All Is a Gift

A good thing can become a condition we place on God.

We will be grateful when the work succeeds. We will make time for prayer once things settle down. We will be generous when we feel a little more secure. These are things worth wanting. But somewhere along the way, we can begin treating them as requirements. Before we give ourselves to God, the world must give us what we asked for.

Our purpose runs in the other direction.

Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God. Everything else is given to help us toward that end. Our abilities, our possessions, the opportunities before us ~ these have a purpose beyond being acquired and kept. We are meant to use them in His service.

That gives us a way to judge what belongs in our lives. Does this help us serve Him? Then we should use it to the extent that it helps. Does it draw us away? Then we should be willing to refuse it, even when it is something we want.

The question sounds simple until the thing in question is ours.

Perhaps it is work we love that has begun to consume the attention we owe to others. Perhaps it is the comfort of being liked, purchased through small failures to speak honestly. A thing need not look wicked to occupy a place it was never meant to hold. Sometimes we discover the problem only when we are asked to loosen our grip.

This is where indifference becomes necessary.

The word sounds cold. We hear it and imagine someone who has stopped caring. But the indifference we need is a willingness to receive or release a thing according to whether it helps us serve God. We can enjoy a gift deeply without insisting that we must keep it. We can work toward something without making its success the condition of our faithfulness.

Gratitude does not require possession forever.

The same freedom applies to our circumstances. We naturally prefer an easy day to a difficult one, welcome to rejection, a clear road to an uncertain one. We may work to improve those conditions. Indifference does not forbid us from making plans or seeking relief. It means our purpose does not have to wait until those efforts succeed.

There is a difference between wanting the day to change and believing we cannot serve God until it does.

Our circumstances shape what is possible. They may close an opportunity we had counted on or leave us needing help we expected to give. We can acknowledge those limits without handing them authority over what our lives are for. The service available today may be smaller, quieter, or less satisfying than the service we imagined. It remains ours to offer.

All is a gift.

And all is created in service to the whole. Our little portion is not the whole of creation, nor are our preferences the measure of its worth. What has been entrusted to us can nourish more than our own comfort. Our time can become attention. Our abilities can become help. Something we have been guarding can become something we give.

We need not despise the gifts to be free of their demands. We can receive them with gratitude, use them with care, and let them go when holding on would turn us from Him.

The restless heart does not have to secure every condition before it can answer its calling. God is with us, before a single thing on our list has been resolved.

We do not have to wait for a better day to give Him this one.