LossSample

FEELING CHEATED 

I don’t want to assume anything about where you’re at, but I know that some of you right now are feeling cheated. There was something you had planned, some way you thought this year was going to pan out, and that just disappeared. It wasn’t your fault, there was nothing you could do, but that dream is now dead. I’ve been there and I get it…but what do we do now?

We’ve already talked about the pain of loss and how it’s a good thing to let yourself feel that for a while. But, sometimes we also need a shift in perspective, and that’s what our reading is going to do for us today. You see, as much as we may not want to hear it, we were never entitled to have the experience or the plan we were expecting. It may be a good thing, you may have worked really hard to get there, but it was still never a guarantee. So often we like to look at God as some sort of happiness genie…surely, he wants me to be happy, right? So, if something suddenly comes in and takes away that potential source of happiness, then what in the world is God doing?

God loves you (more than you can even understand) and he absolutely wants what’s best for you. But, God’s top priority is not your happiness. He wants you to have joy (different from happiness), and he wants you to be closer to him, to look more like Jesus, and to ultimately lead other people to knowing him as well. Getting everything we want and expect to happen doesn’t necessarily lead to those more important outcomes. 

Okay, but what do we do with all that? Today, I want to challenge you to pause for a moment as you read these passages and take a fresh look at who God is and who we are. God is all good, all powerful, all knowing, and is completely perfect and holy. Comparatively, we are small, not all that good, and completely imperfect. With that in mind, we don’t actually deserve much of anything from God. The fact that we get any of the blessings that are in our lives is a miracle and a powerful display of God’s goodness and grace. So, while it’s okay to be sad about something you’ve lost, let’s continue to be aware that we have so much to thank God for anyway. We don’t deserve any of it, but God has still filled our lives with good things.