Devotional: Hebrews 10:10
For God’s will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.
Humans, if anything, are flawed. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just how we are made. It’s kind of like Kintsugi, the Japanese art of finding the beauty and celebrating the flaws in a broken piece of pottery by repairing it with gold. It emphasizes how much a piece has been used, loved, and served its purpose, and now the flaws become a celebrated part of the pieced.
That’s how we can view ourselves after we’ve come to know and accept Jesus. Absolutely we’re flawed, we were never meant to be perfect, but we also weren’t meant to stay in shame and punishment for our lifetime. We are to embrace our flaws, accept them, and turn them over to Jesus, letting our burdens become his, because he chose to lay down his life for us. We are made holy by him, not by anything that we have done (other than accepting him, I suppose). If we go through life continuing to deny him, then none of us benefit.
So we live our flawed lives, day by day in the comfort of knowing that we are loved, completely and unconditionally by God, just as we are, because we love his son.
Love breeds love, and when we are loved, we feel accepted.
We start to love ourselves more because we don’t hold against ourselves the silly grudges or petty things that held us down. We accept our imperfections as our natural quirks, and go on to see the beauty in others’ imperfections. We stop looking for a magazine-perfect image of others, because that’s all airbrushing and photoshop. We recognize that none of us are perfect, and when we drop that high expectation of others, we start to love easier.
How hard is it to forgive someone when we put expectations on them that they can’t meet? Or that they may not even know about? How hard is it to put someone in the mold we have made for them, rather than letting them be themselves, and accept the beauty in the way they choose to approach life? It may not be a way we choose, but when we love them for it anyway, they’ll feel better about themself.
They may even change their ways, if it’s something that is destructive to them. Think about it for a moment. Do you have a friend who does something that is dangerous? Maybe they drink too much too often or smoke or do something else that is bad for their body. I’m not talking from a religious standpoint, but simply a physical one. We know alcohol consumption in large quantities (sometimes even small ones) is detrimental to health, not to mention the harms of smoking cigarettes or vaping. Continuing to harp on someone about what they do will only make them feel judged. If we love them openly and accept them, even for their harmful habits then they won’t feel judged by us, but may be more likely to listen to our kind and loving requests.
It isn’t a hard way to reach out to someone.
Maybe when they’ve been to an event and they have a good time without any alcohol, they realize that they can have a good time without it. Or maybe they recognize that they don’t feel quite as bad afterwards or the next day, and really had a good time.
I know as someone who has anxiety, often times I would be invited somewhere, then couldn’t go because a panic attack would set in. After a few times, people stopped inviting me, even though my anxiety had improved. I no longer had that opportunity because people chose to stop asking me, rather than meeting me where I was. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard of events where family members went away for overnight trips and I wasn’t invited, or there was a girl’s night that I never heard of until it was over. It’s never fun being on the outside. If loving people was easy, we wouldn’t need Jesus. We could all use a little more of him in our lives. Amen!
Please note: I’ll be taking a vacation from posting blogs for a while - feel free to catch up on some previous topics in the meantime. If you have any questions, reach out! I appreciate hearing from my readers.