I have always been a daddy's girl. My father and I have worked on hundreds of projects throughout the years. I can proudly say, because of him, I can hold my own more than some men I know when it comes to cars, home repairs, and generally problem solving anything. Three things I've learned from him that I have used on many occasions is #1) Don't rush, #2) It takes a lot of torque to break something (sometimes you even need to give it a good whack to get it going in the right direction) but it's all downhill from there and #3) The all so famous words, "You need the right tool for the job." Those lessons he taught me go far beyond what he intended them for. Take a look at that last statement for example. When you use a tool for something it wasn't intended for, what happens? It doesn't work. We can walk away and come back to that same place a hundred times (and we do!) trying to make it work, but the result is inevitable. Try as we might, without the right tool for the job, it can't function as we wish, and we eventually give up. But what happens when the tool is so close it almost fits? We use it as if it was meant to work that way, usually with much frustration. More often than not it ends up damaging the object we were trying to make work, leaving us with a bigger problem than we started with. Such as, the wrong size size screwdriver will inevitably strip a screw head and possibly ruin the entire thing. Truth is, substitutes will only give you an inferior result and the full intended use of the tool will never be realized.
So what exactly am I trying to say here? Well isn't that analogy so much like life and love? We are constantly trying to make life work on our terms, in a way it was never intended to work...and we end up broken because of it. We all have those monumental moments that we can't avoid in life and love. Break ups. Break downs. Giving up. Trying every route you can think of to make things work. Failing miserably. But we should never let those things stop us from our goals and dreams. We need to reach for the stars because if we don't, we are guaranteed to never hit them. We need to start using the right tools to get the job done. As my pastor states it best, "We have to remember, good is the enemy of the best." Jesus died so we can have the best and to be able to live in freedom in this crazy unpredictable life full of twists and turns. But in the good...the ok...the mediocre...is exactly where the devil wants us to live. Where we have just enough things going right and looking good, that we think that this is all there is. After all, that's how everyone else is living it.
Yet we are unhappy...even when we do everything right, and have all those points checked off on our American Dream list. There is still that emptiness and feeling that something is lacking. We almost expect to be miserable with our other half, don't bat an eye when we have to hide things we are ashamed of, accept divorce being a 50/50 shot, remain in an unproductive environment, and get used to never experiencing true happiness because it's what happens to most around us. We are forgetting we were made for more!
Where did this view of life and love come from? Not from the one who created it. We allowed it to slowly evolve and take over. Life is not found in things, success, or making it to the top. Satisfaction is found in life. Love is not found in sex as so many chase. Sex in its best form is found in love. Life will never be fulfilling until we find our purpose doing what we were created for. Love does not grow but in worked soil, through perseverance and getting to know someone's heart through the good, and bad. That takes time...lots of it...which we as a people won't spare an ounce of as we want everything now and aren't willing to put in the work it takes to get there. Society skews our view on what love does and looks like, and we wonder why we are all so broken. A family that sticks together seems to be the minority anymore. We take sex out of its intended use and expect to find love and fail miserably every time.
Why do we settle for less and become pressured by society? Why do we think that the One who created us would ask us to do something that is not beneficial? The problem is, we are human. We are impatient. We are fallible. We emulate what we see from when we are born. We trust our own experiences and what we see, over what God's Word says and is the only truth we can trust. Fact is, there are not enough people showing us the right way to live in this world. We are all a doubting Thomas so to speak. We know something's wrong but we are scared to change it for fear of unraveling what we have built. How could we know without a shadow of a doubt that life greater than what we are living and true love exists if we rarely see it lived out? It's very very hard. Yet something calls out to us in the deepest depths of our soul...that this is not all there is...that there's got to be something more.
Doing the hard thing is usually the right thing, but in this world of ease, it's becoming a dying art. We trade in our hard work which builds character, for a life of ease that builds fear and emptiness. And we blame others, God, anybody but ourselves, for this. But if we continue to seek, we will find. We will find that our search was for Him all along and that He gives us a whole new perspective on what it means to live and love. And when we find that, we find the tools we need to have all we ever dreamed. We that have this knowledge have a duty to show people this kind of life and love...just for the sheer fact that people know it exists...to give hope. Something beautiful happens when we trust God and what He says, over ourselves and our experiences. He, unlike humans, keeps His promises and comes through giving us more purpose, strength, and love than we knew was even capable. When we give up the little that we have to Him, He exchanges it for more than we ever dreamed possible.
Just because we don't see something doesn't mean it isn't there or is not possible. Real love is a dying art in today's society. Though this last couple years have been the most trying time in my life, I thank God for them, because in God's love for me He allowed me to be demolished. Brought me to ground zero, because He knew that's the only place I could go to start building something new. Only this time I'm building with the right blueprint and with the right tools. I'm finally building something that will last with the builder that saw this masterpiece all along. It's stunning what using the right tools can accomplish. Where once was a broken down shack, now will stand a strong tower of beauty.
