In my short 23 years on this beautiful and chaotic planet, I have learned a few things. Life is full of surprises, ups and downs, successes and failures, highs and lows. These are the mountain tops and the valleys. We all experience them. We see both sides of the spectrum. We can observe the Christlike character that some Christians portray in their day to day lives, which give us hope. But we also see the complete absence of Christ in a person’s heart, which can bring about a number of emotions. As you experience the peaks and valleys in life, here are three things to focus on through it all.
1) God is still God!!
Whatever cards the hand you have been dealt turn out to be, we still serve a God that is the same today as he was when he formed us from the dust and breathed the breath of life into our nostrils. He is a God that loves and cares for us, so deeply in fact that he would sacrifice His own Son to save us from our sins. The amazing thing about this is, he knew each and every little screw up that we would do in our lives before he even made us. The bible tells us that our very best on our own ability is like a filthy rag in his sight. But somehow, in spite of knowing all this, He loved us enough to want a relationship with us. If we focus on the fact that God loves us THAT much, our focus shifts from the mountain peaks and the deep valleys to the heaven that is above it all.
2) Celebrate Your Failures
As a Student and children’s pastor that is only one year into the ministry, I have messed up quite a bit already. One thing I have learned from my pastor’s leadership is to celebrate my failures. Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 1:15-16 “15It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all. 16Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life.” Every once in a while I believe that falling flat on our faces will keep us honest and help us to always remember that nothing we do is of our own ability, and everything that we do should be to glorify Jesus. Any success we have in ministry or in life comes from the King of Kings, and we are just vessels that he chooses to work through. So celebrate your failures, learn from them, and remember not to rely on yourself.
3) Turn The Page
All throughout my youth I ate, slept, and breathed baseball, and I was a pitcher. It was all I could think about. So naturally, being as passionate about the game as I was, I put enormous pressure on myself to perform well. When I messed up I got extremely angry at myself and it took my focus off of the objective. My high school coach used to tell me to “Turn the Page”. Basically, that chapter of the book is over, so turn the page and read the next one. I couldn’t change what had already taken place, all I could do was focus on the next pitch, or the next “page”. Realizing that we do have failures and like I mentioned earlier we do need to celebrate on learn from them, but we also cant dwell on them to a point of taking our focus off of the next pitch. We may have done some unimaginably stupid things in our life to hurt ourselves or hurt others, but keep this in mind. God knew every unimaginably stupid thing we would ever do, and still loves us like we’ve never done them. What a God, what a Savior!
This is the very first post of this blog, so I want to mention a few things. I have never before blogged, so this is a very new experience for me. But what I hope to accomplish is to, number one, encourage you in your daily walk with Christ. Life is too hard not to have encouragement. Share in your struggles with you, number two. It helps to know that others are going through some of the same stuff, we can help each other out! And three, show you that as a pastor, I don’t have it all together. It’s true, we are held to a different standard than the flock, but the shepherd makes mistakes too. I love you all, and I hope this will encourage you this week.
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