Have You Made It?

It was our young granddaughter’s birthday over the weekend. She is keen on drawing and painting, so we decided to give her some junior artist’s materials and took great pleasure in choosing them. I also discovered a website for children’s creative art. Their advice was: don’t give them anything to copy, but let them express themselves freely, don’t enter them into any competition and encourage them and validate what they do. This is brilliant advice. It’s one way in letting them know they are loved and accepted for who they are, without having to perform, earn love or follow some cardboard cutout example.

I’m not sure there was any definite plan in my career. I am of average intelligence, but conscientiously applied myself using the skills I had. I enjoyed what I did. My father often asked me ‘had I received promotion yet?’ It was obviously important to him, but only served to reinforce my childhood feeling that I had ‘not quite made it.’ I did eventually get my bosses job, a senior management position, but this was after my father had died so he never saw that.

I had a dream at this time - it’s one way that God uses to get through to me - that alerted me of the need to get free of striving to perform to please and be accepted. It went something like this. “I was smartly dressed, with a very heavy bag over one shoulder and was trying to make my way out of the works depot up a steep slope to my father - Father God? - at the exit gates. I was smiling at Him, as if to say ‘look at me I am doing so well.’ But try as I could I just could not make it, even on all fours, and kept slipping back.”

I discovered that I don't have to make it, because God has already 'made it' for me. We can never earn God’s love, it's given freely. Yes, we have to work out our salvation, but it's a love response and even then it's God who works in us. The only effort is to make sure we are abiding in His love.

"for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose." Philippians 2:13

"Freely you have received" Matthew 10:8

“After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” Galatians 3:3 New International Version