0:00:00 - 0:00:26 I'd like to share some thoughts and feelings that I hope that I hope serve as a message of hope to those who are, who are lonely or suffering. So, um I wanna tell a story a couple of years ago, I was commuting to work and I live in northern latitude. Uh There are a lot of cloudy days over the winter 0:00:26 - 0:00:54 and the days are very short. I enjoy sunny days so much that I would actually reorient my entire schedule so that um I, I would leave the house very early so that I could drive home while the sun was still up. And that 45 minute commute, it, it was a focal point of my day. It was very important to me 0:00:53 - 0:01:20 . One day I was driving and it was a particularly cloudy day and I began to speak with the Lord and I said, uh father, I don't understand why you make so many days cloudy. It feels so good to have a sunny day. It makes such a difference. And I know I'm not the only person in the world that feels this 0:01:20 - 0:01:46 way. There are a lot of people who have a vivid, um, response to the presence or absence of sun. And, uh, he responded immediately and all he did was ask me a question. He said, would you appreciate the sunny days as much if there were fewer cloudy days? And it happens all the time when I ask him questions 0:01:46 - 0:02:15 where I think I've got them. I think I've got him. I just said, yeah, you're right. I would not. And I thought that was the end of it. But what he said next, it surprised me even more than what he said before. He said, if you want to get to the point where I can give you more sunny days without reducing 0:02:14 - 0:02:47 the joy that you have, you have to learn to be more grateful for the sunny days. And then he explained it. I'm not gonna try to um accurately retell this part because I'd have to think about it and look at notes. He explained how important it was to come to see the light on the cloudy days. And he said 0:02:47 - 0:03:09 something like you have and I'm sorry, I have this written down. I didn't think we were going here with this video, but we're going to go there. He said, you have to learn to bring your own light. In other words, he said, he said this light that you're experiencing on the sunny days that comes from me 0:03:08 - 0:03:37 and it's good. But that and the clouds and everything else going around, you it's not dependent on you. And he said, there's a way that you can feel light that only depends on the choices that you make. And it's still my light. He said, but you have to get to the point where you can receive that and 0:03:37 - 0:04:19 feel it and that the even greater joy can come from the light within you for me than what you experience so powerfully from without. And uh in the subsequent years, he has proven that to be true. So what is God's purpose? What is all of this all about? It's to increase our joy. One facet of this equation 0:04:18 - 0:05:03 that is criminally underappreciated is what we choose to perceive and value, not just what we value, but by how much those two things matter a lot. So when we feel a longing for a feeling or a situation or a person or a kind of person that we lack, we should ask ourselves what is preventing that outcome 0:05:03 - 0:05:27 . It's the Lord's will to provide us with all good things. So if that's not happening, the first thing we should think about is what more or what different we might be able to do. That's horrific grammar. But what we could do, that's more than what we're doing or what we could do. That's different than 0:05:27 - 0:06:02 what we're doing. And in both cases, the objective is to draw us nearer to what we seek, the good that he has to give us to share with us because he already has it. And that's why he knows the way, he knows the way because he's already walked it. So, but it's not the most supportive thing to hear. The 0:06:02 - 0:06:30 most comforting thing to hear when you say, well, I'm lonely or I'm suffering and someone says, well, change what you're doing, change what you want, change by how much you want it. Um, and a person could be doing all those things and still find themselves without what they desire. Now, often people 0:06:29 - 0:06:54 try to give a comforting message by talking about this idea of waiting on the Lord. This is a phrase that um like many in the scriptures, it means something very different than what you will understand. If you hear it in typical channels, not just youtube channels, but like church or some sort of cultural 0:06:53 - 0:07:21 source, you'll come away with. The definition is very different than what it says in the scriptures. The con the scriptural concept of waiting, it's coupled to growth. It's not a passive activity and it's never arbitrary when it comes to good things that we desire with. And from God, he does not have 0:07:21 - 0:07:45 a stopwatch in heaven where he says, all right, this person's just got away a little longer and then I'll send along what they've requested. It does not work that way. There's some deep thoughts here, but I'll try to, I'll try to treat this superficially when you think of time you think of this precise 0:07:44 - 0:08:19 consistent measure and that's an illusion that's only possible because of modern technology. It turns out that whenever we're talking about time, we have to have something, um, basically something greater than ourselves as a reference point. And it has to be a process. There's no such thing as anything 0:08:18 - 0:08:47 