Each Person Their Own Journey

Just a recycled newsletter article:

The other night a number of youth and I went to Seven Falls. It was a great trip. The Cheyenne Canon is beautiful in and of itself. Then when you see the falls with their changing colors at night the whole place is even prettier.
We then got to the part where we were to journey up the stairs. Two sets of stairs were in front of us. Each of them with roughly 115 stairs. Two of our crew of four adults decided not to go on the stairs and took the elevator. The boys bounded up the stairs first, waited halfway for some to catch up, and then got up the rest of the stairs with similar enthusiasm. A group of girls also did the stairs at a brisk pace, but not so fast as to interrupt their conversations and their �ooos and ahhhhs.� Then there was the group of us who had as their goal to complete the journey up and down the view of the falls. I was in that group. I decided to break down the trip to 11 sets of 20 stairs. And that is how I got to the top of the stairs�only the first set began with a set of 35 and the last couple sets of stairs taken before stopping was more like 7 or 8. I wasn�t the first junior higher bouncing like Tigger up the stairs, but I had kept up reasonably well. I felt good, as I always do when I set a goal and accomplish it.

Then came the joy of going down the stairs. Going down the stairs you can feel a lot more of the bounce of the stairs and the sway that the wind had. But, I kept a steady pace and was at the bottom of the stairs soon enough.

Somewhere on the way down came the temptation to compare myself to others. I was tempted to see if I could catch up to the person in front of me. I also began to judge myself for not being as fast as some of the other people around me. Then I remembered a truth that a friend had told me earlier. She said, �Each us has our own journeys and trails to walk. Your job isn�t to compare to everybody else�s. Your job is to be true to the walk you have in front of you.� Although this friend said this on another night hike, I believe that this truth is bigger than climbing stairs or hiking the M in Bozeman, MT.

In this life there are always going to be people to compare to. Sometimes when I wonder if I am ever going to get married I sometimes take a seat in front of the Wal-Mart and watch all the couples come in. When I see all the odd couples coming through it takes me about twenty minutes and I can walk away knowing there is still hope for me too.

I am pretty sure that God does not want us to live our lives comparing ourselves to others. He wants us to walk the path before us at the pace He has set for us. Each of us has our own journey. Each of those journeys has different challenges and different vistas. Each of those journeys has a different pace, and even the same journey can have different paces depending on the season of our lives.

So, as you live your life, take advantage of the gifts and opportunities God has given you. Especially those opportunities to love and to serve others. There is no need to compare yourself to that other person who always has more money, or that one person who is so much more charismatic than you are. God is not going to judge you for not being enough like that other person. God is going to look at what you did with the gifts that He has given you though. You would be surprised what God can do with nothing more than open ears and a willing heart.

The same is true of our church bodies and our journey together. We can sit around for a long time and compare ourselves to larger churches, or churches that have something that we do not. We can wish we had a bigger building, a younger demographic, or whatever else the pundits say churches are supposed to be. Or maybe, we can approach our church life like our personal lives above. Perhaps God is more concerned with what we are doing with the opportunities and gifts He has given us as a body than comparing us to the other church down the street. Maybe each church has its own journey too.

So as we head down the path, let us be who we were called to be right here and right now, and let us let the ever-moving God continue to transform us into something new in His way and in His time. May God find us faithful.