If you spend any amount of time at all on the internet, you’ll notice ads and offers promising ways to help you live your best life. They invite you to watch free webinars, buy helpful books, and sign up for expensive online courses that will help you finally…write that book, launch that podcast, monetize that blog, declutter your entire house, lose that extra weight, spice up that relationship, etc., etc., etc.
Now, I understand what these people are doing. They want to create a sense of urgency and convince us that we need something better than we have right now.
It hit me the other day when I saw one more ad promising a way to “your best life.”
How about just living your life?
Of course we need to be growing and learning and improving, but we don’t have to be constantly searching for the next magic formula that will finally make us ___________ (pretty, smart, rich, famous…you fill in the blank).
We can be content to just live our lives. We can enjoy the journey. The messy, frustrating, joyful, confusing, and satisfying lives we live.
That’s one of the reasons I’m focusing on this topic tonight. The last couple of weeks I started exploring mental health (Symptoms and causes of mental illness). But I missed this type of writing, focusing on whatever God was saying to me in a certain week.
Don’t worry, I’ll still share often about mental health, but for this week I want to encourage you to just live.
Notice what’s going on in your head, your home, your community, and the world. Help others, and get help when you need it. Remember how far you’ve come. Dream about where you might go in the future. But do all you can to really enjoy where you are right now.
God has you where he wants you and his timing is perfect. Focus on living life.
“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.” (Romans 12:1-2 The Message)
Are you always grasping for something to make your life better? How can focusing on God help you to enjoy life right now?
I can relate so well to your post, Robyn. Guilty of looking for the next best thing, I’m blinded to the beauty God has placed right in front of me. Because of your reminder, I’m putting present-moment living into practice starting today!
Susan, I’m sorry you can relate. 🙂 I’m sure we all struggle because life gets so busy and complicated at times. Hope it’s going well for you as you live in the present! ~Robyn