Episode 52 - Celebrating what’s important

There’s a lot of things we strive after in life. Some of them accomplishments, others possessions, some of them even emotional states. These things come and go, but the satisfaction from them rarely stays forever. I find myself in a strange place in life. I want for nothing yet have few of these things that I’m used to striving after. The accomplishments that I had been pursuing; training plans and completing work, developing relationships and making a difference in Papua New Guinea, have all been put on hold being rendered unchaseable in the meantime by my illness. My possessions which I have accrued over many years are now on the other side of the world and even joy and happiness I have stopped actively seeking.

And yet I have them. I am happy and content with life, I’m joyful and often don’t even know why. I’m not pretending that my life is perfect, without the odd frustration or at times sadness, but on the whole, it’s pretty awesome. And as I look back on my life, I see good times in unexpected circumstances, joy in the middle of the storm. And I also see bad times in equally unexpected circumstances, trouble in times of prosperity. As I look through all these times a pattern makes itself clear. Two things stand out. In all the times that things were good these two things were present. Now please understand that by good I don’t mean happiness as an absence of sadness, nor good in the sense of an absence of bad circumstances. What I mean is hard to explain, it’s kind of like everything is all that it’s supposed to be, even the bad stuff, the sad stuff, and the stuff that breaks your heart. An unexplainable and indescribable peace in the midst of everything. Not only were these two things present in the “good” times, but they were also absent in the “bad” times. Now please understand that I don’t mean bad as an absence of those good things that we strive after, nor necessarily as times of sadness. Often at times I was very happy, at least at a superficial level. But deep down, there was a lack of peace, an unrest, an undeniable feeling that something wasn’t quite right or missing from my life.

The first of these two things is hopefully quite to be expected given the life in Christ that I have chosen to follow, and that is a closeness to God. Not whether or not He is close to me (for thankfully He always is) but whether or not I choose to bring myself close to Him. To spend time talking to Him, reading my bible and generally seeing Him when I look at the world. The second thing is perhaps not so obvious. All throughout my life God has blessed me with amazing, good, wonderful loving people. Not always the same people, but God given good people have always been there. And in the “good” times I have drawn close to them and let them in, shared my joys or my sorrows but in the “bad” times I failed to. I shut them out either intentionally or unwittingly, sometimes through fear, other times through hurt that I allowed to get in the way and still other times because I just let myself become too busy.

But right now, they seem to have surrounded me and I don’t think I could push them away even if I wanted to, and I am so grateful for them. For all of them, (now that I think about it, if you’re taking the time to read this rambling blog of what’s going on in my life) for you. So this post is praise for my God who always goes with me, who never ceases to give me what I need should I chose to accept it. And a letter of thanks to all those amazing people that He has put in my life, all throughout my life, whether I reached out to them or not. Thank you to you all, you have quite literally been God’s gift to me whether you realise it or not.