My happiness then and my happiness now

"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.

I want what He wants!

When we pray for something, we have that confidence that God hears us and will surely answer our pleas. If one does not have that, why would one pray in the first place?

A great professor of mine once told our class, "God has only three ways to answer our prayers." He then picked up a chalk and scribbled three words on the board: Yes, No, and Wait. I haven't realized it before, but he was right. And I haven't fully understood the latter two answers until God actually answered me with those.

Planting our faith firmly on our Savior, Jesus Christ, we all conclude our prayers with 'in Jesus' name, amen!', 'through Christ, Your Son, Our Lord, amen!', and the like. We do this because we know that no one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14:6, 1 Timothy 2:5). And with the strong sense of favor that we have from Him, in our hearts and in mind, we are confident that God would answer us positively. And yet, if God does that, would He still be God at all? If you're own plans and longings shall be granted to you each time you'd ask, everyone will be out of control and ask God everything as if He's a vending machine--you put some bill on it (prayers) and you expect to have in return the exact thing that you chose (answers). But God does not work that way! According to 1 John 5:14,

"This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us."

We are encouraged to present all our requests to God by praying (Philippians 4:6), but we must not forget that His plans are better than ours. Actually, they are the best of the best! And our human intellect will never, ever come up with the brilliant ideas that God has in store for us on our own; not even close! With this in mind, we should not feel bitter about 'unanswered prayers'. Actually, no such thing exists! It's that that we may be ignoring His answers because we're too busy waiting for what we want.

I haven't been able to update this blog, and with all the things that has happened to me in between my last post and this, I can say that God truly wanted me to embrace and accept this as a fact: I am not gonna get everything that I want because He's already planned out when will He give me everything that I need that are immensely beyond what I asked for.