Maggie's Farm

Good quote. Although if you look to God to make you happy, you are going to be disappointed at least some of the time. He doesn't care about our happiness, only about our struggles towards holiness.

On a day like today when I am neither happy nor righteous, when God seems far off, I feel pretty sympathetic to people who choose the near at hand, more concrete pleasures of money, comfort, etc.

So easy to love God the day you see your child born, or their life is saved from a terrible illness.

Harder to choose and keep choosing God when there is no light at the end of the tunnel. But better to live in hope, to have faith in things unseen, than to settle for even the most comfortable fleshpots. Always liked that Dickinson poem about how hope is the thing with feathers...to choose God is to choose hope:

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me." Emily Dickinson