A few days ago my wife showed me a book that chronicled my niece's first year of life. Since she was celebrating her first birthday I guess my brother & sister-in-law thought now was as good a time as any to have a book made to depict her first memories. I agree. Although, as I looked through the book I made it about half way through and noticed something quite humorous...I didn't see any pictures of me in the book. I saw pictures of my niece (of course). I saw pictures of her parents. I even saw pictures of her parent's parents, but I didn't see me. In fact, I noticed pictures of events where I was present but my image was cropped out of the picture. I decided to call my sister-in-law to give her a piece of my mind (relax, I'm just kidding) but as I called to joke with her about cropping me out of the pictures I noticed one picture where I was in the background behind my niece. I had a cameo! Which brings me to the thought that I wanted to share with you.
As you walk through life attempting to serve God and love His people. As you pour yourself into ministry or in the efforts to make the world a better place you may look at the plans of God, the big picture, or who is getting the credit and within yourself, "I don't see me", "Or where am I in all of this". I know that it's not easy to admit that we look for our own benefit sometimes or consider how things will help us as we serve but the truth of the matter is sometimes we do. Since this is always a temptation we must be careful to remember what I had to keep in mind when looking at my niece's book...IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU! It's not about you getting the glory, it's not about you being the center of attention. It's not about people seeing you, celebrating you, or salivating over you. It's about using our lives to cause others to do these things for GOD. It's about doing what we can to help others to see the goodness and kindness of Jesus Christ. Much like my niece's book, this life is all about God. The "big picture" goal is to reveal His glory and when we get caught up in looking for ourselves and trying to get others to see us, we miss the purpose that God intended for our lives. Frances Chan said it best by saying "The point of our lives is to point to God." The point of my niece's book was to show the world my niece and the point of our lives is to show the world our God. If we will live our lives with this understanding the sky is the limit to how we can be used to demonstrate how awesome God truly is...and who knows, maybe with close examination, when it's all said and done we'll see ourselves in the background of the big picture as God gets more glory and be able to say, "Hey, there I am."