related to time. That isn't a process. There's, there is nothing that is a perfect repetitive uh, period. So if you look, it doesn't matter what you look at. Um, anciently, the Hebrews use the moon, the cycles of the moon as a clock. And they'd actually have someone sitting at night watching the sky 0:08:46 - 0:09:14 to announce, for example, the new moon and they'd mark their months by this. And then the days in the month had special significance and very important things that had to be done on precise days. But it was all based off of the moon which no one here controls, right? So, um it's no different today. Even 0:09:13 - 0:09:35 though it's masked, we don't have some guy in a tower watching the moon. But even if you were to look at the atomic clock, it's measuring a process that is, is not precise. I don't mean that the measurement is not precise, although that is true. Uh I mean that if you put enough decimal points of precision 0:09:35 - 0:10:05 on it, you will see that it varies an atomic second is not a perfect second. There is no such thing as that in nature. So um it's just so much more precise than would ever matter to any human in the window of perception that we have. That it doesn't matter why did I go into that long explanation? Well 0:10:04 - 0:10:28 , when we talk about waiting on the Lord, there are things that we can do to accelerate the process and there are things often that other people have to do as well. So what are some of the things that we can do to accelerate the process, which will, which will yield a lot more comfort and peace in us 0:10:27 - 0:10:58 ? Because we get away from this idea that it's some arbitrary passive state just waiting. And you tie into this idea of that. There are conditions for every blessing that God gives and he's impartial. He's perfectly fair. And so the second eil the conditions, the blessings yours. So one of these is trust 0:10:57 - 0:11:20 in God, we could talk about this forever. So I have to keep it super brief. But one aspect of trust in God is to trust His timing. And by that, I hope it's clear. I don't mean just he's got an arbitrary stopwatch in heaven. I mean to trust that he understands the process. If you're baking a cake and 0:11:20 - 0:00:00 you try to cut the bake time, you're gonna be in big trouble. There are other processes. I don't know if you've ever made soap. It is amazingly precise. You have to get everything just right or it's not gonna work. There are chemical reactions that are, that are very picky. Um, anyway, side note, I, 0:00:00 - 0:12:04 I did this, we, we did this thing as a, as a family. We went and we gathered pine tar and our objective was to make soap, uh, out of, out of things that we sourced right here in the woods. And so I had bear fat for the fat. Um, and I had pine tar for the scent. The only thing we, we couldn't get is lye 0:12:03 - 0:12:22 because there are no hardwood trees here and you can get lye out of like, uh, hickory ash and things like that. But we don't have any hickory. I tried, couldn't get them to grow anyway. It's really precise. And so almost always people will use a recipe and if you have to go off of that, uh, if you have 0:12:22 - 0:12:46 to divert from the recipe, the odds of failure are really high and you're gonna have to run many batches. Excuse me, I'm just getting over a cold. So I apologize. You'll have to run many batches to get the quantities. Just right. Anyway, so God's got recipes and you don't want to mess him up because 0:12:45 - 0:13:14 he's already perfected them. He's like your grandma that's already figured out how to make spaghetti and you're not gonna improve on that. So you just go with her recipe, right. Um, we all ought to react to, um, to whatever he provides with implicit trust not just to the point of I'm gonna let you smack 0:13:13 - 0:13:41 me down if that's what it takes. And that is what it often seems like. Although if we really understood his love, we'd never describe it that way. Um, except for effect with those that don't yet understand, but also we react with joy. So one of the tests, like when you're cooking something, usually there's 0:13:41 - 0:13:57 something you could do if you're making jam, you wanna make sure it's gelled. I mean jelly, not jam. You wanna make sure it's gelled and you do the spoon test. If you're cooking a turkey, you know, you can do a temperature test on the thickest part of the meat, whatever there are tests. You see if a 0:13:57 - 0:14:26 pie crust is brown, one of the tests you can run to see how much you trust God is, how much joy the process gives you. And I say gives you that's the way we see it. But it's really how much joy do you find in the process? Because it's a choice, it's your choice to trust Him. It is a powerful, powerful 0:14:25 - 0:14:56 thing to be able to face any challenge that the Lord ordains to place you in with implicit confidence in him, unconditional trust in the Lord. So that no matter what comes your reaction is joy, even if it's, even if you can't say why, because you just say, well, I don't know where this is going, but 0:14:55 - 0:15:25 it's gotta be good. If it's this bad, it's gotta be good. That's, that's the attitude because he's fair. And so his justice would require that the harder it is, the better it will be. These are simple ideas, but they are so important and they're so rarely understood and even more rarely lived and believed 0:15:25 - 0:15:55 . I'd like to