Life to the Full

We spend so much wasted time trying to make a good name for ourselves.  In today’s world of technology almost anyone can do it, anyone can spread the word of who they are and why they feel they deserve to be recognized at the highest of standards.  It’s not hard to make a façade to present to a watching world while you hide in the magnitude of your sins.  Many are making a way for bigger and better, walking along the wide path that leads to destruction.  And what for?  The things along that path all fade away, they are all replaced one day by someone or something.  Maybe a few names get a monument or a plaque or a town named after them, but who were they?

I’m guilty of it too.  We’re all guilty of it.  I was once so busy trying to make a name ‘for God’ that I forgot the Jesus I was to be right here in my home.  I was focused on the “big” and the “meaningful” that I lost sight of what really mattered.  Because even in good works with the best of intentions we can veer of course.

It was only days ago that her and I talked about the everyday, little things that brought him to mind.  After months of him not being here it may finally be setting in.  But in those little messages back and forth throughout the weeks of times we’ve thought of him, found a note from him or just had to have a moment at the loss of him, we realized a little more about how to live.

He did things the world would claim as great, but he didn’t do them for the world.  He changed lives across the nation for Christ’s sake.  Every testimony that’s broadcasted almost daily of a life changed through Teen Challenge, brings the beginning work of his time and talent to mind.  A work that goes unrecognized and that continues to grow and be the work that guides the lost back to their Savior.  Countless ways and times he has set aside himself to follow the One he loved so dearly.

But what I remember of him wasn’t big or grand or across the nation: it was simple.  It was his big blue van faithfully picking me up to go for a visit to my childhood favorite place; his “old people hands” counting six toes on each foot; his lap holding me as we drew the silliest of pictures; the hours on end that he would let me pretend to be the teacher as I made up a classroom; the games and the rides and the walks.  As I became a teen it was his guidance my dad would go to; it was him who saw the change in my heart and made the trip to tell me how proud they were;  they were there every prom, every birthday, every day even as I grew.  His voice was the one who would call to check in; his heart was the one who really knew how his baby girl was;  his eyes were the old gray ones that would look to my husband and express how thankful he was for him; his frail arms would hold each of my babies, always reminding me of the five I wished for.

It was the simple, every day things that he did to pour out love to a child so much in need.

To me, he changed the world.  He changed my world.

So as she and I would go back and forth making our way through the grief of this man who has been there all our lives, we realized how necessary and important the every day,  seemingly mundane, simple acts of love are in this life.  It’s how we find life to the full.  We fill it every day with moments of  putting others first, of going out of our way to help another, of being content with being second, of making room for His glory through us, of bowing low to lift Him up high.   All these things done even when no one is watching, even if it’s only one life we change.  We find life to the full by filling it in every place He has us be.

When we find and live the life to the full that God has for us, it is then that our lives spill over long after we are gone.  

Count your blessings.  Bless Him through it all.
Live simply.  Love extravagantly.

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  John 10:10