I am posting again after a break of ten days or so. I have been tied up in all kinds of things and had a bit of a hiccup with the website stuff, so I have not been around. Sorry about that, but, hey, at least it is all free and we have been putting up the parenting class things every week. :)

Life kind of goes on, doesn't it? Sometimes, it seems like we just cannot do all the things we need to do, but life goes on. We keep getting more things to do and, somehow, we get through. Things change and move and grow and recede, and we just keep on moving.

We like to maintain an image of "happiness" in our lives, a lot of the time. We tell everyone we are "fine" when they ask, even if we are miserable. We do not want to clean up the messy garage and, when we start, we often stop right away because the mess is too big. So, we just keep people out of it. We go to churches where everyone looks so happy and we look happy, too, even though we are not happy at all.

One of the central truths of our lives, as CS Lewis put it, is that we are "amphibians" between the natural and the spiritual. We have natural lives and bodies and desires and boredoms, on the one hand, and we have spiritual lives on the other hand. We move constantly in these two worlds.

Usually, our "happiness" is mostly a natural happiness and our unhappiness is mostly the same. We are happy when our physical world is what it needs to be. We get a good night's sleep, have a nice breakfast, and we are happy. We think we are being spiritual when we are reallty being natural.

The next day, we feel terrible. We slept poorly or caught a cold or one of our children did something stupid and we are now unhappy. Oddly, we then decide that our unhappiness is somehow spiritual, when it is just natural.

The Christian life is about getting hold of this truth in a real sense. It is about learning to handle both the natural high and the natural low with the same spiritual wisdom. It is about not letting ourselves get on the merry-go-round of natural life, from highs to lows, and learning to be content with whatever nature brings us.

For wives, this is often very difficult. By nature, women deal with more changes than men face. Their bodies change more often, they go through very different phases of life, and they have to cope with all these things. Your ultimate happiness must be based on something more than how you feel or it will last only so long as you feel good. You must learn to value that which is most valuable and not to fixate on little things of no eternal value.

Think about your day as you walk through it. Do not let things of this world, natural things, get you so off key that you can no longer sing the song Christ gives you. Keep your spiritual self strong and the winds of the natural world will not take you hither and yon.

You are not a sailing ship, blown wherever the world blows you. You are a steamship, going where the Spirit takes you.




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