Being a new father has brought with it a wealth of new experiences. I've been able to watch my daughter go from being tiny and completely helpless to needy, but full of life and personality in the last seven months. This has caused me to look more at myself and wonder if I have grown as much as I could in the past seven months. Am I helpless or am I the one helping? Do others look at me with disillusion or do they desire something that I have?
After spending last weekend in the Dallas area visiting my family we had a long trip back to Tulsa. While driving I had a lot of time to reflect on my life and then it hit me. God has placed a calling on my life and that hasn't changed. I remembered a pastoral leadership class I had my senior year of college and one of our assignments was to outline our own funeral service. It sounds strange, but aside from the technical details of music, readings, etc. it posed the question, "how do you want to be remembered?"
The best summation I had was found in Acts 20:24. Paul believed that his life was worth nothing unless he was using it to share the grace of God with others. I think too often we complicate what God has for us. When people ask me what the purpose of a Christ-follower is I tell them: "To know Him and to make Him known." --period!!!
I think my wife may have said it best when she said that it's not that you aren't where you should be, but you're not where you could be. I'm definitely not where I could be spiritually, but there is a forgotten reality that there is no should be. We strive to be more like Christ, but we will never be like Him therefore it is a continual pursuit with no end. We say we're trying to get there when there is no there.
Being a follower of Christ doesn't mean that we have to be one person on Sunday and Wednesday and another person the rest of the time. It doesn't mean we have to dress or act differently because we're at church. It does mean pursuing God daily, spending time with Him and allowing the Holy Spirit to work in us that we might become more like Christ. If we change who we are for the people of the church, we are a hypocrite. If we allow Christ to change us then we have truly experienced life-change.
