Confession: resting is not one of my strongest skills. So when I came down with a cold a few weeks ago I did what I usually do in those circumstances. I whined.
But I don’t want to rest.
I feel lazy.
I’m not being responsible.
Fortunately I have friends who love me enough to be honest with me. Their combined response was something along the lines of this: “Knock it off. You’re not a lazy person. You live a productive life. You just have a cold. Now go to bed.”
In other words, they were telling me, “This is a pixel and not a pattern.”
What’s the difference?
A pixel is a teeny-tiny element of a design. Individually, it doesn’t really mean anything.
A pattern is a repetitive element of a design. It means that something is there over and over again.
In the design of our lives, that translates to this: We shouldn’t worry much about pixels {isolated events} but we should pay attention to patterns {what we see repeated again and again}.
I tend to treat pixels like they’re patterns {Ex: I need rest today so I must be lazy.} That skews my perspective and I worry/feel guilty/whine about things that really don’t need that much attention.
And I can treat patterns like they’re pixels {Ex: I chased my blues away with a cookie fourteen times this week. Oh, no big deal.}
What God asks us to do instead is to look at our lives through His perspective. We do so through three primary ways…
1) Comparing our lives to His Word
2) Getting feedback from wise people
3) Taking time to self-evaluate and apply what we learn
God is committed to creating a beautiful design with our lives. Bit by bit. Day by day. And when we choose to see clearly, we become better partners in the process. That’s the remarkable thing: we get to help choose how it all turns out.
That means sometimes the wise choice is heading to the couch for some rest. And sometimes it’s getting off the couch and going for a God-sized dream.
It’s all about remembering the big picture–and making it more and more like the masterpiece God has planned.
p.s. Sometimes having an encouraging outside perspective can be helpful as we grow too. That’s what {e}coaching gives you.
