Is Your Life Exciting Enough?

We live in a world dominated by information.  We are constantly bombarded by information on  any and all subjects you can think of.  Because we live in a world where people are constantly searching for meaning, we tend to hear a lot about how to make our lives better, happier, more productive, more exciting, more purposeful, etc. from all sorts of these different sources.

I heard a piece on the Today Show Thursday morning (as I have previously mentioned, I watch the Today
Show almost every day) where they talked about how to discern if your life is exciting enough.  There was an entire quiz you could take, that would help determine in your life has enough excitement in it.  If you scored low on this test it means that you don’t have enough excitement in your life, so they then talked about how to ‘fix’ that about yourself.  The questions ranged from how often you are spontaneous to how easily you make friends.  Most of you who know me will not be surprised to find that I didn’t score very high on this test.  J 

According to the Today Show, I should be concerned about this fact.  I should rearrange my life in order to have more excitement.  As I watched them talk about how I need more excitement and responded with playful/sarcastic comments in my head, I couldn’t help but think of all the people watching who would take this as truth and think that there really is something wrong with them based on just this test.  There are people all around us through television, radio, newspapers, and Facebook (just to name a few) telling us that there is something wrong with us and they know just how to fix it.  The sad part is that if you believe what they are telling you and try the make the changes they suggest, the next person you hear many tell you something completely different.  People can be blown around like leaves falling off the trees because they are trying to follow what all of these sources are telling them their lives should really look like.  In essence, their lives are guided by the wind as it blows in one direction and then another.  How difficult and stressful that must be!

With the sheer number of things that try to capture our attention and our focus, and with the sheer number of ways we have to connect to all of these things, it can be easy to lose focus and have our lives be blow around in multiple directions.  The challenge for us as Christians is that we should have only one thing that has that kind of power in our lives, Jesus Christ!  As we are told in Matthew 6:33, “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”  We are not told to seek first what the world tells us our lives should look like, or seek first the latest craze, but seek first God’s kingdom, and everything else will fall into place.

What guides your life?  Is it the latest thing you saw on the Today Show, or something you saw on Facebook, or is the God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer?  Is your life guided by the changing winds of our world, or by God who never changes?  “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17).  May we all take some time this weekend to pray out what is guiding our lives, and asking God to be our ultimate and only guide in this crazy thing called life.

God bless, Rev. Liz Arakelian, www.LivingHopeEC.org