BE-Gratitudes: 30 Days of Positive Attitudes – SATISFIED
November 21st, 2021
Day Twenty-One: Satisfied
Romans 12:1-2, ‘So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.’ (MSG)
Living a satisfying life is so much simpler than we make it. We are accustomed to contrive an impossibility, really. We crusade for something we were never meant to yearn for and what is out of reach by God’s design. Our standards for how we are treated by others are quite low as are our standards for our expectations. But, hey, we can’t be let down and left feeling dissatisfied by others or ourselves if we expect little to nothing.
But we take it to a whole new platform when we stop hoping and believing in Father God, that He will do what He says He will do. Just like we as parents and grandparents want to do good and kind things for our children and grandchildren—bless them, spoil them, care for them—so does our Father in Heaven desire to bless us with things that satisfy and sustain us. His formula for feeling fulfilled and satisfied is far different from ours, however, and in many ways, it is as simplistic as putting others before ourselves, caring for others, meeting another’s needs before our own, treating and caring for others as the Father does for His children, not thinking so highly of myself that I can’t see those down on the ground beneath me. As I focus my attention on someone else, another person focuses their attention on me, and so on, until so many dry and barren wells are filled to overflowing. As we care for others, our own needs are met.
Thank You, Father God, that You give me a full life in the emptiest of places.
Isaiah 58:9-12, ‘If you get rid of unfair practices, quit blaming victims quit gossiping about other people’s sins. If you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out, your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight. I will always show you where to go. I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places—firm muscles, strong bones. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry. You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again.’ (MSG)
What are some ways you feel satisfied? Dissatisfied? Maybe try meeting someone else’s needs this season and see what happens. You might find you feel an even greater blessing and perhaps your needs diminish somewhat as you think of others.
