trust your Father in all the “haves and have nots” of today, knowing that the things he is doing in your life right now are for your very best good and his glory?
There is nothing better than to be fully alive—full of joy—right now, at this exact minute, in this season God has given me.
After all, today might be all I have.