Masterpieces of Inherent Value

You are allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress. Simultaneously.

I’m told by people who study such things that each of us has a tendency to either focus on the past, the present or the future. I suppose that the ideal scenario is when we can manage to juggle all three. We remember the past to inspire us to change, remind us of God’s gifts, guide our decisions. We live in the present because that is all we have and we should work hard to show up for it without distraction. We look to the future, we see the horizon, we march toward it with dreams and determination.

When we get stuck in only one of the three relationships to time, we miss perspective.

We are masterpieces because of our inherent value - created by God to work with God on bringing his kingdom to earth - fully human in the best possible sense of the word. We are works in progress because we are simultaneously ONLY human. We are fragile, we make mistakes.

Today, consider your orientation to time. Are you distracted by the past? Perhaps it is holding you back from both your present and future. Are you too focused on the present? Do you lose sight of the lessons the past has to offer or the call to the future that inspires hope for change? Do you waste precious moments in the here and how because you eagerly stand on tip toe looking into the future? The future is not real - today is real.

May we all find a way to expand our time continuum, so that we do the work we need to do without losing sight of the masterpiece we already are!

Meditation Moment

In a time of drastic change one can be too preoccupied with what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. In either case one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but dynamic possibilities. What really matters is openness, readiness, attention, and courage to face risk.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

What is your current preoccupation?

What is your current obsession?

Ask God to show you what is real and true and a present moment reality, and give thanks for the obscure but dynamic possibilities for your future.

Hope and the future

Yesterday I mentioned a friend who is extremely resilient and provided an example of how is resilience shows up for him and the rest of us. He is, I suspect, temperamentally well-suited for resilience. This is not to discredit his resiliency in any way, because resiliency isn’t a temperament trait, it is a skill set. But knowing this man, I think it is a skill set he took to like a duck to water.

However, I am NOT temperamentally suited for resilience. But by dingy I practice it. It is not natural, nor am I as skilled as my friend, but I personally believe that as faithful people, we are called to resilience.

Whether or not we are working on new resolutions in this fresh, new year, resilience is a crucial life skill. It is the difference between thriving and wasting away. Too often we believe our circumstances drive our thriving - that’s not true. It is resilience.

Notice that I particularly called on faithful people to practice resilience. I’m not talking pie-in-the-sky, God blesses me because he loves me, and every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before thinking. That is not resilience. It’s a kind of spiritual languaging that some find comforting, and if you do - awesome. But I do not. It doesn’t fit the facts of my life. I believe that the facts and our faith align.

Does God bless his people? Yes. Do God’s people suffer? Yes. Resilient people can believe both those things at the same time without poking their eye out with a pencil, because resilient people do not NEED everything to go well for them in order to feel loved by God.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13 NIV

Hope is a gift not a guarantee. Whether or not we fulfill our resolutions in 2019, our hope does not rest in getting what we want. My friends the Ryans wrote this on page 242 of “Rooted In God’s Love” - “We need to remind ourselves daily that we do not serve the god-of-relentless-cheerfulness, or the god-of-naivete, or the god-of-blind-optimism. We serve the God of Hope. God is hope-full and loves to share hope-full-ness with us. We can come to God with our fear, doubt and despair and God will give good gifts to us. When all other reasons for hope fail us, we can return to the God for Hope because God is greater than our disappointment, greater than our failure, greater than the problems and conflicts in our hearts and our homes and our communities and our world.”