Thought of the day:
The American culture today raises us to value being unique/weird/special. I grew up with the mindset that I ought to try to do something worth recording in the history books or else I’d be wasting my life.
This is a lie.
Your job is to love your neighbor and do your vocations well.
God chooses who receives honor, in this life and the next.
If God wants you in the limelight, He will arrange your duties so that doing them responsibly leads you into it whether you like it or not.
But to imagine your own existence as bound to accomplish something of great magnitude is just creating an undue burden on yourself.
You imagine a purpose for your time that normal daily vocations can’t allow, and so your daily vocations feel like they drag you down. You feel like you never have time do accomplish anything, not because you actually don’t have any free time, but because your standard of “accomplish” is so nebulously large that nothing you can do is ever enough.
And so you are never able to contentedly enjoy anything or any duty God gives you.
So all your self-appointed burden really accomplishes is tearing yourself down.
(And any hubris in thinking you ought to be purposed for something unique and historically-noteworthy incentivizes God to not give you that limelight.)
It is a blessing to be mundane.
It is a blessing to have the simple life.
It is a blessing to be born, grow old, and die without anyone but God and a few people close to you knowing that you were here on this bridge to immortality, so long as you did your actual simple duties.
Be Hobbits of the Shire. Love God; love your neighbor. That’s it.
“Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.
There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity[/vapor]; it is a grievous evil.” (Ecclesiastes 5:18-6:2)