Content

For as long as I can remember, I have been wishing and hoping for something else. Waiting for the next season, complaining about my current circumstances.

Today and for the last little while I have experienced a miraculous shift in perspective. I am at peace mostly. I am delighted with my little family, grateful for my job, reveling in simple pleasures, blessed with blossoming friendships and the ability to appreciate them. The amazing thing is that my circumstances havne't really changed all that much. It must be the wisdom that comes with age, and probably a lot to do with a faithful Father, but I am content for I think the first time in my life.

Don't get me wrong, I still lose my patience, wish for things that I don't have, and feel blue sometimes but none of these feelings send me into the depths or blind my vision to the blessings in front of me anymore. It is like I have a sweet little optimistic friend around all the time reminding me of how things could be worse, or how short life is, or how all the things I ever prayed for that mattered at all are all under one roof snuggled under covers available for me to love at a moments notice. I am living with a Holy Polyanna in my mind. It is a wonderful turn of events after a life of pessimism, melancholy, and skepticism.

God is faithful! All these years I justified my bad attitude and glass half empty perspective as just "how I am", accepting it as a part of my personality and therefore something I could not change. Even after having been a Christian for some years now, this is something I justified as, " how God made me". Not so, not anymore. A switch has gone off in my head, I am sure due to many friends and family praying over me for years, years of reading the same promises in the Word over and over, and ultimately the faithfulness of God.
Part of me wants to list all of the things I still struggle with and am afraid can't change but that is just the old man slowly dying in the corner of the room. Instead I will revel in this victory and use it as proof to my soul that all the things I presently struggle with are just on the same slow walk down death row.