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What if You are Actually Already Living “The Good Life”?

In a new blog post, author Lisa-Jo Baker reveals how her son’s seemingly ordinary baseball game reminded her that sometimes the most meaningful, most glorious moments, are the smallest and easiest to miss.

A boys’ baseball game isn’t just dirt and sweat and strikeouts, she muses. It’s easy to write it off as “long and boring” – but then we wouldn’t be looking close enough.

I’ve wasted a lot of time thinking glory lives in the big moments of our lives.

But on nights like this I know in my bones that the glorious ordinary is the best kind of big.

Parenting teaches you a lot. We all grow up dreaming about glorious adventures, shining trophies, fame, and prestigious careers. Surely that’s “the good life” – isn’t it? But Lisa-Jo Baker has learned that the “good life” is all around us, if we can only stop to breathe it in. It’s in the unmitigated trust with which our little ones receive encouragement from their mothers. It’s the purple and orange tapestry of the sky at dusk. It’s the grief, the joy, the laughter, of doing something for the first time and being cheered by everyone on the bleachers.  

What if I’m already living the “good life”?

In Why I Absolutely Don’t Want to be 20 Again, Sara Coleman ruminates on the general cultural dread of turning 40. As her own 40th birthday approaches, she decides to look aging full in the face and be present where she is right now.

I choose to embrace my age. Thirty was great, but there are hairstyles and faux pas I'd rather forget. I am thrilled with the things that happened in my life this decade: I fell in love, got married, had children, bought my first home; it was amazing. I am happier and fitter - or at least just as fit - as I was a decade ago. Yeah, I've got grey hairs and I "need" reading glasses. But what I don't need is to compete with the beauty and vigor of a twenty-something. I have life experience. I have confidence.

I don't want to be twenty. I don't want to be thirty. I want to be who I am now.

Why do I think that if I’m supposedly “past my prime,” then I’ve lost my shot at life and vigor?

What if I’m already living the “good life”?

The problem might lie with our own distracted eyes and misguided expectations. Shauna Niequist reflects on this in How Can I Learn to Savor Life?

What I want to do is savor this life—my life, my children, my community, this gorgeous world God created. That’s what we all want, right? To soak up the goodness all around us, to be aware of holy fingerprints everywhere, to walk through each day expecting and noticing those glints and shimmers of the divine right in the daily—in a hug, a tomato sandwich, a quiet moment, a text from someone we love.

…I’m trying to learn how to pay attention, to clear away space and noise, and to invite you to hear the drumbeat, too. God’s always speaking, always. He’s always moving, always present, always creating, always healing. The trick, at least for me, is paying attention. The trick is savoring.

Am I whipping through my day so fast that I’m taking all the beautiful moments for granted?

What if I’m already living the “good life”?

Maybe it’s time to slow down, pay attention, and start learning to savor. Maybe it’s time to stop wishing you had a different life, and start making the most of your present circumstances. Maybe it’s time to stop chasing empty pleasures and instead Start Living the Good Life within the loving boundaries God has created for us.

Maybe it’s time to stop asking, when will I find the “good life”? and instead ask ourselves,

What if I’m already living the “good life”?

Debbie Holloway is the Family Life Editor at Crosswalk.com

Publication date: April 15, 2015