Wow, post #100. Let me just congratulate myself momentarily…

… before I get back to being disgruntled. Probably not the right way to begin a “spiritual post” but I’m being honest. I’m disgruntled because I’ve just gotten home from a shopping trip to a book shop. Usually this is a great thing, which I enjoy.

But I’m disgruntled after this visit, due to false advertising. See, I thought I was buying a great emoji game. One that I could use in a variety of places, including the classroom. Lot of ‘how are you going today?’ sorts of activities and exploring the human experience – perfect for my fresh faced year 12s.

But then I opened up the pack of the “emoji action” game.

The cards are terrible.

And the cards are not what is on the packet, or on the tin container in which they live. The cards on the cover are smiling, have love eyes or sunglasses on, are vomiting a rainbow plus there’s a monkey, unicorn, panda and a palm tree. I think there’s even a French emoji with a beret on, but it’s hard to see.

I loved the package and I thought there’d be all that and more in the card deck upon opening it up. Nothing of the sort. There’s very few emotions in the pack at all.

More pizza, poo… and two girls in leotards (?!)

Such potential, and they just threw it down the dunny with the poo emoji. And they didn’t give me what they said they would on the pack….

But it made me reflect that life is sometimes like that. It doesn’t come like it said it would on the pack. And being a Christian can be like that as well. It doesn’t happen like the Church people say it will. It doesn’t look like that at all, at times.

And we can end up being disgruntled because it’s not like we thought it would be when we looked on the pack.

It’s very easy to look sideways and see what is happening for others when they look full or faith and you don’t feel that way. Or they seem to be very focused in their spiritual thinking and you seem to be distracted as soon as you even go near an open Bible.

Being a Christian often doesn’t look like what we think it would when we “looked at it on the pack.” And we shouldn’t let that worry us. Even Jesus said this sort of thing to his disciple, Peter when Peter started to compare his path with the path of another disciples’ life.

Jesus basically said, “Don’t worry about him, just worry about yourself. If I choose one path for you and another path for him, what does it matter? It’s still a path.”

We just have to walk our own path with God and not worry about whether it looks like it did on the pack or not. If we’re walking the path with God, that’s all that matters. There are essentials for all, but after that, it doesn’t have to be the same as another person’s path.

We need to give ourselves that permission and we also need to guard against people telling us what our path “must” look like. We aren’t all the same.

There is no neat pack with a common description. And that’s OK. It’s not OK when I buy a pack of cards, however.

Yours in a beret with a pet monkey,

Alison

Image Credit: Image from Emoji Request

NB: I always wanted a pet monkey as a child