I consider my self

  I was on vacation last week and I had the privilege of hearing one of my college friends preach an excellent sermon.  One of the thrust of his message was that as we live our life, we find out that its not fair.  It got me thinking about the 75th anniversary of Lou Gehrig's famous speech.  Lou Gehrig was a baseball player for the New York Yankees in the 1920's-1930's and the three things he is most known for is his record consecutive games played in 2130 (which since has been broken), the terrible disease that bears his name and his famous speech.  He made his famous and impromptu speech of declaring himself the luckiest man of the face of this earth after his disease diagnosis and weeks of media speculation.  I think there are several things we can learn from his speech. 

  The first one is a matter of perspective.  Are we willing to give thanks for all things and in all situations.  There are going to be times in life when things do not go our way, how do we deal with it.  So often I find myself grumbling and having a foul attitude when something doesn't go my way and I am giving people a piece of my mind at least on the inside.  Being thankful is more than just being happy, because being happy is based on things that are going on around you.  Happiness is often temporal, because we are bound to have a yucky day from time to time.  Being grateful is based on who we belong to, and who we are, and not what is happening to us.  Being grateful means that we have that peace of God living in us and through us, and no matter what we are living a life of contentment.  Being content is finding peace with what you have, but always looking ways to grow that you can control. 

  The second one is a realization that life isn't fair.  Lou Gehrig knew this well.  He could of complained about receiving ALS, but his attitude seemed to be one of humility.  Here is some thoughts on fairness.  We all want life to be fair and to get what we think we deserve.  Here is the cold hard facts, if we really got what was fair, we all be in trouble because our fairness is based on our standards, and our standards are aimed to make us happy and to look good.  Our standards and rules for fairness is based on our questionable judgment and an aim to serve me first, or at least we can get some benefit out of it.  As people we are really selfish and we can look at history of our own lives and the lives of others to see that personal interest and our own standards have a really high failure rate. 

  Another reason why we think that life aint fair is because we place our own standards on other people and not follow through with them ourselves.  It is a whole lot easier for us to expect other people to live by our own standards than for us to do the hard work.  This takes hard work, possible criticism and when we do fail, we have no one to blame but ourselves.  In all reality, people like to play the blame game for why something didn't work.  Why do I have to take responsibility if I can pass most or all of the blame on someone else. 

  The third big reason why we view that life aint fair is we question the gifts that God gives.  God is the giver all gifts that are good and holy.  We often think that our judgment is on par or better than God's.  We often want the gifts that we think are cool and sexy.  When we start wanting those gifts and blaming God for not giving us those gifts, we are telling God that we are more important than He is and He doesn't know what He is doing.  When we want those gifts, it is often to bring ourselves glory and not giving God glory.  The reason God gives those gifts is not because He wants to make us happy, but to bring Him glory and to point the world to Him. 

  This post doesn't cover the problem of evil and why bad things happen to good people, which is a lengthy conversation in itself.   This is just a beginning blog post and our view of fairness needs to change how we view life to How God views life