“Lord, when I feel that what I'm doing is insignificant and unimportant, help me to remember that everything I do is significant and important in your eyes, because you love me and you put me here, and no one else can do what I am doing in exactly the way I do it.”
JOURNAL
“Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit.” The more I think about this simple statement, the more it seems to bring together so much of what I have been learning. If God is love, then to follow the way of love is ultimately to follow God. And if, as M. Scott Peck describes it, love is the willingness to extend myself for my own spiritual growth or the growth of another, then perhaps this is the true purpose underneath everything else I do.
This also changes how I think about my gifts. I have spent too much time looking at what I lack, comparing myself to others, or measuring myself by outcomes. But God did not create me to be someone else. As Brennan Manning writes, no one else can do exactly what God has placed me here to do in exactly the way I can do it. My personality, experiences, abilities, passions, relationships, successes, failures, and even the things I have learned through suffering have created a life that is uniquely mine. My responsibility is not to wish for another person's gifts, but to recognize, develop, and offer my own.
Maybe that is what it means to “eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit.” It is not seeking gifts so that I can become important. It is asking God to increase my capacity to love and serve through the particular person He created me to be. My teaching, coaching, creating, leading, encouraging, solving problems, being a husband, father, friend, and simply being present with another person can all become expressions of love. The significance is not necessarily in the size of what I accomplish, but in the love with which I do it and the growth it produces in myself and others.
This brings me back to three things God has continually pressed upon my heart: choose my God, own my talent, and live my mission. I will worship something, so choose God. I have been uniquely given certain gifts, so own them rather than compare them. And then use those gifts for their highest purpose, to love, build, restore, and help others grow.
Jesus made the mission incredibly simple: love God with everything I have and love my neighbor as myself. Maybe I have spent too much time making purpose more complicated than it really is. I do not have to control tomorrow or prove the significance of my life through some extraordinary accomplishment. I simply have to trust God, develop what He has placed within me, and use it to love the people in front of me today.
Perhaps that is the new definition of achievement I am beginning to understand. Did I receive God's love? Did I become more fully the person He created me to be? And did I use that person to help someone else grow? If I can live increasingly that way, then even the seemingly insignificant moments become sacred. They become the particular way that God's love moves through the particular life He gave me.
No comments:
Post a Comment