highlight the fact that I mentioned uh this previously, but we'll elaborate on it that often the sometimes the choices that need to change have to do with us. But often what we're waiting on is other people. So the Lord still has plenty of things he can lead us through while we're waiting 0:15:55 - 0:16:16 on other people. Just like if you're baking a pie, you can make something else while you're waiting, you can't use the oven, but you can do something else. So there's no shortage of things we can work on in the meantime, but what other people do it, it matters. And there are times when we have to do 0:16:15 - 0:16:47 things just to um align with is not the right phrase um interact with someone else's timeline. Um And again, just to stress this, nothing the Lord does is ever wasted. And so even when we're in a situation where it really seems like the dominant factor is someone else's choice that's not wasted time 0:16:47 - 0:17:20 . And it's not like a second place consolation prize either the improvement you can experience during that time is still incredibly huge. You know, every single thing, every single thing in your life is precisely designed by God who understands all things. He knows everything about this place and everything 0:17:20 - 0:17:48 about you and everything about everyone else. He's arranged the whole thing so that it is the best it can possibly be for you and for everyone else all at the same time. So there's never a time where it's just wasted waiting there. It shouldn't be, you could choose to waste your time just like if you 0:17:48 - 0:18:08 have to, you know, if you're waiting for an important call or email, you can just sit there if you want to or you can use the time for some other improvement. Go to the next thing on your priority list. If you expect to be waiting for 45 minutes, find the most important thing that you can finish in less 0:18:07 - 0:18:42 than 45 minutes or make a significant improvement on or, or progress in and that's what you do. So it's the same way with this. Another, um Another choice we make that determines the timeline is how much we want, what it is we say we want. Now that can be tricky to understand one way to see it more clearly 0:18:41 - 0:19:05 is. What price are you willing to pay? And you can think about that. I just finished a big project, but I was, I was building some shelving and it doesn't sound big. But if I showed you the scope, you'd get it and, um, it was a real pain but it was important. It need to be done and I've been putting 0:19:05 - 0:19:28 it off for a long time. There were other things that were more important and it hit the, the conditions hit where it was the most important thing. And I spent a lot of time and a lot of money getting it done because that was the most important thing. And so, um, I set other things aside, we spent the 0:19:28 - 0:19:52 money, we got it done. Um, it could have been the case that looking at the price tag of the project, I'd say, you know, it's just not worth that money. And so I'll set it aside because I don't actually want this for what it would cost. So often we allow our desires to drift out of reality and we say 0:19:51 - 0:20:15 , well, I want this or I don't want that, but I'm not gonna think at all about what that's gonna cost. So an example of not wanting something is sometimes people don't want to make hard choices and they say, you know, that's just gonna stress me out or I don't wanna have to worry about that or it's scary 0:20:14 - 0:20:38 or I kind of know what I need to do and I really don't wanna do it. So I'm just gonna ignore it. That's fine. But all of that carries a cost and you have to look at that cost and say, is this worth it there are things you can avoid that are like time bombs, speaking of time and the damage they will cause 0:20:37 - 0:21:00 long term is enormously greater than whatever short term pain you're trying to avoid. And so one trick with this is to learn to love your future self as much as you love your present self. It's the silliest thing to say, but that is the problem is you don't like that future person. You do things all 0:21:00 - 0:21:23 the time to hurt them. You steal from them all the time, all the time, every day till you fix this. And when you, you know, we read that for the Lord, all things are present before him. So it's as if there's no time we have to grow into that. We have to grow in. You know, we think the struggle is loving 0:21:23 - 0:21:45 our enemy that's on the docket. We need to handle that too. But way before that, we have to actually learn to love ourselves. If you don't know how to love your future self, as much as you love your present self, you are not prepared to learn to love your enemy as much as you love yourself because you 0:21:45 - 0:22:14 don't even love yourself yet. You just love yourself right now. So you have to learn to erase the bias that you, I impose on time with yourself and you have to maximize the long term benefit. You zoom out all the way and you say, what does this look like over the full span and you have to understand 0:22:13 - 0:22:41 that eternity will dwarf anything that comes before that in the span of time. So, you know, if the choice is be jumped in an alley and beat by 15 people with baseball bats for two minutes and have a wonderful outcome for the rest of whatever or have a wonderful outcome for two minutes and then get beaten 0:22:41 - 0:23:11 by an alley full of hoodlums for