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Every day is an opportunity to grow, to do something different, to be better. You might have failed yesterday. That’s okay. It’s more important to get back up. To try again. To keep at it.
GOD’S GOT IT
God isn’t scared of your questions. Bring them to Him. It’s better to vent to Him than to run from Him.
“God will never waste pain that’s offered to Him.” I love that. God will never waste your pain. He will never waste your heartache. He will never waste your loss.
Trust God. Trust His heart. Trust that He loves you. Trust that He has a plan. If you have to do this grudgingly at first, dragging your feet along the way, that’s okay. It’s at least one step in the right direction.
all bitterness does is eat away at us like a disease.
“Bitterness is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”16
While we can choose to trust God and still wrestle with doubt, we cannot trust Him while holding on to bitterness. Bitterness and trust cannot coexist.
God didn’t waste Gary’s pain. And He won’t waste yours. You never know how the tough times you are going through today will inspire someone else tomorrow.
THE OTHERS
Brad felt all-around battered by life and started to realize that his pride, his hardened attitude of self-reliance wasn’t working. Not anymore. And this was when he finally understood that he couldn’t do life on his own. He needed God, and he needed others.
Charles Dickens wrote, “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
True friendship is about trust, being vulnerable and sharing, not shutting down because of pride. It’s about enduring with them. Believing with them. Loving them. And encouraging them.
Sometimes we can get so caught up in this kind of mental funk that we forget that those around us are going through a hard time. Sometimes we just need, even for a minute, to stop. Step outside of ourselves. Pay attention to the world around us. And do something, no matter how small, to lighten someone’s load. It’s about perspective.
It’s amazing what happens when we help someone when we’re feeling helpless.
You know what’s so awesome about thinking about others instead of focusing on ourselves all the time? It’s actually good for us. Forbes recently featured an article that talked about how helping others reduces our own stress levels.3 Emily Ansell of Yale University School of Medicine offered, “Our research shows that when we help others we can also help ourselves….Stressful days usually lead us to have a worse mood and poorer mental health, but our findings suggest that if we do small things for others…we won’t feel as poorly on stressful days.”4
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”5
Sometimes you need someone to remind you to dig deep with God, to keep up the faith, to stay in the fight. It’s easy to become complacent because life gets in the way. When tough times come or we get stuck in the routine of the dailies, we can forget what matters. And it can be pretty easy to stop growing spiritually, to stop talking to God, and stop learning about the faith walk.
WHO SAID NORMAL IS THE GOAL?
If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be. —MAYA ANGELOU
Being normal is safe. And easy. It doesn’t require much work or effort or change on our part. But it always leads to mediocrity.
When you start to embrace and even celebrate how special and different God made you, you can begin to do extraordinary things. You can begin to see yourself through His eyes. You can begin to live in the uniqueness with which you were created. You can be motivated and inspired to go against the grain.
Going against the norm can also mean having a different outlook on life than others. When everyone around you is working eighty hours a week so they can one day retire and start enjoying life, you can do something different to start living well in the moment.
You matter too much to God to be just like everyone else.
That’s what He does. He takes something we see as a disability, a defect, or a mistake and gives us opportunities to help others who struggle in those same areas.
He created each of us in a unique way for a reason. We are each different in how we look, how we think, how we create, how we process information. We also have different life experiences, good or bad.
Don’t get beat down by the stares, whispers, or obnoxious opinions of others who point out how different you are, look, or act. They don’t know God’s plan for your life.
God gave you whatever challenges you have for a reason. If you’re feeling discouraged, trust His character. Trust that He has your best interest at heart. He has a better outcome for your life than you can imagine. His love is perfect. And He loves you perfectly. We may see ourselves as unworthy, unusable, flawed, or broken, but God looks at us as shining stars. He thinks about us all the time, countless thoughts that are precious, beloved.
Excellent!:
Instead of worrying about not being as great of a public speaker, as great of a writer, as smart, as compassionate, or as creative as someone else, we have to maximize what we have to offer.
Think about what you’re good at, the unique traits that are hardwired in you. Think about what you love to do.
Instead of wanting to be like someone else, make the most of your talents.
Use what He has given you. Hone your skills. Work on them. Don’t let them waste away.
Don’t hold on to your gifts. Share them. Use them to serve. Use them to aim above the status quo and make a difference.
Perhaps my writing skills??
Work on your gifts and talents in a way that challenges you. Don’t compare your skill level to anyone else. When we do this, sometimes it makes us want to give up.
It’s okay to want to be the best, but it’s more important to want to be your best.
God will use your giftings and abilities in His way and for His plan. It might be to influence one person or one million. Rather than focus on trying to figure out or influence how He will make it happen, focus on Him.
It made me realize that when you’re doing things for the greater good, there is no need to be embarrassed or ashamed or wonder how people are going to perceive you, because the only opinion that matters comes from above.”
When is the last time you did something different? Something beyond your comfort zone? Something that wasn’t familiar but could do a world of good in the life of another? When you stay put in your comfort zone, you don’t grow. You don’t stretch. You’re not challenged. You stay the same. Stagnant.
When we do something that stretches who we are, that demands courage, that pulls us into unfamiliar territory, we grow. And most times it’ll be worth it.
It’s okay to feel afraid while taking the first step. I love the title of the book Feel the Fear…and Do It Anyway! Doing something against the flow of culture, society, or the crowd will probably feel uncomfortable and scary. Do it anyway.
Be who God created you to be. And stand out for the right reason. Don’t fight against what’s right or what’s possible just to get approval or applause from others. And don’t hide or stay quiet for the sake of not making waves and being just like everyone else. Be bold. Brave. Courageous.
STAND UP
If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. —UNKNOWN
Be a hero every day. Find a need and fill it. You can do this in big ways and small ways.
It only requires willingness. Find a need and fill it. Ask God to put something or someone on your heart. Do something different. He will use whatever you are able to offer for the greater good.
Standing up for something you believe in is not always easy. You may get some flak. You may get criticized. You may do this alone. Winston Churchill said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”4
Right then, I felt God working in my heart, opening my eyes to the truth that I wasn’t just a small part of the reason He died; I was the reason.
We forget that each of us is human. Flawed. We all have bad thoughts. We all struggle with things. We all need grace. And we all need Jesus. Every. Single. One. Of us.
THE POWER OF DOING
I’d prefer to err on the side of caution rather than say something like “God told me to do this or that.” This has always sounded to me like pulling a trump card, the ultimate ace of spades. If God told me, who can argue with that? It is no small thing to speak for God. I don’t ever want to be responsible for the repercussions that follow making that statement and it not being true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Christians throw those words around. At the time I was working on this book, in just one weekend of speaking at a few events, six people came up to me and said, “God told
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