sloppy seconds.

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careers, faith, faithfulness, finding happiness, fulfillment, God, God is always there, God is enough, God provides, happiness, Hebrews 13:5, hope, jobs, jobs don't provide happiness, postaday2011, postaweek2011, prayer, priorities, sloppy seconds

Since when did I start thinking of God as sloppy seconds? Probably since society started drilling in my head that a powerful career, a perfect family, designer accessories and the latest and greatest technology were the keys to happiness.

A dear friend and I talked this morning about happiness and how we let certain things overshadow what really provide true happiness. If we don’t feel like God is fulfilling our needs and desires, we start searching for something more. We start focusing on earning more money or developing a new relationship or increasing our power within our careers. It’s easy to do. And when those things fall short of bringing us happiness, we get so incredibly frustrated. Our dissatisfaction with our circumstances start to take precedence over the important things in life and we end up missing out on all the things the truly make us happy. Every time we focus on something else, we in turn start focusing less on God. We start telling God that He is not enough.. that He is not enough to make us happy or to fill our love tanks. We start making God our sloppy seconds.

dirty paws.

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Bible, clean hearts, direction, dirt, dogs, faith, faithfulness, God, love, mud, postaday2011, Psalm

The other night right before bed, I let the dogs out to let them run around and do their business. They played for a while and then I heard this horribly obnoxious barking. The family who lives behind us had let out their little ‘yipp-yipp’ dog at the same time. And needless to say, both Goober (our new dog who you can read more about here) and Twizzler were jumping up on the fence with excitement hoping to play with their little friend, of whom they’ve never met face-to-face. Since it was almost 10:30 at night, I did my best to get the dogs inside as quickly as possible to prevent disturbing any neighbors. I tried calling their names from the deck, but no such luck. I became less and less patient and my voice became more and more stern. I really did not want to have to walk through all the muck and mud to get them inside.

So much for that idea. I trekked through the yard hoping to miss as many ‘land mines’ as possible. I grabbed both of them by the collar and drug them inside. They pulled and pulled the other way, so longing to stay and play a little bit longer. It was like they were saying, “Aww, c’mon Mom, just five more minutes. I promise we’ll be good the rest of the night. Pllleeaassseeee, Mom.” However, their sweet, innocent eyes weren’t changing my mind. We finally got up to the deck and I looked down to see both of them covered in mud. And it wasn’t that wet mud that comes off pretty easily. It was that thick, heavy mud that stains anything it comes in contact with. Great. Just great.

I spent the next…no lie…ten minutes wiping off their paws entire lower half. The once clean green towel was now a nice shade of deep brown. Yummy. And in the process of dragging them in from the yard and holding their ginormous bodies down to get cleaned, I ended up with mud all over my jeans and my Ugg boots. Grrr. They were such a mess.

But if you think about it, isn’t this situation similar to our relationships with God?