An Eternal Perspective

Several days ago I battled discouragement for an hour or so.  "It's too hard, Daddy!"  I cried in the bathroom, after we had another setback.  Visions of negative outcomes piled into my mind and I couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel  Then I remembered that a couple of days earlier, after the first or second setback, I had determined before the Lord that I was NOT going to get rattled by these setbacks.  The doctors had all warned us they would occur, and that his ultimate recovery (of breathing, anyway) was not in question.   I could trust them to do their best and Joel's body and the Lord to do the rest, and the bumps in the road would not stop us from reaching our goal.

My current challenge, and I think all of ours, is to gain that eternal perspective that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians 4:  "Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day  For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comprehension, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.  For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."  Previously he had written about his "light and momentary" affliction as "afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down, and always carrying in the body the death of Jesus," so I'm guessing it wasn't that light or that momentary.

If I really believed Jesus when he said things like, "My kingdom is not of the world," and "The kingdom of God is within you," and understood the upside-down nature of the laws of the kingdom of God, I would not panic over the various circumstances of this "seen" life.  I would constantly ask myself, "How can this circumstance be used to glorify God and make his kingdom more real to me and those around me?"  I would trust that the bumps in the road will not stop me from reaching my goal of knowing Christ and making him known.

Lord, I believe - help my unbelief!