Not the Best, Not the Worst

WE EACH come to life with a full set of emotions through which we sense and intuit our world. It would not be life if we didn’t feel. And of course we feel many times before we think. Our thinking is influenced a great deal by how we feel. But if we continue to allow our feeling its full scope of influence we will be driven from shore to sea and back and fro without steady case for sense. Just the same, if we think too much about things and don’t try and gain a sense for how we should feel, we make decisions that may be short on wisdom.

There is always a balance to be achieved in life. Besides getting the thinking/feeling balance right we have the opportunity to get another balance right.

Sometimes we are praised too much and we feel overly confident in our capacities.

Sometimes we get criticised and we feel overly fallible regarding our abilities.

The truth is we are not as good as we are told we are and we are not as bad as we are told we are. There is a midline truth regarding where we are at any given moment.

We are not the best—whilst we strive to be the epitome of Jesus we will never be perfect. We won’t even be a trifle as good as our Lord in any area; yet, having been given the assurance that we will arrive in heaven spotless and pure, we don’t give up on what God’s doing in and through us in this life.

We are not as good as we sometimes believe we are.

But we are nowhere near as bad as we think we are either.

People will sometimes find fault with us and we may even be quick to do that very thing to ourselves, but we are never condemned and we are never shut down without hope. If we are criticised we may stew on the feedback for days; it detracts from our joy and we begin to get angry, resentful or anxious. No matter what we have done or not done, we are not as bad as we sometimes think we are.

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We are neither as good as we think we are nor are we as bad as some people might tell us. God would remind us that our moments of perfection are fleeting at best. Just the same, our moments of uselessness are just as fleeting. There is broad middle-ground whereby we stand safely as an adequate and acceptable human being; one that God dearly loves.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Dedicated to Pastor Dale Stephenson.