"Right now is the oldest that I've ever been and the youngest that I'll ever be."
That line wasn't conceived by me. I read it somewhere a few months back, and I find it very fitting for the word present. It's true and there's no arguing about it. I was younger the moment that I started typing this sentence and now that I'm ending it, I'm definitely older.
As I grew up, the things that I want constantly changes. Of course, upon learning new things, my mind sails to new frontiers. And now that I'm in my early twenties--an era that I've only imagined years ago--I'm wanting more different things.
Before I met Jesus, or say, before I truly met Him, I just wanted to be happy. I didn't have a clear career choice and I sure didn't have clear life decisions, too. I just went with the flow. When an opportunity rises--like in academics, relationships, and just about everything in life--I grab it if it makes me happy. I didn't even consider back then if I'm hurting other people, even my family. My mindset was, "this is my life, my happiness." Why should I worry about someone else's?
But then again, He just cannot bear seeing me tear my young life apart like that. Tossing it aimlessly at things that didn't matter and won't matter in the long run, that was what I thought what it means to live in the moment. Needless to say, though I was happy from time to time, I was never truly happy back then. So, He came and stopped my madness.
This is not a blog on how God transformed and renewed my life. That might require me to write a whole book so I can explicitly share it, doing only little justice on how awesomely He did it. This is a post about what I realized today:
My happiness doesn't lie in me anymore. It now lies on what makes Him happy.
Well, just as a disclaimer, I am not perfect, okay? I am not claiming to be one and I'll never be one. Anyway, my point is, I just realized that whatever I conceive in my mind now somehow has to answer this question before they're formed into actions:
Will it make Him happy?
If the answer is 'no', I'll feel pain and be discouraged to act on it. But if the answer is 'yes', I'll feel delighted and excited. And so, the latter's what I'll do. Of course there are times that my feeble mind cannot do this process before I say or do things, and that hurts Him tenfold. And I feel that. I'll feel awful and guilty afterwards, and I'd never want to do it again (even though it might have felt pretty good the moment I did it).
This cycle goes on in my head. And that's how I learn. Learn how to act, learn how to speak, and learn how to live. And as a part of this learning process, I still often fail. But with His grace, I am continuously learning.
It is my prayer, as I continue to live and learn, that His wisdom take over me and not my own intellect. I pray for the stubbornness of my heart to melt away and for the pride of my heart to shatter. I want to make Him happy because it is only Him who genuinely makes me happy even if I deserve the exact opposite.
Just the other day I was told (in a conference), only dead fishes go with the flow. I certainly was a dead fish, but not anymore. He gave me a new life.
After all these years, I can now finally say that I'm doing what I really want and what I'm created to do. These are so many things, but all boils down to this: I want to make Him happy.
This is living NOW.