the rest of whatever, you know, most people would say. I just wanna feel good right now and it seems like an arbitrary uh con contrived example. But, but I'm telling you, you do this every day. So, uh we have to get away from that. And um, when we learned to play the 0:23:10 - 0:23:38 long game, ironically, surprisingly, everything shortens up, right? And these long term outcomes, they come all of this all, excuse me, all of a sudden because um, we're willing to do what it takes. Now, we realize there's no benefit in waiting to do what we need. We know we need to do. And uh we, we 0:23:37 - 0:24:02 intentionally think about what the cost of benefit is gonna be. And once we're committed, we are locked in until and unless information changes sufficient to break something that we already figured out. Um, there, there, there are multiple animals like like alligator snapping turtles that once they bite 0:24:01 - 0:24:24 down, that's it. There's no way to break that. You gotta kill the animal or do something funky to get them to release because they're not gonna do it. Um, when this is a pro tip. Ok. So we have Huskies when they fight when they are, like, really angry and there's hormones and things in play, uh, because 0:24:24 - 0:24:42 someone's in heat or whatever and they're fighting the best way to separate dogs is to grab them in the privates. And I'm telling you that works. Um, you'd think they'd try to bite you, but I don't know if it's a surprise or discomfort. They, they just totally forget whatever was wearing them before 0:24:42 - 0:25:11 . Um, so it's funny, it's funny. It's true. Um, but, um, so we need to lock into things, but we need to lock into things because we've reasoned through them and the reasons justify the commitment. Um, there's a lot more I could say about that but, you know, sometimes we lock into the wrong things and 0:25:11 - 0:25:32 God's got to grab us by the privates, uh, figuratively speaking because, uh, we've, we've zoomed into something that doesn't have sufficient reasons to be committed to and we've, we've done it to the exclusion of all other things and he's tapping us on the shoulder saying, hey, there's something better 0:25:32 - 0:25:52 out there, you need to shift and we're like, hey, I'm focused. This is what I've committed to. I won't look at anything else. I won't think about anything else even on good things. We always have to remember that God leads us to better things through good things. So one way of representing this is that 0:25:52 - 0:26:16 the, the shortest path to what is better than what, you know, is through the best thing, you know, right now, the shortest path to, to what is better than, you know, is through the best that, you know, right now, that's always true. So if you're on that path to the best, you know, right now and he's 0:26:16 - 0:26:35 trying to tap you on the shoulder, say, OK, this has served his purpose. It's like the, the oxygen tank on the space shuttle. It's really important at the beginning. It's like the most important thing. But once it served its purpose, you got jettison that that thing or else you can't do what you came 0:26:35 - 0:27:11 to do. So many things are like that, I guess the, the final point I want to make here in the sampling of ideas is um it's actually coming back to what, what um what I started to say before we started talking about grabbing animals by the privates. Um Don't, don't uh don't miss the importance of God using 0:27:10 - 0:27:45 time and the experiences that filet to increase the gratitude you feel for what you may currently or would currently take for granted. Uh I started this with the example about the cloudy days. I'm gonna try really hard to say this clearly. Everything, every situation, every idea, every accomplishment 0:27:44 - 0:28:27 , every person, everything, every scene in nature, every song every book, anything you can describe in mortality, it has a range of potential, perceived joy that max in that range is the greatest possible joy that can provide where we are on that range with any of those things. It's a result of the reactions 0:28:26 - 0:29:05 we choose to the processes that the Lord sends to us. The intent of the process is is um to develop our discernment of value. So in one sense, a very important sense, the objective of life, God's objective is to orient us to the things that provide the greatest joy and to increase our perception of that 0:29:05 - 0:29:38 joy to the maximum. Because where we are on that slider results from our choices or reactions to his processes, which is all really one process because it's dependent solely on our choices. Different people will end up with not just different things but in different perceptions of the value that those 0:29:37 - 0:30:14 things provide. And his task is so that when this is all said and done, every single person has the greatest joy that they were willing to receive and joy comes from value, the value has to be in the thing and it has to be perceived. Those are two separate things. So that's his purpose. And this is why 0:30:14 - 0:30:43 there's a such thing as waiting on the Lord. So if you understand all of this, then you can employ these ideas in your life to have much greater trust in God, much greater joy in the journey and you can arrive at much greater joy at the conclusion of the journey than you otherwise would. And perhaps 0:00:00 - 0:00:26 I'd like to share some thoughts and feelings that I