Love for God Gives Perspective

   We just got back from our annual teen trip with the youth group (which is why I haven't wrote in a while). It is always interesting to see how things work out, and how the things you just expect to work out (like campsites) don't always, but the things you weren't exactly sure about work out better than you could have imagined. Every year we gain more people and lose some that we miss a lot, but every year it is cool to see how the different group bonds and forms friendships that aren't likely to form going through the everyday routines we normally go through.
   One of the things I love so much about it is that the peer pressure is to do the right thing. It is directed to help us grow and to become better people. Not to mention it is so much fun! During one of our nightly devos the comment was made that this was about as close to heaven as you can get. Good friends, good food, beautiful scenery, and not a care in the world. Not that nothing wrong occurred. We had our fair share of excitement and frustrations, but the way that things were handled caused even those things to seem minor in comparison to the good things.
   This is what Christianity is all about. God gives us His word so that we will know how to live a better life, and so that we can help others to live that better life as well. It's not so we can look down our noses with a holier than thou attitude, but rather that we strive to be the best that we can be for the Lord and we expect others to do the same because it is in their best interest.
   One of the coolest things about God's word is that it is so applicable in our daily lives and is constantly around us. If you see a principle that works, you can bet that you will find it within the pages of the Bible. God tells us what will work and what will not. Which is why people, even unGodly people, can do things and be successful, because God's plan was made to have people excel. However it just doesn't work as well without God at the very center of everything we do. We can learn how to do all the right things, but if we forget to love our God with everything we have, while things might still work out well many times, we will have missed out on the reason we are here, and we will find that we have an emptiness inside our hearts that God is longing to fill. When God is first though, things work so much better. It's not that things always go our way and that bad things never happen, but rather that we have the proper perspective of what we are here for, and that makes all the difference.

"...God our Savior, Who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth."
~ 2 Timothy 3b-4 (NIV) Our duty is to love God, but its not one way. He loves us more than we can comprehend.