I recently completed a devotional based on the life of Joseph, who just happens to be my favorite Old Testament guy.  It was all about trusting God while we wait, something Joseph needed to face time and time again.

On one of the last days, these questions were asked: 

How do you see your days?  Your best days are behind you, you are living your best days, or your best days are yet to come?

My first gut instinct was to say that my best days are obviously behind me.  And no question, I have a wealth of good days in my past.  The hard days of widowhood surely can’t be the best.

Some memories get better the further in my past they are.  It’s that whole brain memory phenomenon of remembering good days as better than they might have been, and letting go of the bad more easily.  There’s actually some science to support this.

So I acknowledge that might be in play a bit as I look so fondly on my more distant past.

Then I did a second … and a third take on those questions.  Was my past really the best days?  By what measures am I making that determination?  Was it strictly the days when I had the most happiness, and the fewest number of trials? In which days have I seen God working most clearly?  When has my relationship with him been most satisfying?  When do I have the most to look forward to?

It starts to get a little more convoluted once those standards are questioned, doesn’t it?  And could the measurements change with our seasons of life?  As I pondered how and why I rated my seasons, I decided that, indeed, the measurements do change.  But should they?  Hold that thought.

As I’ve suggested, my past has been incredibly blessed.  From early childhood up until the last hard days of Dale’s life, I would rate my life a solid nine.  Based on what, you ask?  Based on that fleeting “Happiness Quotient.”  It’s a pretty popular standard and there is widespread use of it!

The season I’m in right now is, without question, my most difficult.  Tears and sadness are still part of my days, and sometimes I struggle to keep moving forward.  The “Happiness Quotient” would clearly categorize these days as some of the worst, not some of the best.

Guess what?  That’s not the appropriate standard for this season.   What might actually make these my best days?  A new standard I’ll call the “Christian Walk Quotient.”  I talk about this often in conjunction with anyone’s tough times.  If we’re open to God’s leading, and painful pruning, he will bless us with something more profound, more awe-invoking, and more eternally priceless.  He will cause us to be more Christ-like in our daily walk.  How can we deny that this process, in fact, could make these our best days?

What about the days to come?  If you’ve had a difficult or abusive past, you may place all your hope for good days, into the future.  That’s understandable and nothing inherently wrong with that, unless the focus is entirely on what might lie ahead.  I’ll call it the “Hope Quotient.” 

Sure, your days might “naturally” become better as time goes by and you enter a kinder season.  But what just happened here?  We reverted back to the Happiness Quotient becoming our standard for what lies ahead.

I’d like to propose that the best way to have a healthy Hope Quotient depends on a couple of factors.  First of all, how faithful have you been to let God develop an improving, God-centered Christian Walk Quotient?  And, in what or whom, are you placing your hope?

For me personally, my Hope Quotient is based on the fact that I completely trust, and expect, that God will use whatever days I have left on this earth for his glory and for my good.  Not only can I make that statement simply because of what I know about God, but because he’s been ever faithful to show me in this season that he does exactly that, more times than I can remember.

And ultimately, my hope is secure in what Jesus accomplished on the cross.  My place in heaven is guaranteed because my sins have been atoned for, forever.  Are those days ahead the best days?  Undeniably!

Let’s look at the progression of these measurements.  We go from Happiness Quotient to Christian Walk Quotient to Hope Quotient.  Notice a pattern?  The basis of the standards becomes godlier as we progress.  Or might I add, as I progressed.  I have to own up to the fact that I had a pretty shallow standard of how my “best days” were determined in the past.

It’s not wrong or unspiritual to have good days.  God does want to bless us, and we should enjoy them and be grateful for them.  But let’s be careful that we don’t make that the gold standard for determining good and bad seasons of life. 

I would suggest that we abandon the Happiness Quotient altogether as we rate our days.  In fact, let’s live our lives going forward with BOTH the Christian Walk and Hope Quotients front and center. What a marvelous perspective that will give us, and what an incredible witness it will be to the unbelieving world around us.

 May God give us all the spiritual maturity and fortitude to see our days through this lens.

I close today’s post not with my usual scripture, but with a saying I first learned as a young girl at Church Bible Camp.  In fact, I had a small plaque I purchased and hung in my room for years.  I’m sure many of you are familiar with it.  While not directly from the Bible, I believe it’s a profound reminder of what’s important.

Only one life will soon be past,

Only what’s done for Christ will last.