My reading this morning from John Eldredge’s Walking with God has struck a cord with me…and has me wrestling with this foundational life question:

What is the right way to look at life?

Before you read on too far, how do you answer this question? How do you look at life? Is it random? Is life hard? Is life supposed to be easy? Is life about getting stuff?

The right answer is that life is supposed to be about God…about loving Him and getting to know Him personally. From the book…

The first and greatest command is to love God with our whole being. Yet, it is rare to find someone who is completely given over to God. And so normal to be surrounded by people who are trying to make life work. We think of the few who are abandoned to God as being sort of odd. The rest of the world—the ones trying to make life work—seem perfectly normal to us (Page 87).

This has me thinking today about how I look at life. Am I just trying to “make it work” or am I truly focused on making God the priority in my life? Am I taking His blessings and making them idols? Do I think of God as “a means to an end rather than the end itself”? John makes the point in this chapter that too often we are looking for God to make us happy…when the only way that ever happens is by us selling out to God. By loving Him with everything that we’ve got.

And God doesn’t often play a passive role in the idolization (is that a word?) of our lives. He desperately wants our hearts to be in the right place, focused on Him. In fact, it’s on this point that God promises to test us:

The Lord your God is testing you to see if you
truly love him with all your heart and soul.
Deuteronomy 13:3, NLT

This leaves one final (and probably obvious) question: Are you and I passing the test? Only you can answer that one for yourself. Me? I’m working on it.