hope that I hope serve as a message of hope to those who are, who are lonely or suffering. So, um I wanna tell a story a couple of years ago, I was commuting to work and I live in northern latitude. Uh There are a lot of cloudy days over the winter 0:00:26 - 0:00:54 and the days are very short. I enjoy sunny days so much that I would actually reorient my entire schedule so that um I, I would leave the house very early so that I could drive home while the sun was still up. And that 45 minute commute, it, it was a focal point of my day. It was very important to me 0:00:53 - 0:01:20 . One day I was driving and it was a particularly cloudy day and I began to speak with the Lord and I said, uh father, I don't understand why you make so many days cloudy. It feels so good to have a sunny day. It makes such a difference. And I know I'm not the only person in the world that feels this 0:01:20 - 0:01:46 way. There are a lot of people who have a vivid, um, response to the presence or absence of sun. And, uh, he responded immediately and all he did was ask me a question. He said, would you appreciate the sunny days as much if there were fewer cloudy days? And it happens all the time when I ask him questions 0:01:46 - 0:02:15 where I think I've got them. I think I've got him. I just said, yeah, you're right. I would not. And I thought that was the end of it. But what he said next, it surprised me even more than what he said before. He said, if you want to get to the point where I can give you more sunny days without reducing 0:02:14 - 0:02:47 the joy that you have, you have to learn to be more grateful for the sunny days. And then he explained it. I'm not gonna try to um accurately retell this part because I'd have to think about it and look at notes. He explained how important it was to come to see the light on the cloudy days. And he said 0:02:47 - 0:03:09 something like you have and I'm sorry, I have this written down. I didn't think we were going here with this video, but we're going to go there. He said, you have to learn to bring your own light. In other words, he said, he said this light that you're experiencing on the sunny days that comes from me 0:03:08 - 0:03:37 and it's good. But that and the clouds and everything else going around, you it's not dependent on you. And he said, there's a way that you can feel light that only depends on the choices that you make. And it's still my light. He said, but you have to get to the point where you can receive that and 0:03:37 - 0:04:19 feel it and that the even greater joy can come from the light within you for me than what you experience so powerfully from without. And uh in the subsequent years, he has proven that to be true. So what is God's purpose? What is all of this all about? It's to increase our joy. One facet of this equation 0:04:18 - 0:05:03 that is criminally underappreciated is what we choose to perceive and value, not just what we value, but by how much those two things matter a lot. So when we feel a longing for a feeling or a situation or a person or a kind of person that we lack, we should ask ourselves what is preventing that outcome 0:05:03 - 0:05:27 . It's the Lord's will to provide us with all good things. So if that's not happening, the first thing we should think about is what more or what different we might be able to do. That's horrific grammar. But what we could do, that's more than what we're doing or what we could do. That's different than 0:05:27 - 0:06:02 what we're doing. And in both cases, the objective is to draw us nearer to what we seek, the good that he has to give us to share with us because he already has it. And that's why he knows the way, he knows the way because he's already walked it. So, but it's not the most supportive thing to hear. The 0:06:02 - 0:06:30 most comforting thing to hear when you say, well, I'm lonely or I'm suffering and someone says, well, change what you're doing, change what you want, change by how much you want it. Um, and a person could be doing all those things and still find themselves without what they desire. Now, often people 0:06:29 - 0:06:54 try to give a comforting message by talking about this idea of waiting on the Lord. This is a phrase that um like many in the scriptures, it means something very different than what you will understand. If you hear it in typical channels, not just youtube channels, but like church or some sort of cultural 0:06:53 - 0:07:21 source, you'll come away with. The definition is very different than what it says in the scriptures. The con the scriptural concept of waiting, it's coupled to growth. It's not a passive activity and it's never arbitrary when it comes to good things that we desire with. And from God, he does not have 0:07:21 - 0:07:45 a stopwatch in heaven where he says, all right, this person's just got away a little longer and then I'll send along what they've requested. It does not work that way. There's some deep thoughts here, but I'll try to, I'll try to treat this superficially when you think of time you think of this precise 0:07:44 - 0:08:19 consistent measure and that's an illusion that's only possible because of modern technology. It turns out that whenever we're talking about time, we have to have something, um, basically something greater than ourselves as a reference point. And it has to be a process. There's no such thing as anything 0:08:18 - 0:08:47 related to time. That isn't a process. There's, there is nothing that