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The following excerpt is from Mark Frost's Doorpost newsletter, I found it very enlightening.
"Many times, our desire to fulfill our calling or our destiny, or as some like to phrase it, “to be greatly used of God”, is motivated more out of a desire for personal significance or fulfillment, than out of pure love for God. If you feel trapped by circumstances, unable to fulfill what you feel is your destiny, you can continually long and look for a different station in life, or you can long and look for ways to turn your many daily routines into sweet smelling offerings of love to God, as you do them with a pure motive of love and surrender to the will of God that has you enclosed or shut up in a narrow place... Don’t waste the mundane waiting for significance! Turn the mundane into sweet smelling sacrifice to God. It is that very offering of love to God out of a pure heart that turns the prison into paradise, the desert into a garden, and the shack into a mansion. If you have within you the life of Christ, through a true work of God’s grace, then you already possess all that you need in order to become a well-pleasing sacrifice to Jesus."
I would add- That if you have within you the life of Christ then you already have all you need to find fulfillment/significance in the place you're in.
In my theology I believe this, but my reality does not always line up with my beliefs. I guess what I mean is that some of my daily routines do not smell like "sweet smelling offerings" to me.
What I've done in the past when my place in life left me feeling unsatisfied, was to look for a new place, but after going around that merry-go-round a few times I know the grass is not really greener it just looks that way from a distance.
So how does the mundane start to smell a little less like shit and more like a fragrant offering?
I think it must start with (and come back to) God's ridiculous love for us. If we don't really get This, then everything will come up short, leave us feeling unfulfilled. This Love can't really be explained by anyone. Especially when religion and religious terminology have become the equivelant of white noise, when words like grace, mercy, "the Cross", forgiveness, redemption no longer carry much meaning.
But every once in a while we catch a glimpse of this love, and if our cluttered minds can see it for what it truly is... well there are no words.
I've put a link to a you tube video of Kim Walker singing "How He Loves Us". She's caught a glimpse of His Love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoC1ec-lYps
talon
