What You Can

24 Apr

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”  ~ Theodore Roosevelt

When I was in grade school, the nuns used to tell us all the time to “do everything for the greater honor and glory of God.”  I was young and uneducated and didn’t understand what they were getting at.  To me, it sounded more like religious babble.  What was this “greater honor and glory of God” stuff and what could we do to contribute to it?  I simply wanted to do what I wanted to do.  I didn’t want to have to think about anyone or anything else.

That is the way it is for most people for the vast majority of our lives.  We generally seek the things that will make us happy and/or give us a sense of accomplishment.  We do the things that will get us noticed.  We shy away from the things that are more like “work” and less like “fun”.

What we need to remember is that our final destination is not this world but the Kingdom of God.  Setting our sights on that goal, we are called to be a different kind of people.  People of the Kingdom are loving, merciful, and kind.  People of the Kingdom do for one another and are not self-serving.  People of the Kingdom do the things that they do for the Lord and not for themselves.  Doing so, we please God.  Thus, we do things for His honor and glory and not for our own.

Thinking about doing things for God’s greater honor and glory can make us feel little and insignificant.  It can make us think that there’s absolutely nothing that we can offer God.  We think about huge things that we can possibly do for Him and we falter because even thinking about them boggles our minds and stops us short.

Let me be clear on this:  God doesn’t want big.  He just wants us.  If we give ourselves to Him, no matter how insignificant we may think that is, we please Him immeasurably.  “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”  Roosevelt should have been a theologian.

FAITH ACTION:  Be satisfied with what you have and use what you have for the greater honor and glory of God.