is a perfect repetitive uh, period. So if you look, it doesn't matter what you look at. Um, anciently, the Hebrews use the moon, the cycles of the moon as a clock. And they'd actually have someone sitting at night watching the sky 0:08:46 - 0:09:14 to announce, for example, the new moon and they'd mark their months by this. And then the days in the month had special significance and very important things that had to be done on precise days. But it was all based off of the moon which no one here controls, right? So, um it's no different today. Even 0:09:13 - 0:09:35 though it's masked, we don't have some guy in a tower watching the moon. But even if you were to look at the atomic clock, it's measuring a process that is, is not precise. I don't mean that the measurement is not precise, although that is true. Uh I mean that if you put enough decimal points of precision 0:09:35 - 0:10:05 on it, you will see that it varies an atomic second is not a perfect second. There is no such thing as that in nature. So um it's just so much more precise than would ever matter to any human in the window of perception that we have. That it doesn't matter why did I go into that long explanation? Well 0:10:04 - 0:10:28 , when we talk about waiting on the Lord, there are things that we can do to accelerate the process and there are things often that other people have to do as well. So what are some of the things that we can do to accelerate the process, which will, which will yield a lot more comfort and peace in us 0:10:27 - 0:10:58 ? Because we get away from this idea that it's some arbitrary passive state just waiting. And you tie into this idea of that. There are conditions for every blessing that God gives and he's impartial. He's perfectly fair. And so the second eil the conditions, the blessings yours. So one of these is trust 0:10:57 - 0:11:20 in God, we could talk about this forever. So I have to keep it super brief. But one aspect of trust in God is to trust His timing. And by that, I hope it's clear. I don't mean just he's got an arbitrary stopwatch in heaven. I mean to trust that he understands the process. If you're baking a cake and 0:11:20 - 0:00:00 you try to cut the bake time, you're gonna be in big trouble. There are other processes. I don't know if you've ever made soap. It is amazingly precise. You have to get everything just right or it's not gonna work. There are chemical reactions that are, that are very picky. Um, anyway, side note, I, 0:00:00 - 0:12:04 I did this, we, we did this thing as a, as a family. We went and we gathered pine tar and our objective was to make soap, uh, out of, out of things that we sourced right here in the woods. And so I had bear fat for the fat. Um, and I had pine tar for the scent. The only thing we, we couldn't get is lye 0:12:03 - 0:12:22 because there are no hardwood trees here and you can get lye out of like, uh, hickory ash and things like that. But we don't have any hickory. I tried, couldn't get them to grow anyway. It's really precise. And so almost always people will use a recipe and if you have to go off of that, uh, if you have 0:12:22 - 0:12:46 to divert from the recipe, the odds of failure are really high and you're gonna have to run many batches. Excuse me, I'm just getting over a cold. So I apologize. You'll have to run many batches to get the quantities. Just right. Anyway, so God's got recipes and you don't want to mess him up because 0:12:45 - 0:13:14 he's already perfected them. He's like your grandma that's already figured out how to make spaghetti and you're not gonna improve on that. So you just go with her recipe, right. Um, we all ought to react to, um, to whatever he provides with implicit trust not just to the point of I'm gonna let you smack 0:13:13 - 0:13:41 me down if that's what it takes. And that is what it often seems like. Although if we really understood his love, we'd never describe it that way. Um, except for effect with those that don't yet understand, but also we react with joy. So one of the tests, like when you're cooking something, usually there's 0:13:41 - 0:13:57 something you could do if you're making jam, you wanna make sure it's gelled. I mean jelly, not jam. You wanna make sure it's gelled and you do the spoon test. If you're cooking a turkey, you know, you can do a temperature test on the thickest part of the meat, whatever there are tests. You see if a 0:13:57 - 0:14:26 pie crust is brown, one of the tests you can run to see how much you trust God is, how much joy the process gives you. And I say gives you that's the way we see it. But it's really how much joy do you find in the process? Because it's a choice, it's your choice to trust Him. It is a powerful, powerful 0:14:25 - 0:14:56 thing to be able to face any challenge that the Lord ordains to place you in with implicit confidence in him, unconditional trust in the Lord. So that no matter what comes your reaction is joy, even if it's, even if you can't say why, because you just say, well, I don't know where this is going, but 0:14:55 - 0:15:25 it's gotta be good. If it's this bad, it's gotta be good. That's, that's the attitude because he's fair. And so his justice would require that the harder it is, the better it will be. These are simple ideas, but they are so important and they're so rarely understood and even more rarely lived and believed 0:15:25 - 0:15:55 . I'd like to highlight the fact that I mentioned uh this previously, but we'll elaborate