Our youngest is teething and caught my cold to boot. Our 3 year old is potty training and it's not going very well. My days have become one poopy diaper after another between the two of them, and I keep thinking how fortunate I am to live at a time when we have disposable diapers and pull-ups while I wade through cleaning all the poop--and there is a lot of it as anyone who has ever had a teething child or any child who is not yet fully potty-trained would know. And I also rest in the thought that somehow I managed to get our 12 and 16 year olds out of their diapers too.
So last time I mentioned James 4:14 that compares a human life to vapor in the wind:
How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone.
The verse is not meant to make little of us. The Bible tells us that the Lord knows our hearts and our every thought, that He walks with us through every experience, and that He even stores our tears in a bottle and writes down what they were shed for. We are not little and insignificant to God. He made us in His image and loved us enough to humble himself to put on flesh in His son Jesus, and then offer Himself as a sinless sacrifice on the cross as payment for all sin. We are a big deal to Him. If you read the entire chapter of James 4 in context, James talks with us about drawing closer to God and then warns us against judging others, something the Lord Himself was only designed to do, and against self-confidence.
We live in a culture that teaches and preaches our nothingness without dependence on self only, polarization of the haves and have nots which is only becoming deeper with a socialist political agenda coming out of the White House, not to mention what is happening all over the world, the idea that what God says is sin we don't want to call sin anymore, or that one sin is not as bad as another, and that we place our confidence in our own plans without consulting God about His plans or what He might think of the plans we have---are they really what is best?
I planned to be a doctor and live in a mansion and drive a convertible and enjoy constant tropical vacations where I could regularly work on my tan. God planned for me to become a stay at home wife and mother of four and wipe poopy butts and snotty noses, amoung other humbling duties. God won. I started listening to Him, and His best is far better than what mine was, a lot less selfish and certainly less glamorous, lest anyone think that wiping a poopy bottom is going to land me on the cover of a magazine or create a buzz in Hollywood to film my life story.
My confidence is in the Lord. He can work best when I am weak and submitted to Him. It is easier for me to love Him and to find Him in a weakened state when I am broken in my circumstances and not depending on myself to fix the unfixable (2 Corinthians 12:9). I love that He cares for me and never leaves me that way, but invites me to rely on His strength and tells me that is my joy. I love that I can trust Him to judge and that all I have to do is look to Him and be confident that when He says He has good plans for me (Jeremiah 29:11), He means it, even if they are not the ones I would necessarily make for myself.
Now, I am not sure that I should characterize changing one poopy diaper after another as broken. Yesterday, our littlest managed to get one side of his diaper loose at the exact moment that he was having a very runny bowel movement that mostly ended up on the wood floor at his feet right as I was walking up to him. Never a dull moment in our home, I rushed to action with baby wipes, a clean diaper, Windex and paper towels, oh and Lysol. Not your idea of a typical action movie, but it was impressive how fast I cleaned it and was reminded in that split second of how I care for my little ones as the Lord cares for me--with slightly different tools---and I was humbled. Of course I am not going to leave this sweet little one whom I love with all my heart standing in a poopy, stinky mess. I am going to scoop him up in his tears and help restore him to a better state. He lies helpless, trying to fight the clean up at times because he still wants to go play, poopy or not, but I win this time, and he is like a new little man, ready to go again, until the next poopy diaper calls out my name.
And in the God inspired words of Paul in Romans 8:38-39, "...I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,a]">[a] neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. 39 No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord." We are no different than my little man, who needs my loving and compassionate care in the middle of a huge mess called life.
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