Last summer during my internship with iCare, we had the opportunity to host a day camp for some of the sweet girls referred to us. Part of camp consisted of time spent learning about art, which was a great avenue for the girls to be able to express what they had gone through. One day during the art portion of the camp, one of the girls was frustrated with how her painting turned out, so she put it to the side and started over on a new canvas. A fellow leader saw the discarded canvas, took a paper towel and wiped over the paint to blend it. She worked for a couple minutes, and as odd as it may sound, turned it into something beautiful.
One of my favorite, favorite things about the Lord is how He uses seemingly insignificant things to teach us. I was instantly reminded of how much of a mess we are without Jesus and how we so often make messes of things or relationships or life, but God is in the business of taking our messy selves and making something new and beautiful out of us. We see a mess but He takes His masterful hand and recreates us (or the messes we’ve made) into something beautiful that He can use. For His glory and our good.
And the thing that gets me the most is that He wants to. He wants to redeem us back to Himself and He wants to redeem our lives into something beautiful and God-honoring.
The biggest thing about this though is that Jesus wants YOU.
He big time wants to use our lives and redeem them but His heart behind everything is getting you back. All of us. His love for us is incomprehensible. Romans 5:8 says, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Like...what??
Then 2 Corinthians 5:17-19 tells us, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” I can’t get over the truth of the gospel.
Christ died for us, the messiest most sin-ridden parts of us. All to reconcile us - to win us back and restore our relationship with the Father. And then He uses us (and every broken piece of our stories) to win others back to Himself.
One of my all time favorite stories is of the woman at the well. In John 4 we learn about her life and sin struggles; we see Christ reveal Himself to her and save her. She runs back to town and tells everyone what Jesus did for her - "So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 'Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?' They went out of the town and were coming to him” (John 4:28-30). Verses 39-42 say, "Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”
Man. Jesus is good. Let Him use your story and redeem your struggles for His glory and the furthering of His Kingdom. It is well, well worth it.
