Under Construction

I want to be perfect...I want to be kind and generous all the time. I don't want to be jealous and angry and impatient and selfish. I want to love people with a perfect, unfailing love. I don't want to hurt them. I want to be reliable, humble, forgiving. I don't want to make mistakes.

My biggest mistake has come from believing that I have to be, that it's possible to be all these things, all the time, that it's not ok when I mess up. Believing that everyone around me is perfect and so much more useful than me. So when I do mess up, which I do, a lot...
Then comes the guilt...I messed up again
And the doubt...can I ever do anything good?
And the self-berating...I'm useless
And the despair...what's the point in even trying again?

But what if it is ok? What if I don't have to be perfect?

God doesn’t wait until we’re perfect, until we’re finished to use us. He takes us as we are
     flawed 
              and broken 
                         and hurting 
                                      and lost         

I always had a hard time believing that...till I actually looked in the Bible.

David committed adultery, Abraham lied, Ruth was a foreigner, Peter denied he knew Jesus, Paul killed Christians, Thomas doubted, Jeremiah was young, Moses had a stutter and a lot of excuses and Matthew cheated. 

But God used them all.

He had to do a little work on some of them first, smooth off a few rough edges, but none of those things were big enough to stop Him.

In the same way, there is nothing that you have done, nothing that you could do, nothing about your personality that can stop God. “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future,” said Oscar Wilde, so stop letting guilt hold you back. Stop letting fear of failure prevent you from taking the first step. Stop letting what other people think control who you are or what you do. Stop thinking that you’ll serve God and do what He wants some time in the future, when you’re older or wiser or can control your temper or you live somewhere else or you’re not single or you’re a better person.

God wants you now. He wants all of you now, how you are. That doesn’t mean He’s not going to work on you or change you, but you are a work in progress. You are under construction and you will always be, so the time to start living for God, being used by Him?   

That time is now.