I sprawled out on my bed, happy and a little weary from a productive day.

Why not channel some of the day’s momentum into prayer? I thought.

As I jotted down a list, I began to feel guilty for not praying for these people more. I had listed my friends, coworkers, and family members.

The need is huge and tends to overwhelm me. So I prayed, “Lord, I need you to teach me to pray better. I want to be effective.”

So many of my thoughts swirl around this idea of effectiveness. I want to make my life count. “Don’t waste your life,” reverberates through my my mind on a daily basis.

I listen to podcasts and can’t stop reading books about productivity. It’s become a little idol I regularly bow down to. I often dupe myself into believing spiritual effectiveness resembles the kind of effectiveness we all strive for in our careers.

See, I want to do so much for God. Maybe you’re the same way, and you sometimes worry that you’re not doing enough.

Not sharing the gospel enough…

Not praying for extended family enough…

Not loving your neighbors enough…

If you’re like me, you’re struggling to scrape in a few prayers breathed at the kitchen sink or exhaled as you fold laundry.

That day God answered my prayer for effectiveness, and I was so glad I was lying down. As I begged God to make me a more effective Christian, an ineffable voice whispered something like this:

“You’ll be effective when you know you’re loved.”

After a moment, Love piled on me like an avalanche. My breathing slowed and I felt the weight of God’s love. I laid there several minutes buried in that truth, tears squeezing through eyelids.

I can’t love people the way I want to unless I’m living in His love. When His love is my reality, my countenance changes and a little bit of God’s effervescence shimmers through.

When I get into overwhelm mode, only love can rescue me.

Only love can snap us out of our striving. It’s the only thing that can snatch us off the hamster wheel of trying to please God in our own works.

Only God’s love has the capacity to truly change our hearts. This love sets us free, blessedly free to be who God created us to be.

God—who is Love—vanquishes our fear and supplies us with courage and endless grace. 

In God’s love, we wake up every morning with hope, and it’s the same love that tucks us in each night in peace. His love helps us endure.

In a culture so obsessed with productivity, only love can prevent us from building little idols to our own achievements, even the spiritual ones.

Love came down and bestowed so great a kindness on us that we don’t have to rest in our achievements or our productivity. We are loved just as we are.

God’s love redirects our focus away from our own effectiveness toward the accomplishments of His Son.

You are loved as you scroll through this post. Yes, you know this. But do you really believe it?

Do you know how to consistently live in the light of His love? Only when we take time to let Jesus baptize us anew with His love can we ever hope for effectiveness.

Only when we know we’re loved, can we walk as He walked and live with the kind of connection to God that we long for.

Your are deeply loved, dear reader. Don’t forget it.

 

 

On the heels of prayer I laid in bed anxious to sleep, but sleep didn’t come. Instead, God flooded my mind with an exquisite ceramic wall hanging, painted in different colors and shapes.

I had never seen it before, but I stared at it from different angles in my mind’s eye and appreciated all the detail and the careful eye of the one who created it.

I saw how the artist had lacquered the finished product, but what I remember most is an overwhelming feeling of pride on behalf of whoever had made it.

Somehow I saw this piece of art through the artist’s eye.

Each color was chosen with care, each brush stroke masterfully executed, and this molded piece of essentially clay and water was built into a masterpiece.

It lingered in my mind and I knew God wanted me to see how it beamed with the pride of workmanship.

This wasn’t made by some hack; it was purposed into existence by an Artist. Suddenly it dawned on me that this piece of art was me.

This work of art was the product of the Artist’s love. Its only job was to point to the artist’s creativity and imagination. That lovely, multi-colored masterpiece only ever needed to show forth the glory of its creator.

It need not compare itself to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, saying “Why don’t I look like that.” Or, “Oh, look at those brush strokes.”

As I laid in bed, I realized just how ludicrous it is to compare our Creator’s work with the rest of His creation. We are each a masterpiece because we were created by a perfect Master artist.

And if you create any type of art, this will be especially hard for you to understand. We artists are our own worst critics, aren’t we?

Every author I know can point out to me all the flaws of each novel.

But God doesn’t create the way we do. His process and outcome are perfect—every single time. His design for you is perfect, despite the fact you live in a sin-marred world.

Despite the fact that you are a work in progress.

As I write this, a symphony plays in the background. We are all symphonies to God, even when the music of our lives sounds commonplace and ordinary—like a TV jingle when we long for Beethoven.

This is where we go wrong, when we try to measure ourselves. Our perception is skewed. We fear the obscure and the small and prize grandeur, but that’s not how the Cosmic Artist of the sky sees it.

Not only are each of us fantastic displays of God’s creative genius, He’s creating a larger picture—weaving a tapestry—a multi-generational, diverse, and eternal picture. We are single threads, or just single instruments in His great orchestra.

As we love and connect with one another the whole picture emerges, one more brilliant than its individual components.

The Master Artist leaves no detail to chance, each brush stroke, each note of music exists by His design and purpose.

We are each His masterpieces—every single one of us. 

What would happen if we saw ourselves and each other in this way? If we stared deep into the face of our neighbor and coworker and saw the face of God, the imago dei?

What if we strained our eyes to see God’s signature in all of His creation? What if we looked for the Artist’s fingerprints in everyone we met?