Viewing Life Through the Eyes of a Creative God
"Oh The Things You Can Think!" Dr. Seuss had a way with words and making you imagine crazy and often silly things. When my little brother was a child I used to love to read Dr. Seuss books to him. They would make us both giggle. He was almost 11 years younger and was quite literally a gift from God. As a 10 year old I prayed for a younger brother. God heard me loud and clear and I got the coolest younger brother ever. But this blog post is not about Dan. I was just reminded of Dr. Seuss and that always reminds me of Daniel and our silly times.
I was driving home from work today thinking about life and what a mess I have made of mine. "Oh the mess you can make." There it was, Dr. Seuss. The radio was on and I was focusing on how great God is to me even though I do not deserve anything but poverty. We are the hardest on ourselves, and some days I ask God, "what do you see in me? I am nothing. I am nobody. I have trashed a perfectly good life, and yet, you still give me things to write about. Why? Don't you have enough writers of blogs, books and clever quips in people who are far more deserving?"
It has been a few weeks since I last posted and I've been missing it. This might sound strange, but there is a connection I feel when I write. It is a connection to God that I absolutely long for. I truly miss it when I don't write. My heart was longing for the inspiration of God to write something today, and it brought me to tears as I drove and was thinking how much I need to write, but no words would come. It was in the midst of thinking just how much of a trash heap my life was that I heard one word - recycle.
I started to laugh, because I knew that was the topic of today's blog. The thoughts started pouring into my head and joy was abundant. When people say that God isn't real, they obviously have never opened up their heart to Him and just listened for His voice. He loves to make us laugh, and fill us with His peace and His joy. So let's get into what I heard Him say.
As I was driving I was reminded of a sign I saw years ago in an antique shop. It read,
"RECYCLE - Ride Your Bike Again!"
It is what I think of whenever someone talks about recycling. That is the kind of impact something clever can have on a person. Imagine Jesus when you first meet Him. The relationship is new and you are so happy because God's love is real and has completely made you new. Now imagine years of living life in a very crazy world. We are pulled in a hundred different directions. We are told this lie and that lie and we have to balance it with the truth of God. Not all of us are able to stay on that "first love high". We get bogged down with things of this world and lets face it, our lives get a little trashed. Some of us actually get tossed aside.
This is where I was and where I still end up from time to time. I am very hard on myself. Like Paul said, "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing." How often did he feel this way? Here was a man who persecuted the believers and wanted them dead. The hatred he felt for the first believers was so strong that he got permission to go around and lock them up! The believers distrusted him and they probably thought of him as trash.
BUT God recycled him!
He wasn't perfect after the recycling, but he became greatly used of God. In fact I would argue that it wasn't Peter and the other disciples that spread the gospel to the world, but it was Paul and those who traveled with him. If we could trace our spiritual ancestry back to the early church I bet Paul was the one who shared the gospel with our spiritual ancestors. Oh the things you can think!
Have you ever gone to the beach and walked into one of those little hole-in-the-wall art galleries? The artist is kind of a beach bum looking guy unshaven in board shorts a tank top flip flops and leathery skin. All of his art is made from items he has gathered at the beach. Pieces of junk and driftwood transformed into sculptures that people pay sometimes thousands of dollars to own because he turned it into something beautiful.
God does this every day! He is the GREAT reclaimer of humanity.
When I first moved to Minnesota in 1990 I attended a "new comer's" gathering. These were women who had moved to this small town and met together once a month to share experiences and information with other "new comers". I was young and a bit naive. I went this meeting once. The topic of the meeting was recycling. It was not something I was really interested in, but these ladies were all excited about sharing their recycling ideas with the group. They talked of washing plastic bags and tin foil and hanging them to dry on laundry lines they had in their basement. Others shared how they had turned milk jugs into children's piggy banks with paint and bits and bobs from the local craft store. Then one woman got up and showed an amazingly beautiful fabric covered 5 quart ice cream bucket! I was impressed. It was not gaudy looking or dirty like the washed zip lock bags and foil. It was actually quite pretty. She was selling them, but I wasn't about to pay for something I could do myself.
It was after that meeting that I started noticing things that could be recycled. My husband and I owned a small 16 room motel in town and I set up a sewing/craft room to occupy my time during the long slow winter months. We had a lot of key tags laying around that I turned into Christmas ornaments for my nieces and nephews one year. I made a dozen or more of those covered ice cream buckets after finding a pattern at a craft store. I found a way to recycle many other items using fabric, lace, hot glue, and sometimes paint. Recycling was fun because I learned how to create something beautiful out of rubbish.
Now Imagine Jesus, walking along looking for junk lives to change. Can you see Him smiling as He picks up your broken life and says, "Oh yeah, this one is going to be amazing." He carries you in His arms all broken and damaged to His workshop. The transformation sometimes takes a long time, and many of us try to do things on our own and get broken again. The Master artist has such patience and He never gives up on us. He can see the finished recycled life and knows that it will be more valuable than we could ever imagine.
God doesn't give up because not only is He our salvager, but He is our creator. There was a design from the beginning and He knows what we will become. We get hold of our own lives and begin making our own plans and going our own way and things get wrecked. People will walk away from us and count us lost. Family may shun us, but God pursues us even when we are at the edge of a dumpster fire.
There is no place we can go to outrun the love of God and nothing we can do to our lives that He can't turn into a masterpiece. We see the dents, cracks, holes. He sees the life now ready for what He designed. We don't realize that even these things are part of the plan to strengthen us and get us ready for the true masterpiece He had in mind all along.
He puts some of us on display, while others are quietly working in the background fulfilling their purpose. Some lives have a lot of scars, while others not so many. No two lives are identical, but all are equally loved and cherished. What a wonderful thought it was to know that God doesn't see my life as trash like I do.
When you are a child of God, you are a recycled masterpiece that God can use to give hope to a world full of broken people. He doesn't expect us to be perfect. That is why He gave us Jesus. He just wants our heart to be His. What comes from that surrender is the miracle that changes lives, both our own and the lives of others. We are being repurposed to His purpose. We are not trash, but recycled gems greatly loved and cherished by the God of creation.
Ephesians 2:20 "For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."
Romans 7:24-25 "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
Psalm 139:13-14 "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well."
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