September #jammed: Free Grace.

Day 269: Beads up and rolls off.

“Let someone else praise you…” Proverbs 27:2

Spread out across the driveway, we scrubbed and sealed and patched the long piece of snap-adorned fabric to ready it for the season. Boat canvas. A high-maintenance cover to protect it’s high maintenance counterpart. Every boater knows that all of the time spent to protect and repair that vessel is paid off in the first sunset of the season.

Like boaters protect their vessels, so God protects us. It’s one thing to accept a compliment on a nice canvas job, but when our talents and abilities are given a pat on the back …who do we credit? Our Protection? Our blessings? Or, ourselves? Our own abilities …

“Let someone else praise you …”

We are all after a pat on the back and a job well done. It’s human nature to seek confirmation that we have done good and traveled the right path. We look for evidence that we’ve done the best we can do with what we’ve been given, and seek to achieve worldly standards as a sign of our happiness.

Sometimes, it’s only when we’ve arrived at the top of the world that we realize it’s futility. No compliment or human standard that will ever fufill us. Only Christ’s approval will provide the peace we are innately seeking in this life. Measuring our talents up against His will for them is the only way to travel through life knowing we are doing all we can do. The world’s standards will tell us that we need to achieve certain benchmarks to be happy. One after another we will reach, pass, and move on to the next one …never feeling fully satisfied.

“Let someone else praise you …”

There’s only one way for each life to attain true peace. It looks different for everyone, as individual as we were all created. That’s why comparison is so dangerous. We chase someone else’s benchmark, and all the while miss our own. Jesus died so that we could stop chasing aimlessly. Paint the bottom, prepare the canvas, and then launch her into he water where she will float despite the world’s efforts to sink her …and all of the falsities that fly by our minds eye will bead up and roll off her freshly waterproofed canvas.

That’s what walking with Christ is like. Not prevention from the storms of life …but a way through. Always a way through.

Father, Praise You for Your protection and Your guidance. Thank You for Your Living Word, that guides our lives perfectly, and Your Son Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross to grant us the grace to interpret it. Forgive us for forging our own way, the world’s way. Bless our lives to seek Your way. For we know it is always bigger and better than anything we could ever ask for or imagine. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

 Get the conversation started by commenting below, and let’s encourage one another as we face life in 2017 armed with grace! 

#greatgrace17

Happy Water-proofing,

Megs

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