Getting What You Want

Getting What You Want
By Steve Brown

"I saw another senseless thing under the sun: a man alone, without son or brother, working endlessly, his greed never satisfied with wealth ' For whom do I work and deprive myself of pleasure?' This, too, is nonsense and mistaken investment."

Ecclesiastes 4:7-8

I was in a bookstore the other day and a clerk came up to me and said, "Can I help you?"
"I don't know what I want," I answered. "But when I find it, I'll let you know."

Most of us are like that. We're really not sure what we want. And even if we stumbled onto what we thought it was, we would probably find out that it wasn't what we wanted anyway.

The most unhappy person in the world is not someone who didn't get what he or she wanted. The most unhappy person is the one who got what he or she wanted and then found out that it wasn't as wonderful as expected. The secret of a happy life is not to get what you want but to live with what you've got. Most of us spend our lives concentrating on what we don't have instead of thanking God for what we do have . Then we wake up, our life is over, and we missed the beauty of the present.

You think about that.

What do you really want out of life? In your pursuit of it, are you missing anything along the way? Could you even be missing greater joys? Don' treat these questions flippantly. Your answers will reveal a lot about what you hold most dear, and what your answers don't include may tell you what you're missing in the process.

Is this pursuit really worth the process?