on it that often the sometimes the choices that need to change have to do with us. But often what we're waiting on is other people. So the Lord still has plenty of things he can lead us through while we're waiting 0:15:55 - 0:16:16 on other people. Just like if you're baking a pie, you can make something else while you're waiting, you can't use the oven, but you can do something else. So there's no shortage of things we can work on in the meantime, but what other people do it, it matters. And there are times when we have to do 0:16:15 - 0:16:47 things just to um align with is not the right phrase um interact with someone else's timeline. Um And again, just to stress this, nothing the Lord does is ever wasted. And so even when we're in a situation where it really seems like the dominant factor is someone else's choice that's not wasted time 0:16:47 - 0:17:20 . And it's not like a second place consolation prize either the improvement you can experience during that time is still incredibly huge. You know, every single thing, every single thing in your life is precisely designed by God who understands all things. He knows everything about this place and everything 0:17:20 - 0:17:48 about you and everything about everyone else. He's arranged the whole thing so that it is the best it can possibly be for you and for everyone else all at the same time. So there's never a time where it's just wasted waiting there. It shouldn't be, you could choose to waste your time just like if you 0:17:48 - 0:18:08 have to, you know, if you're waiting for an important call or email, you can just sit there if you want to or you can use the time for some other improvement. Go to the next thing on your priority list. If you expect to be waiting for 45 minutes, find the most important thing that you can finish in less 0:18:07 - 0:18:42 than 45 minutes or make a significant improvement on or, or progress in and that's what you do. So it's the same way with this. Another, um Another choice we make that determines the timeline is how much we want, what it is we say we want. Now that can be tricky to understand one way to see it more clearly 0:18:41 - 0:19:05 is. What price are you willing to pay? And you can think about that. I just finished a big project, but I was, I was building some shelving and it doesn't sound big. But if I showed you the scope, you'd get it and, um, it was a real pain but it was important. It need to be done and I've been putting 0:19:05 - 0:19:28 it off for a long time. There were other things that were more important and it hit the, the conditions hit where it was the most important thing. And I spent a lot of time and a lot of money getting it done because that was the most important thing. And so, um, I set other things aside, we spent the 0:19:28 - 0:19:52 money, we got it done. Um, it could have been the case that looking at the price tag of the project, I'd say, you know, it's just not worth that money. And so I'll set it aside because I don't actually want this for what it would cost. So often we allow our desires to drift out of reality and we say 0:19:51 - 0:20:15 , well, I want this or I don't want that, but I'm not gonna think at all about what that's gonna cost. So an example of not wanting something is sometimes people don't want to make hard choices and they say, you know, that's just gonna stress me out or I don't wanna have to worry about that or it's scary 0:20:14 - 0:20:38 or I kind of know what I need to do and I really don't wanna do it. So I'm just gonna ignore it. That's fine. But all of that carries a cost and you have to look at that cost and say, is this worth it there are things you can avoid that are like time bombs, speaking of time and the damage they will cause 0:20:37 - 0:21:00 long term is enormously greater than whatever short term pain you're trying to avoid. And so one trick with this is to learn to love your future self as much as you love your present self. It's the silliest thing to say, but that is the problem is you don't like that future person. You do things all 0:21:00 - 0:21:23 the time to hurt them. You steal from them all the time, all the time, every day till you fix this. And when you, you know, we read that for the Lord, all things are present before him. So it's as if there's no time we have to grow into that. We have to grow in. You know, we think the struggle is loving 0:21:23 - 0:21:45 our enemy that's on the docket. We need to handle that too. But way before that, we have to actually learn to love ourselves. If you don't know how to love your future self, as much as you love your present self, you are not prepared to learn to love your enemy as much as you love yourself because you 0:21:45 - 0:22:14 don't even love yourself yet. You just love yourself right now. So you have to learn to erase the bias that you, I impose on time with yourself and you have to maximize the long term benefit. You zoom out all the way and you say, what does this look like over the full span and you have to understand 0:22:13 - 0:22:41 that eternity will dwarf anything that comes before that in the span of time. So, you know, if the choice is be jumped in an alley and beat by 15 people with baseball bats for two minutes and have a wonderful outcome for the rest of whatever or have a wonderful outcome for two minutes and then get beaten 0:22:41 - 0:23:11 by an alley full of hoodlums for the rest of whatever, you know, most people would say. I just wanna