bad answers or all the wrong questions?

​I woke up yesterday morning feeling ill for the 100th day in a row. Ok, it's been less than a week, but it felt like the 100th.

As I got my day started, I texted someone about work. I told them I might be a little slow easing back into the week. I've been sick, I told them. I just know that text had pity party written all over it.

As we messaged back and forth, my colleague told me about something she experienced over the holidays.

She was waiting outside a convenient store while her husband shopped inside. Time drug on - she wondered what was taking him so long. Then, police cars started filling the parking lot on all sides of her. Turns out there was a robbery going on inside. The man with a gun - robbing the store - he was standing next to her husband - holding his arm - telling him not to move.

That's what was taking him so long.

My colleague's text - telling this story - it didn't sound like a pity party. It sounded full of praise. It sounded full of gratitude.

And suddenly, in that same unchanged sickness of mine, I too felt suddenly full of praise.

The picture in my life didn't change at all. The picture frame I put around it changed drastically.

I thought about that a lot yesterday. How as I've looked ahead to the new year, there are a lot of things I want to change about the picture in my life.

And believe me, there are things about my picture I want to change.

But I think more often than not, what trips me up isn't my picture, it's my picture frame. More often than not, it's not what is going on in my life that's the problem, it's how I'm looking at it. We don't always have the power to change the scenes in our picture, but we ALWAYS have the power to change the picture frame.

Steven Furtick talks about asking God better questions as a way to reframe our pictures.

For instance, instead of me asking God when I'm finally going to be over this cold and out there running again, I can ask God what he wants me to learn while I'm sitting here getting better.

Is it patience? Is it empathy? Is it gratitude?

Because my God instantly feels more praise worthy when I see him as someone teaching me something I desperately need to learn and not a God refusing to heal me from a cold.

God being praise worthy is never about who God is - it's always about how I choose to see that God.

I'm going to try to ask myself more when situations get tough: Is this a bad picture, or does it just need a new frame?

I'm going to try to ask myself more when situations get tough: Is this God giving Keith bad answers, or Keith asking God the wrong questions?

Before we all get busy painting new pictures in our lives, it might be worth considering - maybe I just need to invest in some new frames.

For me, that's probably a worthwhile consideration. I've never been great at painting....