“The sorrows of our lives are in great part his weaning process. We give our hearts over to so many things other than God. We look to so many other things for life. I know I do. Especially the very gifts that he himself gives to us — they become more important to us than he is. That’s not the way it is supposed to be. As long as our happiness is tied to the things we can lose, we are vulnerable.”

This truth is core to the human condition and to understanding what God is doing in our lives. We really believe that God’s primary reason for being is to provide us with happiness, give us a good life. It doesn’t occur to us that our thinking is backward. It doesn’t even occur to us that God is meant to be our all, and that until he is our all, we are subhuman. The first and greatest command is to love God with our whole being. Yet, it is rare to find someone who is completely given over to God. And so normal to be surrounded by people who are trying to make life work. We think of the few who are abandoned to God as being sort of odd. The rest of the world — the ones trying to make life work — seem perfectly normal to us.

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