TODAY'S DREAM TOMORROW'S JUNK

Okay, I am seating in front of my computer and I am supposed to be typing my blog to close the year 2011, and somehow I cannot think of what to write about.  I have received so many mails and text messages already, thanking me for my role in the authors’ lives in 2011.  So I thought maybe I should be typing a blog of gratitude… but the truth is I have been flexing my gratitude muscles for a while now, so I am kind of feeling, how many ‘thank yous’ will one person say?  But here it is again, thank you to you all for being in my corner.

I was in church yesterday and we were asked to pray for one thing concerning the New Year and I couldn’t find something to pray, however, I could not help thinking about an article I wrote and published in Effectual Magazine a while ago.  I have adapted it here so you can discern for yourself…

Before I got married I couldn’t get over the fact that at last I will have an apartment to myself and be the Lord of my manor in a manner of speaking, it excited me so much that it almost didn’t matter whether I had enough money to spend within that marriage or not, what mattered was that I had found someone I was willing to spend my life with and so even if he lived in a cave I wouldn’t have minded.

Then we got married and we had a three bedroom apartment that had just the basics, when I moved in it didn’t feel like a basically furnished three bedroom apartment, instead it felt like a castle with one hundred rooms.  Within the first year, it was just fine and very exciting, but as the second and then third, fourth and fifth years rolled by, our family had grown, we had two children with the third on the way and we had acquired quite some furniture and property.

The three bedroom castle began to feel like a very tiny hole and I just kept praying and believing God that somehow, we will be able to afford another house, much bigger so we could move in.  I wanted a bigger house so much that it almost didn’t matter where it was located or what amenities it had, I just wanted a bigger place.  Eventually, we got a bigger place, we moved in and it felt like moving into the National Stadium, I wondered if we will ever be able to get enough furniture for the house, if we will ever be able to put enough air conditioning units in and so on and so forth.

Today, five years later the `National Stadium’ has become too small again, we need more space because we have acquired so much again!  And isn’t this the story of all our lives?  We want something so badly that if not for Jesus and a lack of guts we could have killed to get, then we get it and within years and sometimes even months, it losses it’s excitement and all we want is to replace it?  The question is, when we get into the `I need to replace this mode’, and we get round to changing it, what do we do with the old?  A lot of us want to be able to hold on to the old while reaching for the new but in the end we find out that the old is just that, the old, it loses its excitement, it becomes dusty and at long last it becomes just one antique or piece of junk sitting on our shelves or tucked away inside our wardrobes, or sitting within our premises and  we have no idea what to do with them.

I have thought about our dream cars, houses, jewelry, relationships, and all the other things we like to acquire and found out that they are only as exciting as they are new, but with time they begin to lose their sheen and consequently the excitement we used to feel from just looking at them, and as a result we begin to crave new ones and the cycle begins all over again.  

                                                                 

I asked myself how we can get round this vicious cycle and I realized that there is no peace derived from acquisitions that will last, and I suddenly realized that what I should be doing is craving for ways to make my life worth while by spending it and being spent on others.  It has come to my notice that people may die but whatever we invest in them doesn’t die, because somehow they are able to pass it on to others.

So as I sit here wondering it suddenly hit home for me.  Yes I want a great 2012, but it is not because of the things I will get for myself… my sight is set on two things, first to be in the center of God’s will for me and second to be able to serve more people than I served this year. 

I am not apprehensive about how we will cope in the new year, because we didn’t cope this year, God helped us and he will help us again.  Before you make your very long list, remember that it will soon be another twelve months and everything will need to be changed again.  Make meaningful contributions in the new year, and then in December you will be able to say, ‘I lived’.  Because honestly, I lived in 2011, and in 2012, I will live too, NeverTheless.

God bless you and Happy New Year.

Sistar B