Skip to main content

Who Were You Made to Be?

I have a pet peeve. I have a pet passion. As you might expect, they're polar opposites.

My pet passion is simple: be who God made you to be. You don't have to be anyone else. You don't have to live up to anyone else's expectations. You don't have to answer to anyone's judgments of you except God's. He's the One to whom you answer. We only have so many years on this earth. I want to do something with those years. I have a t-shirt that says: "You have one life. Do something." I want my life to make a difference. My name may not go down in history, but if I love passionately, if I obey the call of God for ME, I will affect other lives. That's all I want - to affect at least one other life in a positive, life-giving, life-changing way. In order to do that, I have to be who God made me to be. I have to do what God made me to do.

We're all so different. That's on purpose. We all need what each other has to give.

I've lived most of my life with the heavy burden of pleasing everyone. I continue to struggle with it. I hate confrontation. I hate animosity. I hate conflict. I want to keep the peace at all costs, but I've learned that the cost is too high. The cost is me - a clump of me here, a strand there. Before I realized it, there was little of me left. I had stopped listening to God, not on purpsoe. I was just too busy listening to everyone else.

Now I know. I KNOW I'm supposed to write. I don't know what will happen with my writing, but it's what I have to do. I can't not write. I know I'm not in the mainstream of life anymore - American life anyway. I have to make definitive choices. I have to make time to write. There are only so many hours in a day and only so many days to any one life. I want to purposely use that time to live my life. Not someone else's and not someone else's idea of what mine should be.

My pet peeve? Very simply: People who play God. People who manipulate and control. We all have opinions, but we don't have to push our opinions on those around us. What is it that makes it so difficult for some to let others live their own life? What is it that makes some think they know what's best for everyone?

Be who God made you to be.
Let everyone else do the same.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 22, 2009 at 12:37 AM

    Preach it,sis! I know I was just gonna read the one about Dad, but I got carried away. You write; I read. Deal.

    love,
    Dy

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Resting...Resting?

A few weeks ago, my husband and I had dinner with our daughter-in-law and two of our grand children. My daughter-in-law lost her job a couple of months ago. I wanted an update on current job prospects or plans, so I asked, "What are you doing these days?" Her answer was simple and yet incredibly profound.              Resting. (Is that even a word in the American lexicon?) I'm proud of her, and of them, for making the decision that it's time for her to rest. She's been in hyper-drive for all the years I've known her (over 16).  That word has haunted me since she spoke it. Resting. What would happen if I...if you...gave it a try?  In Psalm 23: 6a, David says Surely goodness and mercy will follow me. In K.J. Ramsey's The Lord is My   Courage (page 240), she tells us that our English word, "follow," doesn't convey the power behind the original Hebrew word that David used (radaph). She tells us that radaph means "to pursue, chase, and pers
1 comment
Read more

It's Time to Take off the Sunglasses

 Americans have a favorite pastime, and no, I'm not referring to baseball or football. This pastime doesn't cost any money. You don't need tickets, and there's no set game time. It happens every day. You don't need to be physically fit. You don't need special training. We do it at book club, at work, on the road, in meetings, having lunch with friends, etc. You get the idea. What is it? Complaining. We love to complain, and I'm right there in the fray, tearing everything and everyone apart. Sometimes it wears me out. My mom passed away many years ago, and one of my all-time favorite memories of life with her goes back to my summer between high school and college. We worked together that summer. Drove together every morning, bright and early, right into the rising sun. One morning, my mom reached into her purse and grabbed her sunglasses, putting them on just as we rounded the bend on the St. Louis-rush-hour-busy road that put us directly in the sun's pat
Post a Comment
Read more

1%

Gideon: By his own admission, his family was the weakest of his tribe, and he was the weakest in his family (Judges 6: 15-16). Midianites: Big bullies who oppressed the Israelites back in the day. As the story goes, this little-nobody-Gideon is doing manual labor for his dad (I'm thinking that this might be akin to working at Walmart - not exactly a career - or even a job - that causes anyone to preen), when an angel calls him, "a mighty man of valor" (Judges 6: 12). Huh? Oh, you mean this other guy, right? Nope, I'm talkin' to you. Fast forward and we find this little-nobody-Gideon camping near Israel's oppressors with a team of 32,000. This seems like a lot until Gideon checks out the enemy and finds that there are so many Midianites and their pals, the Amalekites, that no one can count them. They seemed "like locust in abundance and their camels were without number as the sand that is on the seashore." (Judges 7: 12) Gulp. What does God
1 comment
Read more