What’s In A Day?
If I were to ask you about your day, what would you include in your synopsis? Would you talk about all of your accomplishments only, or would you only complain about all the negative things that you encountered? Would you complain about the weather, the traffic, your boss – that person who fills the office with the smell of popcorn at lunch? Or would you point out that gentlemen who gave you his seat on the train so you wouldn’t have to stand up in your heels all the way home.
If you’ve ever taken notice to how people describe their day, you undoubtedly discovered that people speak most about things that affect their heart. We talk about those things that impact how we feel. How we feel about ourselves, how we feel about the world, how we feel about other people. That being the case, Paul’s admonition to the Romans has a great deal of wisdom:
12 1-2 So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. Romans 12:1-2 (MSG)
If we as the people of God would begin our day presenting it to God as an offering, and then think about all the things He has done and is doing for us – how different would our day be as we start on our way? If we focus on what we are grateful for, and not what the world is not doing to us, how different would we be? What would our lives be like if instead of looking across the world’s terrain, we looked up to heaven’s provision? How would it affect our temperament, how would it affect our relationships?
I do not write this from a place of victory – yet… Rather from a place of recognizing that I’ve given too much time to looking at some of the immoral and criminal elements of this society that persecute the helpless and downtrodden, and not given near enough time to praying for those same people to look unto the hills from whence can come their help, their help coming from a living God.
It’s easy to complain about the lack of resources for poor people in a wealthy nation. It’s harder to believe that in spite of everything that wants to keep people down, there is a way we can lift people up – starting with lifting them up before the Lord. And then lifting ourselves up to the Lord and asking Him how we can be a part of the solution.
I am making a decision to not allow the culture to bring me down to only being a nagging immature person by complaining about everything that is wrong. I am starting to understand Romans 12:1-2 better, grow up and let God make me and the problem better!
Maria