Monday

Catchy title, huh? I think trying to come up with a title for each post is the hardest part of blogging for me.

Anyways, hope everyone had a great weekend. Ours was delightful, however it seemed to fly by. It was Derek's  last weekend of basketball, so we get to have our Saturdays together until April when soccer starts. After Derek got off work Saturday we went to one of our high school students houses and played Rock Band and this fancy dancing game on the X-Box Kinect (I don't know how you spell it!) There's no controllers, just a camera that watches your moves and gives you a score and even sometimes takes pictures of you (a little creepy). It was hilarious and so fun and now I want one, even though I have a wii fit and guitar hero guitars in my living room that have not been used in ages.

So things have been a little busy recently and this week is definitely going to be packed full. I'm making it though, and trying to enjoy every minute, even the things I'm not super looking forward to.

So my last post I was talking about all the amazing stuff God is doing an how I feel so blessed and wouldn't you know that this morning I start reading blogs and in blog land it is so easy to start comparing yourself and to begin to focus on what you don't have. I quickly had to remind myself how blessed I am, and that not having everything I want is not a bad thing. I could focus on things I wish were different and begin scheming as to how I could change it, but I know that when I run after those things to fill me up and make me feel good, I will just find something else to be dissatisfied with.

I'm reading Donald Miller's book Searching for God Knows What and in it he talks about Adam and Eve, and what it must have felt like to not feel like something is missing. He says we were created to find our identity in something external to ourselves, and that something is God. We need that affirmation from God that we are good and worthy. And since the day that Eve took a bite of that silly apple, the one thing that we were created to have our identity in, we are no longer connected to. So we go to everything else imaginable to affirm us and make us feel like we have value. The problem is, none of those things can do that. So we are constantly searching, and as a result we have made up our own value system and resorted to comparing ourselves to each other, finding someone that we can feel better than to slightly fill that void that nothing can seem to fill.

He pointed out that nearly everything we do is an effort to establish where we are in comparison to others. If we look at sports, the whole purpose of any sporting event is to see who is better. Same with reality tv, find out who is the best. We've had our little ranking systems since elementary school - who is the most popular, the prettiest, the best athlete. It seems like a lot of people are having babies these days, and crazy to see everyone's updates of what percentile their baby is in. Before our kids have the awareness to compare themselves to their peers, we are doing it for them. (I'm not saying it's bad to say what percentile your baby is in - I know a lot of it is just out of a desire to make sure they are healthy and for you to remember if they were big or small or whatever.) But it's just crazy how our whole lives we are trying to always better ourself in this value system that we have completely made up and that has no eternal significance.

And so in times when I begin to focus on what I'm lacking, and how my life isn't as full with as many great things as theirs in, I NEED to remember truth, and that my value comes from God, not relationships or material possessions or experiences. It's so easy to say, but so much harder to remember and believe. But I think if we could truly believe this, we would find so much peace.

Those are my thoughts for today. I also have a really hard time trying to end blog posts. So I'll just stop now.