A Sunday Blessing

I am reading the book

The Creative Call

by Janice Elsheimer.

I found the following quote from it to be very true:

Our gifts are not from God to us, but from God through us to the world... When we try to live without exercising our artistic gifts, we may feel restless and empty.  Life lacks fullness.  Something buried deep within longs to emerge.  Job wrote, 'For I am full of words, and the spirit within me compels me; inside I am like bottled-up wine, like new wineskins ready to burst.  I must speak and find relief; I must open my lips and reply' (Job 32:18-20).  If we have neglected to develop and use the talents God has given us, we feel incomplete, unfulfilled, unfinished, even depressed.  We are 'like new wineskins ready to burst'.  We devour books, we travel, we acquire possessions, or we busy ourselves in relationships and careers (not that these are bad things - just that they won't fill that gap).  We engage in diversions of all kinds in an attempt to find that elusive thing called 'fulfillment'.  We spend our time and money in a fruitless search to 'find ourselves' instead of finding out how God wants us to use the talents he has given us.

So why do I fill up my life with things that I do not need 

and my time with unimportant filler?

It does give me that instant gratification and 'instant high' 

(which society enforces everywhere we turn).

But my prayer for myself and you is that we would not be seeking

 that instant fix and instead would create from out hearts 

that which must come out of us or we will burst.

Amen