A Humble Foundation

Day 2570 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge. Proverbs 19:20. Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise. NIV

There are times in life when it seems like we’ve got it all together. We find ourselves a nice little groove and just keep on rolling along. It’s like we finally manage to line some things out and find this routine that seems to work. But then something always happens. We get in our own way. We make some dumb choice. We do something rash without thinking it through. We get tripped up and careen right out of that comfy little groove that we had been in.

Nobody likes to admit it, but we can be pretty reckless at times. Not sure if it’s because we’re always in a hurry to keep up with the world around us or maybe just because we’re not nearly as bright as we like to think we are, but all of us make bad choices. We do things we shouldn’t while knowing all along that it’s not right. We say things we don’t mean just so we can keep that dreadful silence away. We rush into circumstances we may not belong just so we don’t feel left out.

I have no problem admitting that I screw things up all the time. Wish I didn’t. Wish I had it more together than I sometimes do. I wish that I didn’t make the same mistakes over, and over, and over again. But that’s the burden of humanity. A long time ago we had a chance at perfection and we chose an apple instead. We were placed in a garden and got ourselves kicked out. We chose the path of desire, of selfishness, of depravity because we couldn’t resist the temptation.

And just look at how far we have not come! We still cave to temptation. The temptation to argue over absolutely anything. The temptation to follow the world wherever it goes. The temptation to cast stones at others rather than address our own faults. The temptation to put ourselves first. The temptation to run wild and live as if nothing matters. We never learned that first lesson we should have learned when we got turned away from Eden.

No, we just kept running. We found new ways to make bad choices. We came up with new sins that bring a continued excitement that hides the emptiness underneath. We kept trying to carve our own path, our own way, to our own goals. And along the way we forgot that it doesn’t have to be so hard. We forgot that we’re not the ones in control. We forgot that when left to our own devices to make our own decisions reliant upon our own intellect, we’re going to seriously mess some stuff up!

But thankfully there’s hope. There’s redemption. There’s restoration of the things we lost or gave away. There’s the chance to learn from the stupid choices and bad decisions we’ve made. There’s salvation from who we’ve been and the direction we’ve been going. All because God hasn’t given up on us. How do I know? Because we’re still breathing. We’re still alive. We’re still able to realize when we do something wrong so that we can learn to do something different.

I doubt any of us will ever get much right. Some do better than others, but we all still have plenty of room to improve. But it takes a desire and willingness to do so. It requires us to acknowledge our failures and address our weaknesses. It means listening to advice and not thinking we know it all. It demands that own our poor choices and countless mistakes so that we can learn from them rather than running from them. It’s not easy, especially in a world that’s taught us to live on pride and vanity. But that’s a choice we have to make.

Friends, we all make mistakes and get so many things wrong in life. But we can either run from that fact while pretending that we’re better than we are, or we can face it and be changed by it. God offers us His healing, guidance, and salvation, but we have to be ones to accept them. We have to choose to humble ourselves. If we can do that then there’s not only hope of something better, there’s a promise that was sealed on a cross. But if we don’t choose to humbly turn back to Him and ask for His healing and help, well, then not much is ever going to change.

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