Connect the Dots

It’s amazing the games that amuse us in childhood.

Starting with peek-a-boo and moving up to duck-duck-goose, seemingly simple (and sometimes silly) tasks can keep us occupy for hours.

One such activity is the game of the connect the dots. You’re given a sheet of paper with a smatter of numbered dots and the idea is to, in numerical order, draw lines between each point. When you are done, you’re greeted with a completed picture;  a picture that you probably couldn’t see at each point along the way.

Life is a lot like that, except, somehow, as we get older, we take less joy in each step, and want focus more on the final outcome. We concentrate on the end, and not the in-betweens. But rarely does God tell us that picture that He is painting with our lives. Rarely does He reveal what He’s using us to accomplish or the trajectory that He send us on. Instead, He asks us to go to the next point – to do the next right thing as someone once told me. And we trust, that in His time, we’ll see what He see – the beautiful picture that He’s using our lives to draw. We’ll see where each step lead, why each point was necessary, and the lessons He taught us in the in-betweens.

Continue Reading

Building

Since I’m around college students a lot, I frequently get to hear them respond to the question “So what do you want to do with your life?” Sometimes the question isn’t as bluntly stated, but whether they’re being asked “what do you want to be?” “what are your dreams” or “what are your plans for after graduation?,” the root of the inquiry is to try and understand what kind of life they want to lead.

Interestingly, one response that I’ve never heard (and I’ve heard plenty) is “I want to build a kingdom for myself, where I get everything I want in a manner that’s convenient to me. I will make all the rules  and then I will decide whether or not I will live by those rules. No one in this kingdom will be as important as me.”

And although no one is brass enough to answer this way, from the way they live their lives, this appears to be the dream of many.

  • They make choices based on what’s best for them.
  • They act as if no one else matters.
  • They live for what pleases them.

Jesus, however, made it very clear that if we aren’t living for Him, we’re living against Him (Matthew 12:30). Similarly, if we aren’t building His kingdom, we’re building ours.

And our kingdom will not stand.

Which means that the only logical thing to do is to get busy working for the Kingdom that will endure; forsaking our own fiefdom, for a treasure that is secure.

How will you build His kingdom today?

This post was partially inspired by MercyMe’s song In the Blink of an Eye. [affiliate link]

Continue Reading