Created For

We're talking about the difference between who God created us to be and what God created us for - and I said that if we can get this right, it will change everything. 

I promise it will. 

See, the truth is that while God has created us all differently, each with our own unique gifts and burdens and flaws, He's actually created us all for the same thing. 

He's created us for His glory. 

He's created us for goodness and for grace. For mercy and for forgiveness. He's created us for stumbling through this world, trying one step at a time to get closer to Him. He's created us for kindness, for doing good to the stranger and the widow and the orphan and the homeless and the hungry. He's created us for one another. He's created us for love. 

These are the things we were created for, no matter how they manifest themselves through the way we were created to be. 

So in my case, I talk about having a high sense of justice, of right and wrong. And there's a way in which I live into that and think of myself as some kind of warrior for justice, some kind of militant for rightness. And this is what makes me miserable (and also a jerk). 

But if I take my understanding of myself and shift it just a little so that I understand myself not as a warrior for justice, but as an offering of goodness, as a testimony to God's glory, then I start living my life looking not for injustices that I can rage against, but for opportunities for goodness. My perspective shifts - it seems like just a little bit, but it's everything. 

If I look for what is wrong, I will find it. But the opposite is just as true - if I look for love and for opportunities to love, I will find them. 

This is about the greater good, the higher calling. At the end of the day, God has created my life not to be a reflection of justice or injustice, but of goodness and glory and grace and love and joy. It just so happens that He's created me to have to balance that within the burden that I carry for justice. 

Am I making any sense?

Then let me just stop and say this: I'm thinking about this because my burden is sometimes really heavy, too heavy for me to keep carrying it like this. So this is something I've been rolling around in my heart for a bit. What I want most in the world is not to set it right, even though that's an easy, natural default for me. I realize I'm not the savior of this world; that job is already taken. I'm never going to fix every brokenness; that's not what God created me for. 

God created me for goodness, and I want to shift my focus and start being goodness in this world. God created me for grace, and I want to be grace in this world.

I can spend my entire life trying to make things right and never succeed; there will always be more brokenness than I can fix. Even if I could get the entire world to agree with me and embrace what I'm saying, my impact would be extremely limited.

But if I do what God created me for and bring goodness into this world, bring grace into this world, bring love into this world, then there really is glory for His name. There really is something there to speak of. There really is something meaningful about that. 

So here I am, trying to shift from living so much out of the way I was created and live more into what I was created for. Here I am, trying to make the emphasis of my life not justice, but goodness. Here I am, trying to embrace the idea of goodness as both a simpler and better way to live a witness. 

Here I am, trying to let goodness speak louder than passion. 

At the end of the day, that's what I was created for. 

And so were you.