Life's a Beach.

Now that I'm home in Ontario, especially here at the beach, I've been appreciating this place more and more. I absolutely love it here, the scenery that is. It's so beautiful and I never realized how great it was until I lived a few years in the prairies and came back. My parents and I went for a picnic at Tobermory today, for those of you who have no idea what that means, it's the end point on the Bruce Peninsula, the escarpment that begins at Niagara Falls continues through Owen Sound and up the Bruce Peninsula and Tobermory is sort of the end point, although it still continues....blah blah blah, I know. But we were walking around in that little town which is essentially a small marina with some shops and houses surrounding it, and I was realizing how much I miss those types of places, you know, water.
Then I spent some time on the beach tonight, read and went for a swim. It was a good way to reflect, I'm in that kind of a mood today, moreso than usual I suppose.
I recently started reading "Uprising" by Erwin MacManus and I am really enjoying it so far. It's actually been useful in God showing me how deep pride runs in me at times, it's kind of scary, but it's a good thing to be made aware of it. You can't fix something if you don't know it's broken.
Pride is one of those things that works its way into you so that you don't even notice, sometimes it's painfully obvious and other times it's not so clear, maybe to those around you but not always to you.
All I could think about as I read was how much I want to be so bent on God and his purpose that nothing else matters, and as things fall into place after that I can count them as a gift from Him and not as the goal in themselves. As I reflected on life earlier today and how I often find myself desiring to be in a relationship with a "significant other" and further into the future, married with kids, but I often see those things as the goal in themselves. Or even what my career might look like and all that junk, seeing those things as the end in themselves does not provide much hope in life, because once you get there, then what? If my goal is to get married, and it happens, then what? But if my goal is to dive deeper and follow God wherever, that's a goal that I think is worthy of persuing with everything, and if I am blessed with a wife and a family, that's great! Then I can enjoy that and contribute as much as possible.
I guess it may not make a lot of sense, at least the way I said it, but it's making sense in my mind. The ultimate goal, in my mind, if not eternal is not worth it.
I tend to be very much of a future oriented person, I'm always thinking of what things will be like 5 or 10 or even 40 years down the road. I think there's some importance in making plans, but worrying so much about the future only stalls me from being who God has made me now.
These all seem to be such fundamental realizations, but when you rerealize them for the first time in a long time and actually begin to really grasp a bit of the concept, it's exciting.
The bottom line is, I want to live, and live freely, I mean real freedom, not something that I think is freedom but is really holding me back from experiencing God and being changed and molded to look more like Him.
There's a song, it's a country song (that's right), Paul Brandt sings it. The song is called "Loving You" I think, something along those lines. One line goes a little something like this: "Loving you is what I want to be remembered for." Now the song is directed towards a woman, it's pretty clear, but man do I want to be remembered for loving, actually living the two main commandments. Love God, love people. The question is, what am I going to do about that?