Gray Skies

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your "plans"

Chapter 18

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your “plans”

A friend explained to me, that there are 3 stages to happiness, all interlinked with God. And it’s a set, you can’t be fully happy and content with having belief in 2 of the 3, every single one of them has to be obtained and obtained honestly to be able to be completely satisfied. Stage one is to believe in God, that he exists and have no doubt in your mind about it, stage two is believing in his word, you can’t pick and mix, you can’t choose what you think suits you and ignore the rest, and stage three is realising that He loves you. Most people can get up to stage 2 and fail miserably on stage 3. Sometimes it’s the other way around.

Take Jonahs story as an example. Washed up, chucked off a boat into the deepest part of the sea and finally in the stomach of a whale for three days and three nights, before being spat out to do what he was told to, the tree, the anger, the death wish, the worm, the whole story aims to show that God is patient and will go to great trouble to try to persuade every person to trust him and follow him.

Stage 3 is very important, you have to realise that he loves you more then you love yourself, more then you can love anyone else, he cry’s more then you, knowing you are crying, it hurts him more then it hurts you when you are in pain. And when you truly believe in that, you will realise what his words in the bible and Quran meant.

Think about when your Father sent you to the painful dentist trip, when you barely knew what a tooth was, surely now a gratification is in order.

God will put you through experiences which would be unexplainable by yourself, you would simply not be able to understand the good that can come off it. It’s strange how we never question that when luck is with us, after all, your gain has to be someone’s loss. You might be wondering, how hurting you and making you feel down is going to do anyone good. How losing someone, in every sense of the word, can be beneficial to me? or anyone for that matter.  

“My way is not your way” a simple statement, yet if explored and related to even a small episode in your own life, its depths are unimaginable. God wants the best for you, he wouldn’t hurt you, or put you through a test he knows you can’t get through. He loves you. Once you realise that, everything becomes so simplified that nothing matters anymore. But none of this can work without faith in the other 2 stages. If you sit there and hope for everything to fall into place nothing will happen for you, you need to get up, you need to wake up and take a stance.

God says, if I have faith in you, how can you not have it in me? Take a blinding jump, believe in him and his ways and you shall be triumphant, and even if you don’t think its what you wanted, be patient, for you will find out, its what you should have.

If something happens to you, do what you can to help yourself, don’t expect miracles. Pray and take the action, God will not make you take the action, just because you are praying for it, but he’ll help you through it.

 “Though I walk through the valley of shadow of death” from the bible

“God helps those who help themselves” from the Quran, all these weren’t said for the sake of it.

Never feel that you have let him down and give up “oh what’s the point, he’ll never accept me now” because he would never give up on you, like he didn’t on some of his most disobedient servants Jonah, Gideon and Jeremiah and even Moses. Why give up on him, when he wouldn’t on you?

How many times have you wished for something to go the way you wanted, and it doesn’t, yet you are adamant your way was better? Just because you think its best for you, doesn’t mean it is. God makes the world go round, yet you are arrogant enough to think that you know better then him what your life should turn out to be? You might say “I can dream can’t I?” sure you can, but then why let a dream affect you? Don’t worry about facing the “what then”  and “What if’s”, because that is what God will help you with, face the truth, don’t be scared of change, people change, times change, you have to accept the inevitable.

Believe this and apply it to the smallest thing that goes wrong with you. Just let it be, take a leap of faith and believe, truly believe that it is what God has planned and you will feel fulfilled, if you can move the transition onto bigger things, then nothing will get you down.

No matter where you go, your surroundings come with you; hiding like Jonah won’t change reality. Everything, reactions, emotions are all a states of mind. Most of them self inflicted.

Imagine you are hanging off a cliff, hanging on to another person’s arm who has the power to save you and pull you back. The guy who you are holding onto tells you to look at him. Straight at him, not around you, not behind you and he’s asking you to give him only a few minutes of your time. He wants you to talk to him, one on one he wants you to trust him and ask him to help you, ask him to pull you up to safety, because he can.

His request to look at him at your time of need is not to be impressed by his hair style, or bulging biceps, its because if you look down and around you, you’re going to lose composure, get scared and end up letting go, only to meet the unwelcoming ground, within a time where reminiscing about your life is not a choice, you re-live it in a few snippets.