What God taught me about change and failure this week

[jennifer_bloom]

In the parable of the ten maiden brides that wait for the bride groom to arrive and so he can whisk them away on the carrier, the maidens had to trim their lamps before they could meet the bride groom.

Back then, their lamps were glass structures that were filled with oil, with a coiling tope shaped device that was lit with a fire and had to be cut and relit after a period of usage, so the coil like line is a symbol for your life, the trimming is a symbol for partial severance of certain aspects of the life, and the relighting is a symbol for adjusted restitution after the earlier parts are cut off.

Today I made the choice to put one of my working book outlines into the back burner category because it seemed to have lower profit margins, social merit and workability potential than my other outlines. I also realized I needed to set more realistic goals.

I made the choice to read a 600-700 page book today but woke up 3-5 hours later than normal, which cut into my reading time, spent an hour eating and doing dishes and new morning routines, attended a zoom event which ran longer than the scheduled time, typed up an email that took longer than expected, got held up with organization tasks for my book outlines leading to time loss.

I also wasted precious reading time scouring multiple dictionaries for outdated, offhand phrases that were atypical of common dialect or nuanced to peripheral societies and isolated quarters of North America in a specialized book I was reading on ethnic cultural experiences among the privileged elite.

The result being, I only achieved around 100 or so pages of reading and I still had 2 hours to kill to update myself on the news and eat dinner which I do every day at the same time and I realized, I had to accept that my goal of covering 600 pages in one day would not be attainable unless I pulled an all nighter.

Ecclesiastes 3:6 says that there is…

a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away.

Today was the time for me to give up my unattainable goal. I also remember other times when God pushed me out of other goals I was pursuing and against my will, because God knows, I never quit at anything unless I have no choice but to quit. Ultimately, the forced quitting was more beneficial for me than my stubborn desire to continue what I was doing.

This also applied to dead end jobs, relationships and educational pursuits where I was unhappy but refused to quit, and God forced me to quit against my will by laying off my entire department, or relocating a guy I wanted to date ,or having me replaced by others in a competitive program at school, which turned out to be good, because it was a career I hated and did not want to train in.

I think God cares more about my happiness than I do sometimes.

[alance99]

Nice Mytake