Encourage

June 11
2010

encourage_

"...so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it." Jer. 18:4
You Were God's Idea

Have you ever had one of those days when you wondered if what you did really mattered to anyone, or if your life was really making a difference in the world? I have, several times. Recently, on one of those days when I was experiencing one of the particularly low valleys, I received a blessing from a simple card - kind of like one of those familiar greeting card commercials. No, it wasn't a Hallmark card.

Looking through the mail that morning, I opened a card from a thoughtful group of WMU ladies at a church I had never heard of, in a city I only knew by the name on the map. The words on the front of the card said, "You Were God's Idea: You were made by God and for God." Above these words was a picture of a single leaf pinned to a clothesline. As I looked at the picture and pondered the words, God's Spirit ministered to my heart in the way only God can do. He reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the Psalms, Psalms 139:13-16.

"You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb. Thank You for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous - and how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was written in Your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed."

Wow! I am God's idea! He made me, and he doesn't make mistakes! Oh, how I needed to be reminded of this amazing truth! God not only knew me before I came into the world, I was His idea! As Rick Warren says in the Purpose Driven Life, I was made "by Him and for Him."

Even when I feel like a failure, or when everything falls apart around me, and nothing seems to make sense, I can rest assured; He knew what He was doing when He made me - with all my imperfections and shortcomings. If this is true, and I believe it is, we must thank Him for what is happening (or not happening), and look for His master plan - his eternal purpose, above and beyond the present landscape. God uses every circumstance, every glitch, every success, and every failure, to shape and mold us into His eternal design.

The problem is not with His design, but with our failure to see and learn from these bumps on the journey. He made me the way I am for His purpose, and only as I surrender to His leadership can I enjoy the journey toward that purpose.

Our problem is, we don't see it; or when we do see it, we fail to keep our eyes focused on what He is teaching us through these experiences. We get so caught up in what went wrong, or who did what and why, that we fail to look beyond our present circumstances to see where God is leading, or preparing to lead us.

Even our worst days can be great learning experiences - milestones that mark our journey, and enable us to grow, mature and ultimately become all God designed us to be.

Larry Doyle