Chaplain
#LiveYourBest Life. It’s such a good hashtag, that maybe I shouldn’t ask what it means. But curiosity got the better of me recently, as I wondered what my best life is. Life is filled with choices. I might eat a chocolate bar for breakfast, or muesli. If my best life is the healthy one, the muesli it is. If my best life is the one that makes me happy, then Twirl bar here I come! Is my best life the healthy one of the happy one? The problem is, I can’t see all my possible lives ahead of me, so how can I choose the best one? One the one hand famous Chinese Proverb tells me that there are many paths up the mountain; the view is the same. And yet it feels like our world of media and social media are pushing us to compare our paths – as though my best life is one that is more like someone else’s! So how do you #liveyourbestlife anyway?
This week in Chapel we read Psalm 1. And you could sum it up – and answer my torrent of questions above – with this one phrase: #YourBestLifeIsaLifeConnectedToGod. It is too long for a hashtag now that I look at it. It might not take off.
Regardless, Psalm 1 says that those who “delight in the law of the LORD, meditating on it day and night” (in other words, trust in God’s wisdom for how to live and make God’s priorities their own), are like “trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit in each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all that they do.” According to the Bible, a life connected to God, trusting in Him is a strong, prosperous, and resilient life – like a huge tree! Some of us are sceptical – we have this lingering suspicion that including God in our lives might reduce our joy and purpose in life. In fact, the Bible says the opposite.
Psalm 1 – I encourage you to read it all – says that Led Zep were right: “there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run” the path that leads to joyful, purposeful, eternal life is the life lived in relationship with God. #YourBestLifeIsaLifeConnectedToGod. I had to say it again…
