Being involved in business and ministry for the better part of my adult life has given me a unique perspective on my life and the lives of other people I have known over the years. I have watched as people in both business and ministry suffer and struggle through the pains of unmet expectations and disappointments.
I have not been immune to being disappointed or disillusioned with life when things have not turned out the way I had hoped.
Even as I write this, though everything I have wanted, desired, and worked for may not have worked out the way I had wanted or hoped, I do realize I have been blessed the entire time. The problem has been, on more than one occasion, I have allowed myself to be “miserable in the blessings”.
This seems oxymoronic, but it is very real and occurs in most of our lives.
How and why are the natural questions that flow out of this type of thinking.
How do we find misery among the blessings of our life? We do so by looking at someone else’s life and thinking they have been blessed more than we have.
Why we do so, if we are honest, is because most of us are all self-focused and self-absorbed much of the time, which will always leave us disappointed and dismayed in the middle of the blessings of our life.
For many, the natural response would be to think, you don’t know how I have struggled or what I have been through, if you did, you would not consider my life blessed. While others would contend, the way they have given and served should have led to a greater sense of the blessings of their lives.
I contend both perspectives are short sighted, and to prove my point, all we must do is look around us and we can easily find someone who has given more of themselves or had a greater struggle than we have.
Like most things in life, being “miserable in the blessings” is simply a choice we make.
The question we should ask ourselves is, why choose misery? I want you to know, in many cases, we do so because it gives us a sense of justification for the things in our life we are not pleased or happy with. It is as if it feels better to be miserable than to except the truth we are blessed.
My hope in sharing these thoughts is to encourage thought and perhaps help someone go from being “miserable in the blessings” of their life to being thankful because they realize just how blessed they are.
If we survey our lives, in most cases we will see the truth we have been blessed and are blessed. The choice to see or not see this will either cause us to acknowledge both the blessings and the blesser or we will continue to be “miserable in the blessings” because we refuse to consider we are blessed.
If misery is what we choose, we must realize, when we do, it is impossible to recognize how blessed we are, which will cause us to miss the blessings all around us.
I will close by asking you to ask yourself if you are “miserable in the blessings” of your life? If you are, I pray you will see being blessed is not about what we have or don’t have. Being blessed comes from knowing whose we are!
John 1:16, “From his abundance we have all received one gracious blessing after another.”
