Your Life Is Re-markable
By Jackie Scott, PIONEERS
“Watch Yourself …” —Gal 6:1
My heart is small … not a lot of room. But it is “grow-able,” “re-markable”! And that gives me hope. Though our lives are marked with sorrow, disappointment and confusion we can make new marks! Some people seem born with big hearts. I was born with many wonderful things, but my heart needed major stimulation and new markings. Small hearts keep us in small worlds (mindsets).
You know the you that you dream about being? The you, you really hope to someday become? The one who is a new and better version of who you are now … the version that your Maker intended? Why doesn’t that just automatically happen? How do we become the person we were made to be? How do we get so off course?
Busy-ness, distraction and lack of direction try to keep us from growth. If we don’t slow down, get some focus we’ll stay as we are or get worse. And we’ll miss out on who we were supposed to be. Our souls need nurturing to grow.
My own growth seemed painfully slow and laborious. I was thrust into the disorientation and grind of cross-cultural living that perhaps pushed me to deeper searching and I hardly knew what questions to ask. I join many others on this quest of soul growth and hope to add another angle on how we can do this.
We can end up missing out on so much expansion in our hearts. Where are the “varsity Christians”? The ones who put in fresh effort toward godliness (1 Tim. 4:7)? Who want it more than other things? The varsity athletes are the ones who are always at practice, who give up things in order to focus; who listen to their coaches yell because they know they need to hear what they’re saying to them again if they’re going to improve. As a gymnast in my youth, I remember hearing my coach’s voice in my head as I was going through a routine and that kept me concentrating and doing what I was supposed to do. It took a long time for each move to become habit and a very short time to revert to sloppiness.
Behind the beautiful flow combined with amazing strength of the gymnast’s moves were hours of focused discipline and sacrifice. So our coaches helped us “watch ourselves” to see where we were slacking when we didn’t know it, where we needed extra effort and time. Can we gently, humbly do that for each other in our Christian lives?
PIONEERS, a Mission Nexus member, provided this article. Member organizations can provide content to the Missio Nexus website. See how by clicking here.
