I will probably never understand exactly what it is that God is doing in my life, but I have finally realized it is not really that important that I understand. I can choose to be happy or sad; I believe that happiness is not only a choice but a moral obligation. I am not talking about joy. I think joy is given from above; happiness is my response to it.
Something I observed about my son Braydn that I think I can learn from is that he chooses to be unhappy too often. He does not understand our discipline for him. He gets totally focused on some small thing, sometimes an item headed for the recycle bin, maybe a bottle cap. His obsession so often has no importance at all. It is just something that keeps him from seeing what is really happening around him. He becomes oblivious to the rest of the family, to his sister’s cry for help, to his mother asking him a question.
Then the next day, he finds some other item that takes over all of his attention, the important item from yesterday goes into his stash. He has a small fishing tackle box filled with junk. He loves all of this junk; he treats the items almost like scars, he cares for them and seeing them remind him of where he got them and what happened. If you dare remove an item from the box he only knows to respond negatively. He thinks of these things as his treasures. He gets very angry if we don’t let him have it out all the time. His mother loves having a tackle box that barely closes because it is so full of junk on the couch all the time.
But it is just junk…
I think we are like this with God sometimes. We get focused on things that we think are important. We can’t stop thinking about them. We get obsessed with them and we feel like our life is one continuous string of important crisis after important crisis. I wonder how often God looks at our crisis’s and see’s a small piece of plastic? A pop bottle top, something that was not a big deal to him at all because he understood that it was just distracting us from him. Not that our important crises are not important to him. He sees them for what they are, something he is in control of. He could take them all away at once and make it all better but maybe we can learn something from them. Maybe we can learn to choose him, to choose happiness instead of dwelling on our junk.
As Braydn’s dad, I understand that most of the junk he keeps will not hurt him for now. There will come a time that he will need to let it go. He will need to focus on other more important things. I can work with him slowly, one item at a time and teach him that other things in life have greater value that pop-tops. I can show him love and understanding. God does this for us.
