At least as of today... a perspective...

I choose to be happy.

Yesterday I decided this. Tired and fed up with struggling with all my conundrums, I decided to make a conscious choice to just STOP IT and choose to be happy.

A title of a book, I have not read, intrigued me (I did not buy it, my book stacks are too high and my amazon.com wish list is just too long) but it voiced what I concluded.

The book title:

Just Do Something: How to Make a Decision Without Dreams, Visions, Fleeces, Open Doors, Random Bible Verses, Casting Lots, Liver Shivers, Writing in the Sky, etc.
By Kevin De Young.

Great title, huh?

So I have these great questions, imponderables, paradoxes that I just cannot reconcile or solve, so I decided to just let them go, and live my life, and be happy. I will love my God, respond if He speaks/leads, love my kids to pieces and just do my life, happily, without resolutions.

The great imponderables?

• Trying to understand the freewill of man against the unthwarted plan (sovereignty) of God and how the two reconcile.
• Trying to understand why God allows the extreme poverty, pain, need, sorrow, brokenness of people in Ethiopia, Uganda, India, etc etc etc and the spoiled, entitlement-driven affluence of America (and a few other places). How can He bless me or answer my prayer, while they suffer? And don't even get me started on the orphaned children of the world and the "christian" peoples who cannot be inconvenienced. ("It's just not my calling, Linda Sue, I tell ya, it is just not my callin', but God bless 'em!")
• Trying to comprehend what is the effective power of prayer when I do not see the intervention of God or the answers to prayer.
• Trying to understand God, when He is beyond my understanding, like Chris Rice says, trying to smell the color 9. 9 is not a color, and even if it is, you can't smell a color anyway. His point exactly.
• Trying to grasp God's kingdom plan and calender and why it is not "enough already!" Why keep this going in this way when every day He has to start over with a new group and new generation. What is the milestone that says...ok, let's move on to what is next.
• What He expects when waiting on God seems to result in just waiting and in the meantime decisions need to be made and things need to be done.
• Why is God silent? He was silent for about 400 years between the old and new testament...and now for a bit over 1940 years or so...since Revelation was penned. Why? Why not burn a bush or knock someone off a donkey or speak from a cloud in heaven or whisper in the night? We are getting it really mixed up down here, it seems. Why not set us straight? Aren't we as useful, important, worth it.....loved as they were?

So those are my imponderables. Harsh perhaps in some ways, but honest.

And I came to this conclusion: There is no answer for them. I can reflect and search and dig and ask and read and pray from here to eternity, literally, and unless God decides to end the silence, I will NEVER KNOW the answer.

So I choose to let them go.

I choose to be happy without answers.

I choose to let my soul (and mind) rest from the struggle.

I choose to believe God and His sovereignty and with all my heart surrender my freewill to what I know of Him. He will have to show me what I do not know, if it needs to be known.

I choose to help those in poverty and pain as much as my resources can and not get caught up in affluenza, as much as I can and share the joy of adoption by living it out in my family.

I choose to pray about all that crosses my heart, believing His word, that it is powerful and effective, even when I do not see it.

I choose to trust and believe my God who is beyond my understanding and whose ways are incomprehensible to me.

I choose to leave his kingdom calendar up to Him and just do what is before me.

I choose to hear him speak in what He spoke in His ancient text and watch Him make it living and alive breathing hope into my life now. If He is silent on all else, than so be it.

I choose God

and I choose to be happy.