I'll put something here some day...

just remember that if you didn't get what you wanted for Christmas, Jesus is eager to give you the best gift you can receive in your entire life. He is eager to talk and walk life with you. A wonderful relationship with Him, the Ultimate Comforter, Counselor, Redeemer, can be yours if you turn and agree with Him that sin is sin and lean on Him.

I offer this as nothing more or less than personal testimony, but the single best inoculation I’ve found against the doomerpill is Ecclesiastes. Not because it’s a feel good book or offers any particular comfort or assurances, if anything it does the opposite. But getting told “nothing matters, the world is corrupt and full of injustice, worldly pleasure is fleeting, humans are idiots who never learn (myself included), and the future is uncertain and frightening; now dust yourself off, appreciate your life and its simple pleasures, fear God, and try to live as rightly as you can” by a guy who lived 2000-odd years ago really beats you over the head with a sense of perspective. The troubles of our time are not exceptional. There is nothing new under the sun.

PLEASE YES Ecclesiastes was the book that helped me through a very disillusioned time in my life. A time where I was looking at all the political infighting and how life demands all these things from you that if you look at it objectively, don’t matter nearly as much as everyone else would like to make you think. And it makes you wonder what the point is of trying at all. And Ecclesiastes agrees with you on that. But it tells you at the end that God is the point of living, not everything else that is fleeting and falls away. So live your life as best as you can for the Lord. And if He blesses you, it’s ok t enjoy those blessings. Just never forget that the blessings are not the sole reason for living, it’s the One who grants them that is the most important.