Signs Matter

I did it again. I hung my All About Me sign on my door. It crookedly covered the letters on my ‘Everyone is Welcome’ sign. It wasn’t at all pretty. 

I’m not sure how long it had been hanging there, and it took someone else to remind me to take it down. 

As I pulled through the drive-thru, I smiled when the young cashier handed me my order and said there was no charge. The person in front of me had generously paid on my behalf.

My mind was a whirl as I drove off. I thought how sweet they were for thinking of me.  I thought about how much I had needed to be thought of on this particular morning. I thanked God.  I felt I was finally being seen. After all, life was hard right now. If I could have, I would have struck up the angel choir to help me celebrate. 

As I handed my husband’s food to him when I got home and proceeded to tell him how someone else had paid for it, he asked me, “Did you pay for the person’s order behind you? Did you pay it forward?” 

The celebration was over. There it was. My All About Me sign was firmly staring me in the face. It hung there like a wreath with a bright red bow. A big red bow called conviction. 

His words hit me like a ton of bricks. Honestly, I never even thought about paying it forward this particular morning.  I just knew that other women would have thought to do that. Thoughtful, warm-hearted women would have thought of the person behind them. All those shiny women on Instagram would have thought of someone else besides themselves. Ouch.

It is incredible how God can use the ordinary, everyday things in my life to teach me spiritual applications. The thing was, it wasn’t just about the whole pay-it-forward thing. There were a lot of things I had made just about me lately. 

I could have easily argued that life was hard right now and that I had a lot on my plate. But so did other people in my life. Making it all about me was making it harder on them, and God was about to show me that it was actually making it a whole lot harder on me, too.  

So what’s a daughter to do when she messes up? She goes home to her heavenly Father for some much-needed advice.

Proverbs 14:8 (NIV) says, “The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception.” No better place to start than in God’s word.  

I also found that in Philippians  2:4 (Message) God tells me, “Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand.” It is hard to help others when your hands are full of yourself. Plus, when I walk around with my heart and hands all closed up with all the “me stuff”, they aren’t open to receive all the new and beautiful things God has planned for me.  

 

God never meant for me to hide how I feel and forget about myself. God never intends for me to pretend either.  There were some things I needed to deal with and work through.  Honesty, I needed healing. Nothing can eat away at your joy and peace more than the disease called “self”. 

I got on my knees and bowed my head to pray.  I needed to surrender some things I had been holding back and allow God to begin His work in my heart. 

I talked to God and asked for forgiveness. I also asked him to replace that feeling of unwillingness with the spirit of willingness. I had lost that somewhere along the way and needed God to help me find it. 

I needed it to finish my course with the  joy Paul talks about in Acts 20:24 (KJV) that says “But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God.”  I can’t let the things I go through move me away from the true purpose God has for my life. 

Living the abundant life I truly desire is really about putting God first and others second. It is about denying myself and taking up the cross to follow Jesus. I had discovered that putting myself first only created an emptiness in my soul.

I’m finding that, even though I gave my heart to Jesus years ago, I tend to take it back from time to time. So I gave my heart back to the Lord. Again. 

It would be the first step taken toward that healing I desperately needed. I knew this would be a process of taking one step at a time and giving myself some much-needed grace. 

I reminded myself that, even though it felt like I was the only one who would ever fail like this, I know I am not. All of us, from time to time, go a little off course. 

We, like sheep, are all prone to wander; that’s why we have a Great Shepherd. He never allows us to go too far before He gently leads us back to the fold.  He will even leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness to come after one sheep that has gotten lost along the way.  I’ve been that sheep several times in my life. 

So the next thing I did was take a hefty dose of courage that the Lord offered me.  I then stepped out in faith and took down my All About Me Sign.  

I replaced it with a Thankful and Blessed sign.  And you know something? It looks so much better. 

Oh, and one more thing…..

I went through the drive-thru and paid for the person’s food behind me.  

No longer being all about me feels a whole lot better.