Finding what makes us "feel good"

The other day I was eating in a chinese restaurant with some people from the church. I think that my favorite part of chinese food (besides eating with chopsticks) is the fortune cookie! Now at this particular place you could eat as many fortune cookies as you wanted because they are out on the buffet. I went to the buffett line and I got a large handful of fortune cookies and proceeded to open them up and read fortunes and eat cookies. The people I was with were laughing at me as I was becoming quite dissapointed that I couldn't find a fortune cookie with a fortune that I liked. You know one of those ones that make you feel good because they say your going to get money or find true love? Well I once again went and got another handful of cookies. FINALLY after eating 6 or 7 fortune cookies I found a fortune that tickled my fancy! It said you will recieve an unexpected payment soon. ALRIGHT! Just what I need I said and once again the people with me laughed. Later that night I was sitting in my room thinking (scary I know) and I had a thought about my experience with the fortune cookies.

Often times we do the same thing to the Bible that I was doing with my cookies. We dig through the Bible trying to find a verse or a scripture to make us "feel good". I was simply ignoring all those fortunes that said things like "you will learn a hard lesson this month" and simply looking until I found one that I liked better. Once I found the perfect fortune all the others were simply forgotten and that became my fortune. Now I know we can't put much stock in fortunes but we can put complete trust in the word of God and yet we sometimes pick it apart taking only the parts that give us that warm fuzzy feeling and leave the rest to be ignored. It's not that we do it on purpose it just happens. We love the part of the scripture that says resist the devil and he will flee but we often brush past and ignore that part that says submit yourselves unto God. We often try to ignore those ugly words like submit and obey in the Bible and we search and search for the parts that say blessings will flow abundantly. While there is nothing wrong with looking for scriptures that apply to our current situations let us make sure we aren't ignoring some of the many wonderful treasures in his word just because they don't make us "feel good"

Hope you all enjoyed my thought for the day. (See no politics this time either!)

With much love,
Yvonne