There’s a lot of rabble nowadays about the self-made man and how you have to live life on your own terms and the like! And though you may be overwhelmed with abilities and skills and knowledge, you’re going to struggle to win at life. Sure, you will have plenty to feel good about, but in the end you are going to come up short and have paid a hefty price. You weren’t designed to be self-made, but instead heavily aided and favored. Your self just aint big enough to bring it home.
Life, if you follow the pattern, is rather consistent. You start out in life completely dependent upon your parents. As you grow and learn that dependence diminishes yet you still need assistance from those who have walked the path before you. And now, in adulthood, you long for those times when you lived a carefree life and didn’t bother to stress about the future, nor could even see a reason why. In your innocency you simply trusted that what you need would be supplied and you were rarely disappointed. People who grew up poor seldom recognize it until someone informs them later on. In short, you were happy and you were free.
Then, the wheel of things sort of got to you. Though you vowed otherwise, you stepped onto the treadmill with its lofty requirements and standards. You honorably, yet foolishly took full responsibility for your life with its associated expectation of being able to solve every problem. And though it cost you your health and your youthfulness and worse, your peace of mind, you forged ahead. Someone told someone who told someone a thousand removed that this is how life works. You’re an adult now, so put on your big boy pants and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and get ‘er done! Thus the way of a man became etched in stone.
But, what if it really wasn’t true? What if the pattern you began with was the pattern you were to continue with for a lifetime? What if life wasn’t supposed to be so damn hard and demanding and impossible? What if there was an easier way, though no-one as of yet had clued you in? Well, consider this your first glimpse of a better way to live. Maybe you were SUPPOSED to transfer your dependence on your parents onto your Heavenly Papa? Maybe the framework you mastered, where you had a need and lovingly requested it be filled, and it was fulfilled, was to continue throughout your whole life? You see, your parents were responsible to teach you about God, but they couldn’t because no-one taught them and no-one taught them. And if they did get taught, they were persuaded of some impossible standard required by an impossible God in an impossible way. They were convinced that life with God was hard-wrought and absent enjoyment or pleasure or fun. And, rightfully they rejected it and refused to pass it along to you. So you absent any wrong teaching might have a chance still to know. And, He remains there still, for you.
God designed life as a partnership. He has a part and you have a part. And His part is a helluva of a lot more than emergencies, deathbeds and catastrophes. Further it isn’t His part to sit in perpetual judgment of you or to be constantly disappointed with you or unendingly ashamed of you. He knows all about you well in advance including every error, every misstep and every looney tunes thing you ever did. His expectation for you isn’t moral perfection, it is an expectation that you perform your part of the partnership and allow Him to perform His! His part is to make you righteous in His sight and your part is to accept it. His part is to supply your every need and your part is to believe it. His part is to do ALL of the things you cannot do for yourself and your part is to do the things you can! Life worked in this manner puts the spring back in your step. You finally unload the heavy, heavy burdens that come with being the party of the first part and the party of the second part and the party of the third part. You reorganize and realign and reprioritize your partnership and take back what you were supposed to take back and turn over all the damn rest!
The way of man absent God throughout all centuries has been a hard life with man and his finite possibilities ever trying to produce infinite and lasting results. He fights, as it were, with an immense handicap in that he cannot prevail against an opponent he cannot see. And in thinking he can see, spends a lifetime chasing effects with indiscernable causes. Oh, but if he could see the causes. Oh, but if he could get back to the proper administration of his partnership. Oh, but if he would only reach upward instead of inward! Great life changing assistance is always there from his Partner, ever waiting for His man to simply ask…
Your life, your one frightfully short go round is not time enough to begin seeking and searching and requesting. You’ve spent time infinitum in futility pressing one step forward and three steps back. You have proven beyond doubt your own inability and feebleness and have come up short enough, despite your very best efforts, to finally recognize your self-made way is deficient and arduous and wrong. Stop living that way today! Get off your high horse and release your hard-fought high ground long enough to experience a different way; a way where you get all you ever wanted without paying too high a price. Yet stand head held high, proudly accomplishing and questing, while seeking ever upward and beyond your earthbound limitations. All that you ever dreamed to be, God dreamed to be before you, and waits like a father waits for Christmas to give you all that He can. Do your job and learn how to receive it, thankfully and graciously.
You are not old enough to be too old to ask your Daddy to give you what you need. Be a God-made man and see if your life doesn’t become all that you ever wanted it to be. You can have it if you want it. Just ask…
Just some good thoughts…