don't work in vain

Seek His will, Trust in Him, Acknowledge Him.

若 不 是 耶 和 华 建 造 房 屋 ， 建 造 的 人 就 枉 然 劳 力 ； 若 不 是 耶 和 华 看 守 城 池 ， 看 守 的 人 就 枉 然 警 醒 。

2 你 们 清 晨 早 起 ， 夜 晚 安 歇 ， 吃 劳 碌 得 来 的 饭 ， 本 是 枉 然 ； 惟 有 耶 和 华 所 亲 爱 的 ， 必 叫 他 安 然 睡 觉 。

诗篇127:1-2

Relationship Advice

It is important to compliment her
It is more important to complement her 

He provides

Whenever I find myself not trusting God to meet my needs, I shall remind myself of Genesis 2.

He observed, He analysed, He found the man lacking and needing help and He considered the options and devised a plan.
He caused the man to fall asleep and He prepared the helper while the man was unaware.
The man awoke and behold, before him stood his helper.

Do I underestimate my God? Why do I sit around and worry?
He knows my needs more than I know them. Perhaps He also knows that I don't have a need in that area.
But if how I am now is not good in His eyes then certainly He is already at work.

Nothing honours You more than a whole hearted trust.

Simple things like sleep

What is one thing that keeps me from living a life which is aligned to God's will? Strangely, my attitude towards sleeping habits.

At the spur of the moment when I decide what time to sleep it seems to me to be a very mundane, arbitrary decision.
But what I'm realising more and more is how sleeping late takes a big toll on my health.
I'm also beginning to see how a bad night's sleep affects my ability to perform in the next day. Basically, if I wake up groggy I end up having a bad, unproductive morning which carries into the rest of the day.
And so it turns out that sleeping late results in a wasted day the day after.

Been waking up with sore throats recently... sleeping late at Jeff's birthday chalet today.
Perhaps I should cease such folly.

What an illustration!

"This is hard for us to comprehend, because we have to sleep every day just to cope, not to mention thrive. We go up and down in our enjoyments. We get bored and discouraged one day and feel hopeful and excited another.

We are like little geysers that gurgle and sputter and pop erratically. But God is like a great Niagara — you look at it and think: surely this can’t keep going at this force for year after year after year.

That’s the way God is about doing us good. He never grows weary of it. It never gets boring to him."

From this morning's devotions.

I felt that I can really appreciate the description of the waterfall after seeing the 3rd (or was it 2nd) biggest waterfall in the world during my trip in China. Waterfalls are just incredible, I remembered watching, marvelling and wondering at the sheer volume of water, at the fact that a larger river lies beyond and then even beyond that, the sheer size of the watershed boundary necessary to sustain the water flow.

At such a volume of flow you'd really expect the waterfall to empty out its source but that didn't happen. It just went on, and on, and on, and the occasional gust picked up the misty droplets to bring us a faint, but safe, taste of it.

To describe God as a mighty waterfall... The choice of parallel also covers a particular aspect of how we relate to God: we just simply underestimate Him.
In certain episodes of awe I am sometimes provoke to distrust rather than promoted to greater heights of faith because I think to myself
"wow... this is incredible, I'm sure I'll have to wait a pretty long while before God does something so magnificent again"

My heart is unwilling, fearful even, to believe that God will put his omnipotence into caring for us day after day after day.
But that's how He is.

What I lack

True manhood is man's response to God's calling for men to gladly assume sacrificial responsibility.