I want to move to Australia!

Today was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
And I want to move to Australia.
Any of you out there recognize the voice of Alexander???
I used to read that book on the first day of school.
I now know why.
Since school has started my life has been filled with terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, mostly because my 3 year old totally refuses to "adjust" to school. Mornings are a fight and I'm called out of my classroom almost daily to attend to potty problems.
Today was the worst.
Then I came home.
And in my email inbox there were two very important things:

#1...My daily devotional which concluded with this:

Is there a situation you are facing that has made you weary? Are you at a point
where you have nothing more to say? If so, you are not alone. Let's pray today
that our words will cease so that we can make room in our hearts and thoughts to
hear His.

Hmmm....a very important reminder!

#2...An interview in which Rick Warren said:

People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond: In a
nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were made to last forever, and
God wants us to be with Him in Heaven.
One day my heart is going to stop, and
that will be the end of my body-- but not the end of me.
I may live 60 to 100
years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions of years in eternity. This is
the warm-up act - the dress rehearsal.
God wants us to practice on earth what
we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you
figure that out, life isn't going to make sense.
Life is a series of
problems: Either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one, or you're
getting ready to go into another one.
The reason for this is that God is more
interested in your character than your comfort.
God is more interested in
making your life holy than He is in making your life happy.
We can be
reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life. The goal is to
grow in character, in Christ likeness.
This past year has been the greatest
year of my life but also the toughest, with my wife getting cancer.
I used to
think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go
to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore.
Rather than
life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a
railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in
your life.
No matter how good things are in your life, there is always
something bad that needs to be worked on.
And no matter how bad things are in
your life, there is always something good you can thank God for.
You can
focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems.
If you focus on
your problems, you're going into self-centeredness, "which is my problem, my
issues, my pain."
But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get
your focus off yourself and onto God and others.
We discovered quickly that
in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to
heal my wife or make it easy for her.
It has been very difficult for her, and
yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other
people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people.
You
have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life. Actually,
sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past
year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me
instantly very wealthy.
It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never
had to deal with before. I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your
own ego or for you to live a life of ease.
So I began to ask God what He
wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two
different passages that helped me decide what to do, II Corinthians 9 and Psalm
72.
First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our
lifestyle one bit. We made no major purchases.
Second, about midway through
last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church.
Third, we set up
foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches,
equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next
generation.
Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24
years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to
be able to serve God for free.
We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live
for possessions? Popularity? Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt?
Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes (for my
life)?
When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say,
God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love
You better ...
God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list. He's
more interested in what I am than what I do. That's why we're called human
beings, not human doings.
Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.
Difficult moments,
SEEK GOD.
Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.
Painful moments, TRUST GOD.
Every
moment, THANK GOD

I needed both of these reminders today. I needed to remember that I am not walking through these problems alone. I needed to remember that He has a plan in all of this. I needed to remember that it is okay to cry out to Him and say, "please change this!" He may not answer but that's okay too. And most importantly, I needed to remember that there is good in everything. People that I didn't really know at all a month ago came to my rescue today. They comforted me, they allowed me to vent, and they voluntarily took over for me so that I could have time to recover without fourteen 4th graders watching my stress. Yes, I have a lot to be thankful for!

Dear Lord, Thank you for the people that you have placed in my life.
Help me to trust You to work out the problems that Jesse is facing in preschool
and to seek Your counsel and not rely on my own answers. In Jesus'
Name. Amen