Here’s a great meme that I saw at church this past Sunday! “Me looking outside to see what chapter of Revelation we’re doing today.”
“Then I saw in heaven another marvelous event of great significance. Seven angels were holding the seven last plagues, which would bring God’s wrath to completion.” Revelation 15:1 (NLT)
Do you ever encounter people who are just unreliable? Many years ago I had a friend who would cancel our plans about 80% of the time. She was so unreliable that I could rely on her unreliability! My husband and I used to joke about it often, but it did truly wound me as a friend when I couldn’t count on her. She became untrustworthy. In fact, she and I are no longer in relationship BECAUSE she was not a faithful friend.
Faithfulness, reliability, loyalty, and commitment are very lacking among so many self-proclaimed Christians these days. David’s prayer in Psalm 12:1 seems to still ring true…
“Help, LORD, for no one is faithful anymore; those who are loyal have vanished from the human race.” Psalm 12:1 (NIV)
I recently read a daily devotional on this very topic. Consequently, this post is inspired by that devotion by Judy Jacobs, “7 Days of Preparing for Great Exploits—Day 5”.
“Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful.” 1 Corinthians 4:2 (ESV)
In her devotion, Judy Jacobs says that “Faithfulness was the mainstay of being a steward in Paul’s day; and—beyond a shadow of a doubt—it still is.”[1] Faithfulness, commitment, reliability, and loyalty should be one of many defining characteristics of followers of Christ. Faithfulness, in fact, is a fruit of the spirit that we should all operate in and display.
“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things! Galatians 5:22-23 (NLT)
How about you? Can people count on you? Are you faithful?
There are many negative consequences to being unreliable. One especially unwanted outcome of Christians who aren’t faithful is that it can give Christians (and Christ) a bad name. Having a lack of integrity in work ethic and/or reliability does not represent Jesus well. I’ve seen this (and written about this before) in a collegiate setting where students professed to be Christians, but then consistently showed up to class late or even missed class regularly. These same students put little to no effort into assignments and often had apathetic and lazy attitudes that were apparent. These types of students were a very negative reflection to other students and professors who knew they were Christians.
I LOVE the way the Message translation of Colossians 3:22-25 reads:
“Servants, do what you’re told by your earthly masters. And don’t just do the minimum that will get you by. Do your best. Work from the heart for your real Master, for God, confident that you’ll get paid in full when you come into your inheritance. Keep in mind always that the ultimate Master you’re serving is Christ. The sullen servant who does shoddy work will be held responsible. Being a follower of Jesus doesn’t cover up bad work.”
The 5 symptoms of laziness:
“But you, lazybones, how long will you sleep? When will you wake up?” Proverbs 6:9 (NLT)
My family and I like to work on jigsaw puzzles from time to time. Typically it turns out to be an ongoing project. As a matter of fact, sometimes they even go unfinished for quite some time…if we give up because it got a little tough. In fact, we had unfinished puzzle on a piece of plywood sitting inside our extra room for probably nearly a year!
Our unfinished puzzle that was there quite a while!
A thought crossed my mind. Trying to run our own lives and figure everything out on our own is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle. It’s a puzzle of life. Additionally, it’s not just any puzzle. It’s a very intricate one where it’s hard to determine where things fit together. Not only that, we don’t even have the picture off of the box to look at to see what the finished product is supposed to look like.
Sure, we may be able to do all of the outside edges. The outsides are fairly easy to put together and find. Likewise, in our own lives we may be able to fix our outsides to look fine. On the surface we may look all put together, but then the middle or the insides are a jumbled mess with things missing everywhere.
That is…it’s only a jumbled mess until we let God step in. You see, He’s got the box, the full picture. Furthermore, He’s the one who created this puzzle of life in the first place. So He knows exactly what it’s supposed to look like and how all the pieces fit together. With His help and direction we can put the pieces where they go and make sure everything fits where it’s supposed to.
“Only I can tell you the future before it even happens. Everything I plan will come to pass, for I do whatever I wish.” Isaiah 46:10 (NLT)
The thing is though, Continue reading
Anyone else’s car getting 3 weeks to the gallon at the moment?
“…Stay in one place…” Luke 10:7 (NLT)
A few months ago I was going through some old journals of mine from college to find some things to help one of the girls in my youth group. As I was thumbing through the pages, I found a poem, “Seize the Day”, I had written about not worrying about the future.
My student I was working with loved the poem and took a picture of that page in my journal. Even though that was months ago, she just recently shared with me and the other girls in our small group that the poem has really helped her and that she still reads it often. I was touched that something that I had just written in a private quiet time over 20 years ago could be beneficial to someone now.
As I was pondering what to write about this week, that poem came back to mind because of the words “Seize the day”. It felt a little appropriate for many reasons. Primarily at the front of my mind are the graduating seniors that have missed out on so much their senior year because of COVID-19. There are still so many unknowns in the future and so much loss experienced over the past few months. Seize the day seems like some timely advice for graduates who will not get this time back.
It’s also wise counsel for so many others of us who are also affected by this COVID-19 crisis. We can live in the past mourning all of the things that we are missing. We can fret about the future and what is to come (or NOT come) and the timing of it all. OR…We could seize the day and live in this present moment, trusting God.
In my journal entry I wrote about how God had worked some things out that I had been worrying about. I honestly do not remember any of the specific details of that time (and my journal entry was a bit vague), but the point was that God came through when I just trusted him instead of worrying. I was writing to remind myself to stop worrying, trust in God, and make the most of my present moments in the process.
We have some new little neighbor kids who just moved here from Phoenix a couple months ago. They’ve been coming to the back of the neighborhood where we live and playing in our creek/ditch. Their mom said it’s their favorite place in the whole neighborhood because of the trees and rocks and creek and such. They come catch tadpoles and frogs and crawfish.
I got an idea for act of kindness that my daughter and I could do for these little ones. I can’t take credit for the idea though. It came from my friend Kim. She and her daughter painted some rocks and put them out on walking paths as a surprise for some little girls in their neighborhood to find on their walks. This was such a great idea that my daughter and I decided to duplicate it for our new neighbors.
We painted some rocks in some fun designs and then set them all out in our creek for the kids to find when they come back to play sometime. The anticipation has been so exciting as we’ve been waiting on them to come back to find their surprises. We’ve even talked about expanding our idea to set little decorated rocks out at the base of some of our neighbors mailboxes as an act of kindness for them too so they might have a little fun surprise when they get their mail. Then we discussed even making more to take to some nature trails to lay out for other families and kids to find out some point, and we talked about making some to put in geocaches we find too.
Doing good deeds and seeing the creative ways that others have done good deeds has been a wonderful way to pass the time recently during the COVID-19 pandemic as so many of us are homebound. We love watching clips lately from Some Good News, or following Good News Movement and Global Positive News on Instagram. It’s also fun to get inspiration from those internet or Pinterest posts tagged “faith in humanity restored”. If you’re ever having a bad day these are all good places to focus on the good, pure, lovely and admirable things.
“And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” Philippians 4:8 (NLT)
However, these are also some great places to get some good ideas for some good deeds! Jesus tells us to love our neighbor. (I’ve even written before about loving your actual neighbor.)
“The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:31 (NIV)
This commandment is only second in importance to loving God with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strength. I also personally believe that the second command—to love our neighbor—is one way HOW we go about showing our love for God in a tangible, practical way. We can do this by doing good deeds, loving people, and showing God’s compassion and kindness toward them. It really does stand out in today’s narcissistic and self-entitled culture where people rarely go out on a limb for another.
For those of you whose days are also all blurring together.
“But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day.” 2 Peter 3:8 (NLT)
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