Continuing from my last post - about the blog post I read the other day that said... "You won't be judged on what you did - you will be judged on what you were called to do."
The second point that caught me was, about thinking too small - or not stepping into me fully enough to allow God to use all of me. He says, "I won't be judged on my results, but on my capacity, and my faithfulness to fulfill the divine assignment God has purposed just for me."
How often am I too afraid to step out into the light - to fully embrace what God is calling me to do (no God, surely you aren't asking me to do that!)? Marianne Williamson once said (although it may not have originated from her) that what we are most afraid of is the light within. We are most afraid that we will be wonderful and great. We are more afraid of the light than of the dark.
I won't be judged on my results, but on my capacity... How often am I not open to fully embracing what God has called me to do? More often than I'd like to admit! So what do I do about it... prayer and continuing to seek a deeper relationship with God, for starters.
What about you? Do you agree with this? And if so, do you find it difficult to live to your fullest capacity and live faithful to God's calling? What do you do about it?
2 comments:
What comes to mind is “Not the labor of my hands can fulfill thy law’s demands.”
I think it’s important to seek God’s will for our lives. But I don’t think that God wants us to live lives spotted with regret for callings we might have missed or ignored, or to live in fear of judgment for those inevitable omissions.
What would it mean in an eternal sense to be judged as being not quite open enough in general, or to be judged as clearly not seeking God’s will on the night of April 23, 2006? I work in the field of Mainframe “Capacity and Performance”. It is by no coincidence that these concepts are linked. Apart from Performance, Capacity cannot be valued. It may be quantified, but whether that capacity is “enough” is cannot be determined without also looking at what was accomplished or not accomplished. So, I think the idea of being judged on “capacity” or “willingness” alone, should make us at least as uncomfortable as being judged on “performance” or “results” alone.
I worked in a church about 10 years ago (wow!). One of the ministers was "in charge" of benevolence. Anyone coming to the church in need of some kind of assistance (mostly financial) was to speak to him. He gave money -- sometimes in the form of gift certificates for food or gas, sometimes payment of utility bills, sometimes outright cash -- to practically everyone who came in and asked for it. There were many days that I was just aghast at the situations people got themselves in or claimed to be in. There is no way I would help those people.
One day I asked this minister how he could give to these people who seemed so careless (or clueless) -- to those who seemed so adept at getting into the same situations over and over again. He said that what was important wasn't the spirit in which they took what he gave but the spirit in which he gave it.
I have tried to take this to heart. Maybe we won't be judged on our results or our capacity. Maybe what is important is the spirit in which we seek God's will for our lives and the spirit in which we try to fulfill it.
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