Amazing!

“...in Him you were enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift...” 1 Corinthians 1:5-7

Most of the time we do not believe that God made us to be amazing! He really planned that we be lights in the darkness, a clarion call for His good news of love, peace and joy! 

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” Marianne Williamson wrote in her book A Return to Love. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.” I’m not particularly a fan of Williamson who has a tendency to be new-agey, but I like what she says in this quote which has been frequently attributed to Nelson Mandela in graduation speeches. 

We ARE children of God and He has made us for His own. Whatever we are feeling right now, our situation may be most depressing, but we must not lose heart, as St. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, “Though our outer self is wasting away, yet our inner self is being renewed day by day. For our light and temporary troubles are producing for us an eternal glory that far outweighs our afflictions. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.…” We may be made of weak clay and we often feel inadequate, but we have this treasure God placed in us, this all-surpassing power and grace to be overcomers if we tap into Him. 

C.S. Lewis wrote in his book The Weight of Glory, “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

How overwhelming to realize that that is God’s planned destiny for us!