It’s Free Friday! Today is the day you let go of the things in your life that keep you down or hold you back. To celebrate, I’m giving away a copy of “A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Were Made to Live” by Emily P. Freeman. Keep reading to find out how to enter.
So many of us feel like what we do doesn’t matter. We see ourselves as a grain of sand on a seashore full of sand. “How can one grain of sand make a difference,” you ask yourself. When you look at the world, there are over seven billion people who are here doing their own thing too. It’s hard to think that anything you do can make a difference in their lives. You don’t think you have much to offer them. You see others with talents that you wish you had and abilities beyond your own.
It’s tough not to get jealous when you see that God gave someone else ten talents and you look down at the one He gave you. It’s not easy to see the life of luxury others live while you struggle check to check. Others who don’t live the way they’re supposed to seem to be blessed beyond measure while you do everything right and wonder where all your blessings are. You wonder what your one true talent is and fear that it’s too late to find it and develop it. These are all thoughts that many of us have because we compare ourselves to others.
God doesn’t measure you according to the abilities He’s given to someone else. God measures you according to what you do with what He has given you. If your talent is raising godly kids at home, make a difference in the world through your children. If your talent is keeping things clean, then do it for the glory of God. If your talent is being able to get in front of large groups to perform, do it for an audience of One. Your life, no matter how mundane or spectacular, is meant to find ways to glorify the One who made you. Each of us have a purpose and a role to fulfill. God made you to do what only you could do.
I love what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech. He said, “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.” You can’t successfully be someone other than the person God made you to be.
Whatever God has made you to be, I encourage you today to embrace that with everything in you. Free yourself of the comparisons that only make you put yourself down. Free yourself of the guilt that comes with not making as big a difference as others. Free yourself of the thoughts that your just a…. (Whatever you tell yourself). You are a child of God with a talent that no one else has. Your are the one God hand picked to raise those kids, be married to that person, fulfill that role in life. Your job is to do it better than He expected. Don’t bury your talent under thoughts of comparisons. Instead, invest it in the thoughts of doing what you do for God’s glory.
If you would like to win “A Million Little Ways” by Emily P. Freeman, all, you have to do is go to my Facebook page here and “like” it. I will randomly pick one person tomorrow (January 11, 2014) who has liked my page. If you enjoy reading these daily devotionals, please invite your friends to like my page so they can receive encouragement from God’s Word too.
Devotions by Chris Hendrix 