A Spiritual Lesson from e-Reader Selection
The decision had been made! By this point, the battery was lasting almost an entire week due to my lack of usage. For the preceding month, I had tried out the Bullet Journal technique to keeping notes at work and the new system worked remarkably well for me. I no longer brought my iPad to meetings and instead meticulously captured notes and action items via bullets and empty squares. When I did pick up my iPad it was to surf the web for a few minutes before abandoning it for my laptop. When it came to reading books, I always used my Kindle Touch.
I told my wife that I was ready to get rid of my iPad. She told me I was crazy, but went along with my antics. I was certain that I no longer wanted it!
I was wrong.
I decided to take advantage of my library’s free eBook collection. Their selection was vastly limited for my Kindle Touch compared to the Nook collection. So that was the ticket. I wanted a Nook. My wife took on extra knitting projects to save up enough to buy me one for Christmas. I was elated!
Then I used it for a month. The novelty wore off. The interface felt slow & jumpy. It was an inferior product.
When bonus time came around, I bought the device I wanted all along…. an iPad.
In Psalm 37, the author captures the essence of what my e-Reader selection was really about all along:
Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
You know, I delight so much in my wife that I often seek any way possible to give her the desires of her heart, similar to the way she worked at buying me a new Nook.
Contrarily, that’s not the way God works. Reading the verse over again it clicked. In retrospect, I didn’t know the desires of my heart. I thought I did. Each decision point was thoughtfully made and I was certain that I would be happy with the result. But it lead to disappointment at every turn. In a similar fashion, our hearts when left on their own, will only lead to bewilderment at the expense of a great many things in our life: wasted time, poor focus, etc.
What the Psalmist is actually saying in this verse is that if we take delight in obeying God, then our hearts will gain insight into what truly matters in life. That God himself will direct our hearts in what they should desire.
Have you ever experienced that?
