Sound of Surviving Blog

Galatians 6:4-5 is a powerful verse. It instructs us exactly how we are to live our lives. I had never read it before, though in the Message version, until the other day. It reads, “Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. Don’t be impressed with yourself. Don’t compare yourself with others. Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.”

Each line of this verse gives an instruction, a guide to live our lives by.

First, Paul tells us to make a careful exploration of who we are, and the work we’ve been given. Paul isn’t just telling us to look in the mirror, at what we see, and study our reflection. No, Paul is telling us to look at each and every piece of ourselves, the good and the bad, all the bits that make up who we are, even those that are the most broken parts. If we look closely, we’ll realize that the work we’ve been given often correlates with who we are inside, with each of those bits and pieces that make us who we are. We are called to dig into that, because that work is how we will impact others who are hurting or in similar situations. If we pour our hearts and souls into first discovering who God made us to be, and why, we are better equipped to lead others, to allow them to find their true calling, their purpose scattered amongst the pieces of their own lives.

The next line tells us not to be impressed with ourselves. We often get so caught up in ourselves, and what we are doing, that we forget it is not us doing the work, but God working through us. We forget that without God, we are nothing. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be proud of your work, or what you’ve done, but we shouldn’t boast about our work, because we’re just the vessel; God is the real captain on this ship. We are called to boast of our weakness, so that others can see, if he can use us at our worst, that he can use them too.

Then, Paul tells us not to compare ourselves to others. God created and designed each one of us differently, with different journeys, different purposes, different hardships, and different levels of brokenness. When we compare yourself to others, we are selling yourself short, because you aren’t striving toward the greatness God has in store just for you alone. If you’ve ever looked at someone and thought they seem like they have the perfect life, I can promise you that they don’t. We each have our own brokenness, our own imperfections, and heartache. Everyone on this earth has their own label of brokenness; some people just hide it better than others, and not everyone wears it on the outside.

Lastly, I think the most important instruction Paul gives us is that last line, “Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.” If you’ve ever heard the expression, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” this verse is what that phrase is all about. We each must do our best with the hand we’ve been given, with the life we have. It’s up to us, to redefine our circumstances, to get creative with the hand we’ve been dealt. We can choose to sit around and say, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way, I had big dreams for my life,” or we can get up, and make the most of what we do have, what our life is right now. Our picture-perfect life isn’t always the plan that God has in store for us, but his way is always far better than ours. The sooner we learn to trust him with the little we do have; the sooner he’ll bless us using the tiny amount of good in our lives in far higher and vastly greater ways than we could ever conceive.

For those of us with chronic illness, this verse isn’t just a list of instructions; it’s our way of life. We learn to redefine what a happy life looks like, and by doing that, we beat the devil at his own game. Because he wants us to think that because our life doesn’t look like everyone else’s, we could never be joyful, or praise God. So, when we, as Paul instructs us to, “do our creative best with our own lives”. We’re redefining what joy is, what hope is, what goodness is, by thriving, despite everything that tells us we can’t live a good life. Don’t let the devil win; get creative and inventive with your own life. Because when we are creative and make the most of what we have, we’re not saying everything is picture-perfect, but we’re showing the world that we can trust God in the creatively messy life we’re living, because he is the master artist and author of it all.