28 Jun All I Need

One of the most beautiful lessons I have learned from my parents over the years is that building kingdoms here on earth will not make you happy. 

There is something about having little that gives one such a feeling of freedom. My dad has truly toiled all of his life—and mostly in vain it seems.  There have certainly been times of reward, but it just seems that from a worldly standpoint his efforts and abilities were mismatched with his time and space. 

And yet, instead of hopelessness and exhaustion he simply continued forward. His obedience looked like movement—feet on the ground without the promise of prosperity. And Jesus is redeeming all of the parts of his life with every step. Sometimes we need to hear stories like that because it’s so hard to see life in its frailty and vanity and failure and pain and have enough hope to keep moving forward in obedience. 

“We all have things in our lives that we would love to blot out for all eternity and we have things that we would love to hang on to and carry with us through eternity.”

On the other side of that coin is the person who has had successes all of their life. In the book The Hiding Place (my favorite ever), Corrie Ten Boom’s aunt learned of a diagnosis that gave her only a few weeks to live. As a woman who had given her life in service for the Lord, her family tried to use this to comfort her as she faced death:

“And Jans, some must go to their Father empty-handed, but you will run to Him with Hands full!  All of your clubs, your writings, the funds you’ve raised, your talks…

But our well-meant words were useless.  In front of us the proud face crumpled; Tante Jans put her hands over her eyes and began to cry.  “Empty, empty!” she choked at last through her tears.  “How can we bring anything to God?  What does He care for our little tricks and trinkets?”

And then as we listened in disbelief she lowered her hands and, with tears still coursing down her face, whispered, “Dear Jesus, I thank you that we must come with empty hands.  I thank you that you have done all—all—on the cross, and that all we need in life or death is to be sure of this.”

We all have things in our lives that we would love to blot out for all eternity and we have things that we would love to hang on to and carry with us through eternity. Part of the lesson of not building kingdoms on earth is that Jesus redeems my life and the beautiful thing about it is that I can come to him at the end of it completely empty-handed. I have nothing but the cross and that’s so freeing. 

I pray for us as women that we see this and believe it. In our modern world, things like Facebook and Instagram can make us forget what Jesus has done for us. I know that seems a drastic claim, but we can easily become defined by our (sometimes exaggerated) successes that we post (Can you believe that my 2-year old is already reading Harry Potter!?); or our failures we perceive in ourselves compared to the success posts of others (I’m such a lazy mom because I didn’t cut my daughter’s sandwich into cute flower shapes and write her a poem to place in her lunchbox). The excerpt from the book is actually one of the things God used to convince me to get off of all social media 3 years ago. I was forgetting that Jesus is all I need! 

-Chappell Hughes, Downtown

How about you?  Are you in despair because you seem to have nothing to show for your life or are you prideful and self-reliant because of the many accomplishments you’ve had in your life?