My brother in Christ is wisely seeking counsel to help him grow in his faith. He has good questions.

We worry about what God has in store for us and if it will make us happy because we lack perspective. Tell me something; if you could choose to do what you love and have a good relationship with God throughout eternity or let Him chose for you and have a great relationship with God throughout eternity which one would you pick. If you pick the first then you lack perspective. This life lasts all of 80 years where as my time with God will go on forever. It makes more sense to invest in the eternal relationship. Even if we get what we want and we have a good relationship with God in Heaven, we will agonize over the fact that we didn't go for his best. We will then know what we did not know now. What God taught me to do was to surrender everything to Him completely. To pray to Him saying sincerely that I will let him and want Him to take everything away if that's what it takes for me to be to be a close as possible to Him in this life and eternity. If you can't do that then take it in steps. If not that then ask God to make you willing etc. After that always remember to put God's plans in ink and yours in pencil. Pleasure in this life is a shadow. We can't let ourselves ever forget that. To be in the presence of God is to exceed the sum of all pleasure and fulfillment. We pursue pleasure and fulfillment because there is something that is missing. We lost it in the Garden when our parents fell. We no longer walk with God as they did. The pleasures we experience remind us of what we had and can have. We confuse the shadow for the light and spend our lives chasing shadows. Ecclesiastes 2:1-3: 1. I said to myself, "Come now, I will test you with pleasure. So enjoy yourself." And behold, it too was futility. 2. I said of laughter, "It is madness," and of pleasure, "What does it accomplish" 3. I explored with my mind how to stimulate my body with wine while my mind was guiding me wisely, and how to take hold of folly, until I could see what good there is for the sons of men to do under heaven the few years of their lives." We come to realize that there is a form of suffering worse than we could have imagined; the weariness of pleasure. If we are sick of feeling good then what is left but to feel bad or nothing and neither of those is anything to look forward to. Victor Frankel hit on something when he said that what people needed was meaning in life. But he was wrong in that he wasn't specific enough about the meaning. Not just any meaning will do. The meaning for which we all seek and long is to Love God with all our selves and to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. For instance, the toys we most favored as children were probably the ones we used most often when we played with others. Watch commercials for toys and you'll see the child accompanied by their father, mother, grandparents, siblings, or friends. The toy is a mere catalyst for the relationship. I was watching a documentary about Ayn Rand. She talked about living for ourselves and our work. But if you look at her life she spent allot of time desperately trying to please academics and literary critics. She spent great deal of time living for others. I'm not putting down for that, we all do it. Well brother, we can continue in private if you want or we can do another one these right now and just continue on. I need you to respond though. Two teachers I like are: Charles Stanley Chuck Swindoll