Short thoughts



God loves us and has a wonderful ability to bless our here and now.
Sometimes God blesses us by removing a difficulty. Sometimes he blesses us by giving us peace in difficulty.
God is about something bigger than us, but there is great goodness for us in it.
If left to ourselves, we will miss the blessings. 
God can make more of me than I can make of myself.
I don't have to have the things I want to be happy.*
The things I want often won't make me happy.
Getting what we want may not be a blessing, it might be a trap.
If I can't be content with the things I have, will I be content with the things I want?
The secret to contentment is first to have faith in God and in his blessings, and second to give thanks.
The default life of faith is not to see God deliver you from all your problems, but to see God encourage and strengthen you to trust and bless you through your problems.
We often think we couldn't possibly be in the situation we're in if God's promises were true. But this situation is where God wants to demonstrate how he keeps his promises. 
God really wants to bring peace and contentment  and good character to our hearts. Any other objective we have misses the point.
God knows how messy our hearts really are. He still insists on bringing peace and contentment to them.
God does not want to act once to make us happy ever after. He wants to act again and again to bring us blessings each day.**
We need him to act again and again. When we aren't happy ever after, we haven't missed something.
When other Christians act like they are happy ever after, they're probably faking it.
If you think admitting your imperfections gives God a bad name, think again. His specialty is helping imperfect people.
If you think that the Gospel of grace is for people outside, and once you come inside you need to learn to do the right things, reread Galatians. You're believing in an altered Gospel.
Lamenting our circumstances is not lacking faith. It is the life of faith.
God's great plans involve using us. He is not concerned how much more efficiently he could do things by himself without us.
What he most had to do on his own, because we couldn't help at all, he did by becoming one of us.

*Not original with me. I read this on Facebook.
**I know Christ's death and resurrection was a one time event that changed everything. I'm talking about how we discover and live out what that event means.  We don't experience it as a one time discovery that changes everything in our hearts and circumstances, but as a progression of learning to hope, trust and confide more and more from day to day.

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