feel good right now and it seems like an arbitrary uh con contrived example. But, but I'm telling you, you do this every day. So, uh we have to get away from that. And um, when we learned to play the 0:23:10 - 0:23:38 long game, ironically, surprisingly, everything shortens up, right? And these long term outcomes, they come all of this all, excuse me, all of a sudden because um, we're willing to do what it takes. Now, we realize there's no benefit in waiting to do what we need. We know we need to do. And uh we, we 0:23:37 - 0:24:02 intentionally think about what the cost of benefit is gonna be. And once we're committed, we are locked in until and unless information changes sufficient to break something that we already figured out. Um, there, there, there are multiple animals like like alligator snapping turtles that once they bite 0:24:01 - 0:24:24 down, that's it. There's no way to break that. You gotta kill the animal or do something funky to get them to release because they're not gonna do it. Um, when this is a pro tip. Ok. So we have Huskies when they fight when they are, like, really angry and there's hormones and things in play, uh, because 0:24:24 - 0:24:42 someone's in heat or whatever and they're fighting the best way to separate dogs is to grab them in the privates. And I'm telling you that works. Um, you'd think they'd try to bite you, but I don't know if it's a surprise or discomfort. They, they just totally forget whatever was wearing them before 0:24:42 - 0:25:11 . Um, so it's funny, it's funny. It's true. Um, but, um, so we need to lock into things, but we need to lock into things because we've reasoned through them and the reasons justify the commitment. Um, there's a lot more I could say about that but, you know, sometimes we lock into the wrong things and 0:25:11 - 0:25:32 God's got to grab us by the privates, uh, figuratively speaking because, uh, we've, we've zoomed into something that doesn't have sufficient reasons to be committed to and we've, we've done it to the exclusion of all other things and he's tapping us on the shoulder saying, hey, there's something better 0:25:32 - 0:25:52 out there, you need to shift and we're like, hey, I'm focused. This is what I've committed to. I won't look at anything else. I won't think about anything else even on good things. We always have to remember that God leads us to better things through good things. So one way of representing this is that 0:25:52 - 0:26:16 the, the shortest path to what is better than what, you know, is through the best thing, you know, right now, the shortest path to, to what is better than, you know, is through the best that, you know, right now, that's always true. So if you're on that path to the best, you know, right now and he's 0:26:16 - 0:26:35 trying to tap you on the shoulder, say, OK, this has served his purpose. It's like the, the oxygen tank on the space shuttle. It's really important at the beginning. It's like the most important thing. But once it served its purpose, you got jettison that that thing or else you can't do what you came 0:26:35 - 0:27:11 to do. So many things are like that, I guess the, the final point I want to make here in the sampling of ideas is um it's actually coming back to what, what um what I started to say before we started talking about grabbing animals by the privates. Um Don't, don't uh don't miss the importance of God using 0:27:10 - 0:27:45 time and the experiences that filet to increase the gratitude you feel for what you may currently or would currently take for granted. Uh I started this with the example about the cloudy days. I'm gonna try really hard to say this clearly. Everything, every situation, every idea, every accomplishment 0:27:44 - 0:28:27 , every person, everything, every scene in nature, every song every book, anything you can describe in mortality, it has a range of potential, perceived joy that max in that range is the greatest possible joy that can provide where we are on that range with any of those things. It's a result of the reactions 0:28:26 - 0:29:05 we choose to the processes that the Lord sends to us. The intent of the process is is um to develop our discernment of value. So in one sense, a very important sense, the objective of life, God's objective is to orient us to the things that provide the greatest joy and to increase our perception of that 0:29:05 - 0:29:38 joy to the maximum. Because where we are on that slider results from our choices or reactions to his processes, which is all really one process because it's dependent solely on our choices. Different people will end up with not just different things but in different perceptions of the value that those 0:29:37 - 0:30:14 things provide. And his task is so that when this is all said and done, every single person has the greatest joy that they were willing to receive and joy comes from value, the value has to be in the thing and it has to be perceived. Those are two separate things. So that's his purpose. And this is why 0:30:14 - 0:30:43 there's a such thing as waiting on the Lord. So if you understand all of this, then you can employ these ideas in your life to have much greater trust in God, much greater joy in the journey and you can arrive at much greater joy at the conclusion of the journey than you otherwise would. And perhaps 0:30:43 - 0:30:54 even more important than all of that. You'll have much greater tools to help others navigate to greater joy for themselves.