We are very blessed to live in the day and time we live. I’m not saying things are perfect, but we have so many things available to us every moment of every day, it’s hard to remember there was a time, not that long ago, when things were dramatically different.
When I want to take a shower, I simply turn on the spigot and decide how hot I want the running water to be. If I’m hungry, I can go to my well stocked pantry or refrigerator or, in a real bind, I can drive through the nearest fast food joint and get my fill. When it starts to get dark, my landscape lights come on and I flip the switch on the lamp so I can keep reading or writing or whatever I happen to be doing once the sun goes down.
I go to bed every night with a roof over my head and clean sheets and pillows to make me more comfortable. I get up in the morning, slip in the K-Cup for my morning coffee and sit and read a bible that fits in my hand and is mine. My iPhone is connected to my iPads and all of them can speak to my laptop computer that I carry with me to write, check up on the news or my friends simply by turning it on and clicking a few keys.
I could go on and on about the conveniences that we have now that even fifty years ago seemed impossible.
Its so very easy to get comfortable, entitled and complacent with life and how I choose to spend my time. You would think that with so much at our fingertips we would be content and happy and successful.
And yet, generally speaking, we are a generation of people who are angry more often than we are not. We have more and yet we never seem to have enough. We expect others to treat us kindly and yet we don’t offer them the same courtesy.
There was a game we used to play when I was a kid called “Hungry, Hungry Hippo”. It was a simple, crazy game where each player tried to get their hippo to gobble up the most marbles in order to be crowned the winner.
I know I’m getting older, because I find myself envisioning some of the people I come across each day or the people I hear about in the news as giant, colorful hippos – trying desperately to gobble up the most of whatever lays in their path to come out as the winner.
In a world where we have so much, it’s very easy to want more.
What hurts my heart is when those of us who call ourselves believers in Jesus Christ join in the game. I say “us” because I’m no different from you. There are times I get sucked into the game, just like everybody else. It may not be that I’m trying to gobble up all the marbles that would give me a huge house or fancy car or bottomless bank account; sometimes I’m trying to fill all the volunteer positions at my church, or take care of every single homeless person that crosses my path because it can make me seem more “Christian”. Oh my goodness, how that must break my Savior’s heart!
There is an extremely fine line between doing right because you feel compelled to due to a heart filled with love and gratitude vs doing right because you want to make yourself look better and everyone around you to look less spiritual.
My personal challenge for this week will be to make sure that my motivation for doing good is what will please Jesus. I want to treat others kindly even when they don’t do the same for me, because that’s what Jesus would do. I want to focus on relationships rather than material things, because that’s what Jesus would do. And if I find myself getting sucked into a game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos, I want it to be about trying to gobble up as much of Jesus as I can!
A person may think their own ways are right, but the Lord weighs the heart. – Proverbs 21:2
