well-being

So tonight I got this email from a good friend. And in case you were ever thinking about me and wondering, Huh. Does that Jessica appreciate emails from good friends? Let me assure you, I do.

Heck, it doesn’t even have to be an email. You could scrawl down something kind for me on a napkin that you used to wipe your mouth after you ate a donut . Because though I might think it was odd at first, after wiping away the sugar or jelly or chocolate or whatever it is you prefer on your donut, I would read that something kind and I would appreciate it. And then I’d probably want a donut of my own.

But now you know.

About the emails and kind notes, I mean; not necessarily about the donut.

But tonight I got this email with a link to a speaker in L.A. named Erwin McManus and a certain message he gave. My friend told me that he thought of me throughout much of the message and wondered if it might do me some good to listen to it.

So I did.

And I have to be honest, I wasn’t altogether convinced that it was the same message he had meant to refer. I mean, there was the part about building a house for habitat for humanity and the Wright family that was going to live in it and then there was the part about a church wanting to give 60k away and then there was the time that Erwin himself found out something cool about God providing and he started crying in the food court of the Westfield mall. Now I am all for houses and I am sure this particular one made for a spectacular new year for the Wright family and good for them. I am also not at all opposed to giving away 60k or even crying in food courts, though that probably wouldn’t be my first choice of a place for me to let myself go, so to speak.

But why any of this should make my good friend think about me right now just beats all.

But I kept giving Erwin (and my friend) a chance to say something that stuck to me.

Plus I was in the bathtub and my hands were all wet and I didn’t really want to get them all over my computer.

But then it happened. Something stuck. And I was like, okay, okay, I get it. And the gist of it was that one of God’s names is the Prince of Peace and, when translated, that can be just as simple as meaning, the provider of our well-being.

Well-being.

–a good or satisfactory condition of existence; a state categorized by health, happiness, and prosperity.

And that got me to thinking. About a lot of the things that I normally would need in order to feel like I have well-being. And how maybe that list should be a lot shorter than it is. Read: GOD. Do you need to see it again? I know, it’s kind of hard to read it all the first time, kind of overwhelming, so here it is: GOD.

And now let’s all try to memorize this list: GOD.

That’s not to say that I shouldn’t desire other good healthy things. That I shouldn’t keep working on the relationships that God has given me; nor should I just start ignoring the things God has given me to do. But I guess my point is that all of those things, they aren’t necessarily constant, you know? They shift. They ebb and flow. And lately the ebbing has been all consuming and has hurt like the dickens. The ebbing has made me want to swear, and I don’t swear.

But my well-being.

That is directly relating to who God is and He doesn’t change. He doesn’t ebb. Though I wonder sometimes if maybe people doing all that painful ebbing to others makes Him want to swear too. He could do it in an Old Testament way. Something about an ass and he could mean a donkey but he could also mean something else, say a particular creation of his who is acting like one, and it would be a double entendre and he’d chuckle to the angel Gabriel and Gabriel would roll his eyes but laugh too because who isn’t gonna laugh when God makes a joke?

Probably only the devil and do you really want to be in that boat?

I didn’t think so.

And after I finished listening to the message, I emailed my friend and thanked him. But not without letting him know that I had to wade through a lot of rhetoric that made me wonder why he thought of me at all while he was listening to it. But the well-being thing, I said, that was good. That made sense.

And then he wrote back and was like, Jess, that was the complete wrong one. So sorry. Here’s the real link I meant to send. And I was like, Oh. Because by then I had already listened to one long teaching that was not really meant for me and now I had another one to listen to but now I was really tired and so I didn’t have a lot more to say than Oh.

But the well-being part. That still holds true. Maybe I am off the hook for the Habitat for Humanity stuff tonight, but I certainly can give the God-being-the-provider-of-my-well-being stuff a closer look. Because honestly? It did help.

And it still does.