So, here is the truth about Pat Cooper's life right now. School is stressful. I feel like a failure. I can't stay on a diet. I am full of self-doubt. I feel persecution. Yikes!
What is the best way to face life under these circumstances? Good grief...it is right before my face. Romans 12 says:
"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. "
Do you see what this is saying to us? God is not asking me to be perfect. He does not care about my strengths. In my weakness, his strength is shown. In my times of humility, God is breaking me out of my culture, the culture that says that I should be loved, I should be honored, I should receive attention, I should be happy, or I should be served. This is the culture dragging me down to its level of immaturity.
I need to embrace what God does for me, instead of what I do for Him. I need to truly understand that I am his adopted child. I am an heir of all that is his. He allows me to work on his grand estate that he owns. But at the end of the day, he does not expect me to go to the house for the slaves and just berate myself for having a bad day. I need to sit in his house at the end of the day of working the fields and just be silent before him and drink sweet tea. He wants me to enjoy his company and be renewed for another day of serving him. He renews me to sow the seed for another day.
The focus is what God has provided for me.I am going to take my everyday, ordinary life and present it to him. He is not waiting on me to present myself as a superstar. I bet he doesn't even like superstars. He loves the one who totally depend on Him to be the superstar!
