The Oversimplified Version

“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. John 6:43

Once upon a time, I lived in a mansion and I found myself with the common complaint of the thing I wanted always being in another room. Then, I had a larger house and often I complained that the thing I wanted was three feet out of reach. Through the circumstances of life, I moved into a smaller house, and I griped that everything seemed to be just six inches out of reach. The Lord moved me to a hut on the beach; as I sat outside in the beautiful sunset watching the waves break gently on the shore, I hoped one day to have a place to sleep inside since the hut was packed full of my stuff until I had no room for a bed!

You will recognize from experience our tendency to complain over the smallest inconveniences and also a worldly desire to hang onto stuff until it becomes a hindrance. If it is a reason to complain we seek, then life presents all manner of opportunities to gripe, whine, moan, and grumble. As the Israelites proved, we can even grumble so much that God grows weary of it. Gratitude is the answer to our inclination toward the disenchantment of life in this world. There are those times, many of those times, when gratitude must be taken up and put on like a cloak to smother that tendency to be down and grumbly. Sometimes, gratitude might have to be more like a tent we step into in order to cover all the urgent complaining we feel. Then, maybe, we just might need a prayer closet war room to list those moanings on a wall to bring before the Lord in prayer. And perhaps one day the mansion of the heart will grow so much that we take each and every former complaint and instead give thanks to God for each perceived problem. That last may seem an impossible step...

...but it is God's step and He will show us how it is done. Have faith in that!

Bucky