What No Longer Matters

When all that matters is Jesus and His kingdom, there is a long list of things that no longer matter to me. 

 

1.  What others think of me

2.  What I think of others

3.  What I will obtain in this life

4.  Who gets the credit

5.  Who gets the blame

6.   Why it happened

7.  Why they have more

8.  Why I have less

9.  It wasn’t supposed to be this way

10.  Discomfort

11.  No one understands

12.  Insults

13.  I can’t                       

14.  The past

15.  The future

16.  Other people’s decisions

17.  Who worked harder

18.  Who deserves more

19.  It’s not fair

20.  People get away with sin

21.  What I don’t like about myself

22.  What doesn’t change

 

 . . . and 100 more. 

 

 

 

We took a missions trip in 1998 to Yucatan, Mexico for a week with our youth group.  While we were there, we met a Mexican national pastor who lived in a small, cinder-block home.  He worked 12 hours a day on highway construction, 5 – 6 days a week, and then served as the senior pastor of his church.  He had two teenage daughters, and he asked us to pray that he would someday be able to raise about $600.00 so that he could add an enclosure to his makeshift “bathroom,” so that his teenage daughters could take showers without fear of neighbors seeing them. 

 

I’ve never forgotten that pastor.  Whenever life has seemed “unfair,” and whenever I have been tempted to focus on myself and on the inequities of life—secretly wondering how pastors can join golf clubs while my husband gets up every morning at 4:30 to drive a school bus—the face of that Mexican pastor comes to my mind.  I’m sure he is still working on blistering hot highways to make a living.  No, Kristie, life isn’t fair.  You have a ceiling fan at night, an indoor bathroom, and three meals a day while one of God’s most dedicated servants bathes outside.  It's not fair.   

 

It was John the Baptist who said, “He must increase and I must decrease.”  And he did.  It was his severed head that was eventually served up for entertainment at Herod’s banquet.  There is hardly a more devastating way to decrease. 

 

And so we accept that the purpose and mission of this life is not about us at all:  It's all about Jesus.  We lay all of our questions at His feet and “let patience have her perfect work.”  God can use anything in His recipe for good to shape us into His image and to achieve His perfect will.

                         

Remember--He once used a cross.