I Wish I Had Never Been Born

“So why did you have me born? I wish no one had ever laid eyes on me!

I wish I had never been born

I wish I’d never lived—a stillborn,
buried without ever having breathed.

Isn’t it time to call it quits on my life?

Can’t you let up, and let me smile just once
Before I die and am buried,
before I’m nailed into my coffin, sealed in the ground,
And banished for good to the land of the dead,
blind in the final dark?” Job 10:18-22 (The Message)

If not expressed verbally, then despair can often be whispered in the heart’s deep recesses, unspoken to anyone except the soul.

Gifts under the groan

Under this groan belies some gifts that many wish they could give back.

The Gift of Desires
The Gift of Thoughts
The Gift of Choices
The Gift of Emotions

The combination of our desires, thoughts, choices, and emotions can often create an absolute mess. Yet all four gifts are the greatest qualities we have received from our creator.

We are a ‘chip off the old block.’

We have inherited from God these innate qualities.

God has

Desires–The prophet Hosea voices the desires of a family longing for a wayward child. Hosea 11
Thoughts – God thinks about us and draws conclusions. Genesis 6: 5-8 brings a challenge and also hope. I especially like verse 8! Try inserting your name and see how it feels.
Choices- Paul, writing in Ephesians, tells us that God has a purpose, and they make choices according to those purposes.
Emotions–From feelings of sadness and loss to feelings of injustice and anger, we see Jesus expressing feelings. God is pleased, another feeling, when we follow their lead.

If we have these same qualities, then where did we go wrong?

Where we went wrong

It’s in this.

Our dependency is not on God, but ourselves. We are self-reliant. We steer the ship of our lives. We set the sails. We plot the course.

The gift of having free choice grants us the freedom to follow our thoughts, feelings, and desires. Often putting us on a collision course with an iceberg.

What do we do?

We shift to having a complete dependency on God. Letting them be the Co-pilot of our ship.

Will we continue to get some things wrong? Yes!

We can also become overly dependant on others. I have seen this many times. We become too dependant on someone. They worship them, and the person becomes a quasi Jesus.

We, by our choices, make ourselves vulnerable to their imperfections. Any change in them, which actually is inevitable, can rock the boat violently.

Where does the focus need to be?

C.S. Lewis writes this.

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things. (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock)

We need to put Father, Jesus, and Spirit first in our desires, thoughts, choices, and emotions. They have the first and rightful place.

We need to choose to turn around from going the wrong way.

Repentance involves
1. facing my utter helplessness to make life work as I would wish;
2. sorrowing over my insane strategies that are intended to make ‘Life Work’;
3. clinging to a God who calls me to follow a plan of life that seems absurd. Dan Allendar

Job was brought to a place of change through a plan that seems absurd to us, but he was one that decided to ‘Put first things.’