I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
Psalm 139:1 ESV
There’s something about showing up.
I don’t mean just being physically present in a place.
I mean showing up – body, spirit, soul, every fibre of your being and then some.
And then showing up again. And again. And again.
There’s something to be said for the person who shows up for their life each day. What may seem like a mundane existence could in fact be glory hidden in plain sight.
We tend to think of power as this grandiose pink elephant in the room that everyone wants to ride on and nobody could possibly miss. But the longer I live, the more I find that power – true power – is more like a quiet river steadily going about its business. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d hardly acknowledge its presence. But it’s there. And everything around it is impacted by its daily existence.
Sometimes…many times…being powerful looks like showing up intentionally every single day. Making a purposeful choice to be there, wherever there is, whatever there looks like.
This is a pivotal decade for me at personal level for various reasons. And as I think about the trajectory of the years ahead, I find that more than anything I want to be intentional.
Intentional in my presence and in my absence.
Intentional in my speech and in my silence.
Intentional in my writing and in my living.
Intentional in my gratitude and in my praise.
Intentional in my kindness and in my graciousness.
Intentional in holding onto hope and in fighting off the fears that come my way.
Intentional in stepping out in faith and in making good use of divine courage.
Intentional in how I love God and in how I love people.
Intentional in faithfully pursuing the small things as much as the big things.
Intentional in being me.
The intentionality with which God created each one of us often gives me pause. That He would so concern Himself with the tiniest of details – right down to the number of hairs on my head and the days formed for me.
We look for value in so many places when the proof of it is (literally) in our face – staring right back at us every time we’re in front of a mirror.
What better response, what better worship could we then give Him who created us than to live like we’re created – intentionally.
Whatever God has placed in your heart to be and to do this year, this decade, I hope you’ll make the daily choice to be intentional with it.
Figuring out who we are and who
we’re called to be is a lifelong endeavour. The paths we take on this journey
are often determined by factors that we’re not always conscious of.
Some of these factors are pain, doubt and fear.
As Christians, it goes without
saying that the source of our identity is God. He should be the One guiding us
through our journey of life.
But what version of God have we
embraced and how does it affect how we see ourselves?
Is our God the sum of what we
know to be true about Him and the work He continually does in us and through us?
Or is He the sum of what our pain,
doubts and fears have made Him out to be?
We can all point to fundamental
moments or seasons of our lives that shaped the course of our trajectory from
that moment on. But it’s one thing to acknowledge the role that a significant
experience (whether positive, negative, or both) has played in shaping your
life. It’s entirely another to build your life on the foundation of that
experience.
It’s the difference between
setting up camp on the way to your destination long before you arrive, and
proceeding on to your destination until you get there.
We can allow our experiences to
be tools in the hands of our Maker that He works for our good. Or we can take
them into our own hands and use them to define ourselves.
So much of the latter is happening. Perhaps because life has a way of undressing us…leaving us naked and vulnerable for the world to see. In our mad rush to make sense of things and restore some sense of dignity to ourselves, we end up clothing ourselves with the very thing that undressed us in the first place.
All around I see individuals,
movements, ministries, etc whose very existence is driven by pain, anger and
tragedy.
It sounds like it could be a
redemptive thing except lemons will never bear apples. Seeds of pain can never
birth fruits of peace. Seeds of disappointment and sorrow can never birth fruits
of contentment and joy. Seeds of anger can never birth the fruit of peace. At
best, they can serve as catalysts to get us on the right path. At worst, they
only result in a multiplication of themselves under the guise of being a testament
of survival.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
Psalm 139:16 ESV
Every day – every single day – of
our life on earth has been intentionally mapped out by God. We were always
meant to be more than one experience, one high, one low, one phenomenal
success, one devastating tragedy.
Our lives are meant to be centred on our Creator; not merely our experiences as created beings. Only divine healing can birth testimonies centred on the Healer and not the disease and the diseased.
God cannot use us to redeem that
which we have yet to overcome. If Christ is not at the centre of all we are and
all we do, there are plenty of idols waiting to take His place. Our experiences
– good and bad – are some of the most underestimated idols we worship…and in
the process, lead others to the very same idolatry.
While we may be able to work people up to a frenzy with these idols, and build a name for ourselves in the process, all we will have done is build a house on sinking sand. It’s only a matter of time before just the right wind of life brings it all crashing to the ground.
We need to think long and hard about what we’re consuming as Christians even from fellow Christians and the Christian world. I always say the simplest test to whether something is good for you is this – is it bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit in your life: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control?
Or does it just tickle your flesh and make you feel justified about holding onto the fruit of the flesh: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like?
For the record, orgies don’t have
to be about sex. There are plenty of orgies of jealousy, hatred, anger, selfishness,
etc happening online each day that we partake of without second thought.
We need to think long and hard about
what houses we’re building as Christians. Are they monuments to our survival
from what we (secretly) think God should have saved us from? Are they Christian-shaped
idols that point people to us and our ability to overcome relegating God to be
the sidekick to our stories?
Or are we in service to THE house
of the living God? The One who takes every dart the enemy meant for our
downfall and uses it to propel us to our destinies. The One who gives every
triumph and every tragedy the right perspective and position in our lives.
Our experiences devoid of God’s
mark reduce us to gods who can only give the illusion of salvation. But when we
place our very existence in the hands of our Maker, there’s no limit to
redemption His presence and power in our lives can bring about.
May everything we are, and everything we do, point the world to Jesus. Because it is Him, and only Him, who is THE way, THE truth, and THE life that the world desperately needs.
