11 October 2013

Five Minute Friday ~ Ordinary

To listen to people talk, to read what people write, to observe how they act...


You'd think describing someone as just another ordinary guy or gal equates verbal abuse. Saddling with that label essentially scribbles with indelible ink to mark another with a four letter expletory epithet...

Using the word ordinary has become contemptuous and insulting...

...because we'd much rather consider ourselves special. Someone who does great things for God. Someone mightily used by the Lord.

It feels better to pat myself on the back and humbly boast in my great achievements for the Lord than to acknowledge God's amazingness as He accomplishes much through ordinary people totally devoted to honoring and obeying Him.

I get it. I understand. People want to feel like they count... and someone, somewhere values them, immensely... to know that they are important and special and one-of-a-kind unique.



Yet?

God's Word proclaims all of that already. 

Each one exquisitely fashioned, woven together uniquely as one of His masterpieces, a tapestry of grand design, a vessel crafted by a Master who not only knows the hairs in each head, the capillaries meandering through every lung, and the cells in literally billions of bodies, but also intricately designed each cells to work in the first place:  mitochondria firing, DNA replicating, RNA transcribing, vacuoles emptying and filling, membranes protecting.... This Creator isn't limited by time or space, neither anything finite nor infinite. The only thing that limits Him are the constraints of His character that He will not and cannot violate: love, justice, mercy, truthfulness, gloriousness, graciousness, righteousness, holiness, kindness, unendingness,... all of which just lightly runs a fingernail across the tip of an unending, ever deepening iceberg.

We've got ourselves all turned upside down and inside out. In our search to discover something un-ordinary about ourselves, we forget: each is masterpiece wrought by a Designer Who is absolute good. Ordinary or not doesn't matter. We have worth because He created us and because He values us... not because of how we look, how we dress, what we achieve or how good we are... 

When I start defining my worth as emanating somehow from within me, as something more, something unattached or independent of my Creator?


I easily step the line into humanism...
or post modernism...
I begin to build a tower, attempting to reach high into the heavens...
striving to snatch a little acclaim and notice for myself...

while fooling myself that somehow, I'm REALLY seeking to glorify God.

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2 comments:

  1. Stopping in from 5 Minute Friday. You said it all with your last several lines, when we define ourselves with anything other than Child of God, we start to build that tower, etc. Great job.

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  2. The word "ordinary" does have a negative connotation, doesn't it. But to be honest, things have been so crazy, I am craving just an ordinary weekend at home with my kiddos. I don't want to have a list of things to do or places to be this weekend.

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