Hey everyone, hope this finds you doing well and enjoying life to the fullest. That’s actually what this blog is about, living your life to the fullest.
Today I received an email informing me that a professor at my school passed out in the hall and was pronounced dead shortly after at the hospital here in Abilene. This man was 55 years old, he has a wife, and two kids. Yeah, I’m blown away at the tragedy and can’t even imagine what that must be like for his family. It is shocking, saddening, but most of all in my mind, scary.
I don’t want to downplay the fact that this is awful tragedy, and that there is mourning to be done. However I do find a great point in this and it is something I have been thinking about for a week or so now.
Matt Chandler spoke at my church here recently, he is a well known preacher and I had the opportunity to write down some thoughts while he preached two Sunday’s ago. He talked about some great things and I could write numerous blogs on what was said (I just might actually) but he mentioned something that is at the heart of everyone at some point or another, being satisfied.
This was exactly why I started blogging about my life, because I was ok (satisfied) with where my relationship with Christ was at, and that’s not ok. Matt used an illustration that I want to try and share, I hope I can do it justice.
We all have a bar that we set in our life, this isn’t an actually bar, but a imaginary bar of standards we have. We go through our day-to-day lives and we have this bar that probably isn’t set very high. Mine; do the right things, say the right things, live the right way. Sounded pretty good to me, but how LOW is that in reality? How easy is it for me to lay in bed at night and weigh the events of the day and say, yeah, I got over my bar today, overall I did good. I’ve been trying to figure out where my bar REALLY stood and where it SHOULD be at over the past two weeks. I’m still not sure honestly, I know that I don’t set it high enough in many areas of my life, and that’s something that I can only improve on, because good enough is never good enough.
God DEMANDS more. How lucky are we, how lucky am I, that 2 Corinthians 12: 9-10 says what it does: ““My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why for Christ’s sake, I delight in my weakness, in my insults, in hardships, in persecutions, and in difficulties. For when I am weak, I am strong.”
What I learned from the tragedy today and remembering the illustration of setting a bar for my life is this. That every day, I need to set the bar so high that there is no way I can get over it, but it should be my goal, the only thing that matters, to reach that bar and get over it. I am weak, I am not able to live this life on my own, I don’t have the ability to do it. Thankfully God wants me to be weak, and to let Him be strong through my weakness.
So live your life to the fullest, don’t let a minute go by that you will want back at the end of the day. We are called to live boldly, courageously, and with strength. So go out into the world, change someone’s life or impact someone’s life I should say because your life has been changed through the dying of Jesus Christ and so has theirs. Tell you people you love them and that you care about them sincerely, don’t live superficially in a world with enough of that already. Go beyond the surface, you never know what is underneath. Trust in a PERFECT God who loves us, even in our faults and mistakes. Lastly, don’t let an opportunity get away that you never know if you will get it again, we don’t know how long our time here on Earth is, so make the most of every second you do have.
Much Love
Austin
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