I find myself disappointed in the different outcome of my situation. When 2am hits and my mind won’t be still, I think of how I thought life would look different by now. I thought I’d be building a home on a few acres. I thought I’d have a new baby or close to it. I think of the remodel ideas we have for our current home. I think of our financials goals that we originally hit but then slowly is draining. I think about the new car we were trying to buy. The knee throbs or aches and I want to go back to when I had no problems. I want comfort. I’m a bit salty…

Let me explain.

Life is really beautiful right now, but it’s different. I find myself lost in the thought of “what could have been” or “what I thought life should be like by now”.

One morning when my eyes had not yet closed and the clock showed me 2:37am, the Lord convicted my heart. Genesis talks very briefly about a woman called “Lot’s wife”. She was not named. She isn’t some long story. Yet her story proves to be gut punching and powerful. We know very little about her background or character. All that we know is that when Lot got his family up to leave their homes, he took her and their 2 daughters with them. They lived in the town of Sodom and Gomorrah which held a reputation of wickedness, violence, and depravity. But it was their home. When God finally brought judgement on the city (where Lot and his wife had built their life), God warned Lot and gave them time to leave.

Angels warned them, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!”

God basically removed these cities from the map. Sulfur from the sky. Smoking later like a furnace. Demolished everything due to how evil it was.

Lot’s wife looked back and became a pillar of salt. She was destroyed by her own decisions. And while we can’t know for sure why she looked back, the Hebrew word for “looked” in verse 36 means to look back on or scan intently with favor and care. To regard or have respect.

Everything in this world is temporary. Our hope can’t be in the things that the world has to offer. If we find ourselves looking back, we loose sight of what God is doing and begin to idolize the blessing instead of praise the one who gave it to us in the first place.

We like to make plans and figure everything out for ourselves. We get comfortable in the blessings that we have and the moment God calls us to more or the unknown, we look back with favor at the things that will die and rust and decay. The things that won’t stay with us. While it’s okay to dream, it has to be for the things God is calling us to. He is after our eternity. The physical material blessings may not come (although He loves giving gifts to His children), but the eternal promise that He has for us is so much bigger and better than what we can even imagine.

Now look, I’m obviously not perfect. See my intro to this post again. Everything we go through is an opportunity for us to choose Christlikeness. We don’t just wake up patient when we pray for patience, He gives us opportunities to be patient. To grow. To learn. In the same way, we can choose to stay where we are. We can to choose to idolize the world. OR we can choose to not look back. We can choose to follow Jesus no matter the cost. We can choose to go where He calls. We must die to self everyday and choose to fix our eyes on God. To use every hard situation and life change as an opportunity to grow our hope and faith in Jesus as opposed to looking back, longing for the things of this world. It’s not about our comfort, it’s about our heart transformation until we are no longer…

Under The Sun.