More of You

As a human being, I find myself wanting to be fulfilled, and I would bet money that you do too. You want to have a career that leaves you feeling full, you want to settle down with someone that makes you feel loved, you want friends that leave you feeling happy, you want to find hobbies that allow your inner self to flourish. You want to live, not just survive. I do too. Take a gander in the "Quotes" section on Pinterest and you'll find quotes like these:

"And now I'll do what's best for me."
"You never need to apologize for how you choose to survive."
"If I cut you off, chances are, you handed me the scissors."
"They wanna see you do good, but never better than them. Remember that."

They seem empowering, but are they really? To a point, yes. Only to a point. Sometimes you do have to step up and do what is best for you. You have to stop listening to what everyone says you should be doing, and just do what you know is best. The real conflict arises when I start to put what I want in front of what God wants and deserves from me. If I'm reading my Bible, praying consistently, and open my heart to what God is saying to me, my wants will start to line up with God's (for the most part, after all, I'm still human). I'll see that doing what's best for me is doing what God wants. I'll see that some behaviors do need to be apologized for and that those behaviors were never necessary to survive. I'll understand that the only thing I need to survive is God and that I don't need to apologize for Him. I'll be able to cut off people that need to be, but I will also be able to love and forgive 7 x 70 times. Because of that love, I'll be okay with others doing "better" than me. In fact, I'll want them to do better than me. I see it this way, the best "achievement" (although we can't earn it) in life is a relationship with Christ, so no one can really do better than me because we're all on the same boat. For instance, I have a friend who plays football. If me scrubbing toilets for the rest of my life was the difference between him having a successful career or not (I don't know why, just go with it), I would be the most joyful toilet scrubber you ever saw because at the end of the day I know we're both ultimately headed for the same fate: an eternity to worship Jesus together in heaven, and he would be leading a happy life here on Earth. All of these are "side effects" of leading a Christ filled life. At the beginning of this post, I acknowledged that we all want to be fulfilled. I hate to break it to you, but you're going to have to empty yourself of yourself first. One of my favorite songs is "More of You" by Colton Dixon. The chorus says, "More of you, less of me, make me who I'm meant to be." I can't get enough of that. I need to listen to this song quite often to remind myself that true fulfillment only comes through Christ, and that I can only be fulfilled through Christ when I have emptied myself. If you know me, you know I love coffee. Pure, black coffee. In today's illustration, I will be milk and God will be coffee. (Can you see where I'm going with this?) I'm imagining waking up to my favorite coffee cup nearly full of milk (ugh). I go to pour my coffee in and can maybe get a few tablespoons of coffee in before the 16 oz. cup is too full to hold any more coffee. If that happened to me, I would pour myself a bowl of cereal, pour the milk over the cereal, and then pour myself 16 oz. of coffee. That way, the milk is being used how it was intended and I get to enjoy every drop of my coffee. To attain that bliss, I had to put the milk in its place. That's just like our lives. When we let God come and completely fill us, he will use us for who we are, where we need to be. Just like the milk. Whether you're a painter, writer, artist, musician, athlete, work with animals, work in the medical field, are a mechanic, an educator, a lawyer, a pilot, work in the oilfield, are an accountant, secretary, journalist, or anything else, you have a call on your life. We all have the ability to be the best little cup of milk if we will just get out of God's rightful place in our "coffee cups." The next part of the chorus says, "You're all I want, all I need, You're everything." I want to finish up by driving this point home: being full of God is always, always, always better than being full of yourself. I mean, that's an insult. People are talking negatively when they say someone is full of themselves. It doesn't take long being around someone who really is full of themselves to understand this. I'm not talking about your social behavior, though. Life is just more enjoyable and fulfilling with Christ.

("House of Mirrors" by Tenth Avenue North is another great song that's along these lines.)