Box of Chocolates

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Tom Hanks in the movie Forest Gump says “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.”
Life’s challenges begin from the time we are little. At elementary school, many of us are forced to compete for good grades. As we grow older we practice hard to make into sports, robotics and debate teams and some of us even work harder to get a date for a school dance. In this struggle, we go through cycles of success & failure, joy & sadness, excitement & disappointment.  After we graduate we become happy with the assumption that there are no more grades, but we soon realize that competition has just increased two or three fold. Two month vacations are a thing of the past – the hard reality of life kicks in. 

In Jeremiah 18 we see God taking the prophet Jeremiah to a potter’s house. He sees the potter taking the clay that was “marred” or broken and making it into another vessel that seemed best to him. The prophet understands that our life is like the clay - marred or broken, which is why we are in a constant state of strife. We work hard and compete to re-make our broken lives with our own strength. In reality, if we continue to do so we will stay in that state of “brokenness” and will never be fully satisfied with our successes, because we are naturally continuing to aspire for more. The race never stops, we keep moving from piece of chocolate to another.

Rick Warren said, “Life is a series of problems, either you are in one now, and you are just coming out of one, or you are getting ready to go into another one. The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort; God is more interested in making your life holy. We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn’t going to make sense.”

If we truly wish to make sense of our life, we need to understand that we are in God’s hand (just like the clay in the Potter’s hands) and we are to use His strength to fix our broken lives, rather than our strength. Paul tells us in Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” As long as we are in the hands of Christ, our broken clay will be made into something better. We can either allow our life to stay like a box of chocolates where we will never know what we will get and be dazzled every time, or we can allow God in our life and make sense of what is happening.

Your pick!!

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