A Sleeping Giant Awakens

In my heart lives a sleeping giant.  His name is HOPE (for relationship).  He sleeps for years at a time until an experience nudges at him until he is awake.  This time, it was an experience with a catfish.  I am very aware of catfish; how they work, the red flags.  I avoid them as much as possible.  I don’t accept friend requests on Facebook from people I don’t know.  I check to see if they are friends of a friend or someone I might know.  Most times, they are recently created profiles and have no friends.  I don’t accept message requests from people I don’t know.  This experience happened over a game of Scrabble.

I’ve been playing Scrabble with just one friend.  I get requests to play games with other people several times a day.  Mostly men and some start off with a direct message.  I have been declining games.   I thought maybe I would accept a game if I found someone who had a score average close to mine (most are far below mine).  So, I accepted a game from someone named David.  We played several rounds with no communication.  Then he messaged me and we began to chat.  I suspected a catfish from the beginning.  The red flags were there: widowed, engineer, a young child in his life, foreign born, etc.  I told him that I suspected he was a catfish.  What’s a catfish, he asked.  Who in 2022 does not know what a catfish is?  Scrabble chat feature is cumbersome so we moved to Google Chat which I also found odd.  I went from 50/50 suspicion of catfish to 15/85 suspicion of catfish – he was good at convincing me that he was not.  Now, I am at 95/5 suspicion that he is a catfish. 

Back to the giant.  What really woke the Giant was a song that he sent to me, Perfect by Ed Sheeran.  If you like love songs, it’s a great one.  It stirred up all those emotions of longing and desire for a relationship.  The Giant was waking up.

I have five life principles.  One of them is to live in contentment.  The Giant is not helpful in living out that principle.  He breeds discontentment. 

 Our small group lessons today was on contentment.  Paul, in Philippians 4:11, tells us to be content in whatever circumstances.  We should live in contentment, not necessarily with contentment of our circumstances.  Contentment is not happiness.  It is deeper than that.  We can live in contentment because our contentment comes from God; not from people or circumstances.  We can dwell peaceably in whatever situation we find ourselves because we can trust God. 

But, how do we do that? 

• ·      Philippians 4:8  Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy – meditate on these things.
• ·       Use your circumstances to share the love of God and saving grace of Jesus Christ
• ·     Keep your walk with God close so that your response to circumstances is positive and God honoring. 
• ·      Focus on something/someone other than yourself.

 

Now….to put that Giant back to sleep.  😊