Last year our bible study leader gave each of our members a devotional journal that she had put together. I would be lying if I said I had put the devotional to good use throughout the last year. However, a few weeks ago I pulled it out and started reading some of the scriptures she had put inside and one stuck out to me and I pulled out a pen and just started writing. Before I knew it I had 3 pages full of my thoughts on the scripture and I thought I’d share some of those thoughts in this week’s spiritual Sunday post.

Something is currently happening in our extended family that made me pull it out again and take a closer look.

Now therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts; consider your ways.

Ye have sown much and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put into a bag with holes.

Thus saith the Lord of hosts; consider your ways. – Haggai 1:5-7

Do you ever feel like the harder you try the worse things get? For instance:

1. It might be that you work more only to have the extra money have to go to an unexpected expense instead of what you wanted or for savings?
2. You try harder to keep your spouse happy by doing something special or better than usual only to have them not notice or find other things you didn’t do?
3. You make it a point to spend extra time with your kids because you haven’t been giving them the attention you feel you should lately? The only problem is they aren’t interested in spending time with you or they act up during the time defeating the purpose of fun, quality togetherness.
4. You try to save some time (and your sanity) by planning ahead and your plans get ruined by something out of the ordinary in your day that you never in a million years would have expected to happen.

If any of these things sound familiar or you’ve been in a situation where the harder you tried the worse the situation became consider the scriptures above.

When we sow our seeds and don’t reap any reward something is more than likely wrong somewhere. The first thing most of us think is that it can’t be us, but more times than not the truth is just the opposite. If we really (and I mean really) cleared our minds and thought it through we’d realize it in fact IS us.

A reality check is in order in these instances. Instead of spending our time complaining we should stop and find out where things went wrong on our end. Once you’ve been honest with yourself and see the things we are sometimes so blind to in our own ways, only then can we fix the problem.

It might take time to correct these things and likely results won’t happen immediately, but if we keep working at finding and correcting these problems within ourselves, eventually we WILL get where we want to be and all those things we do will not seem to be for nothing.

So, if you’ve got something going on in your life right now that you just can’t seem to figure out why it’s not working out the way you thought it would (no matter how big or small it may seem) I encourage you to take the time to stop and think about why.