How God Calls Me Upward

God most draws me up when others pull me down. I’m finding that God tests me most in community and the test is rarely ever of my own choosing. Yet, God draws me up to purity and sanctification as I’m asked to reckon with the weaknesses of others. In dealing with others’ weaknesses God exposes the places where I need to become more like him in grace and mercy and love. To avoid this is to avoid his upward call.

My temptation is to guard against my immaturity - my lack of grace and mercy,- to tuck it away, protect myself from it, and avoid the circumstances that require of me more grace than I feel I have to give. My own immaturity threatens the godly, orderly life I want to live. It is a threat to my own sense of being pleasing to myself. I can intellectualize it and understand it but none of that serves to sanctify it. Thus, God uses the weakness of others to expose it and to draw it again to my attention. He is drawing me up.

Only by fully ackknowledging what God allows to be revealed can I lay it down at his feet. Only then can I ask for help, plead for mercy and ah ha….there is it - awareness that we all require mercy and that I too must learn to give it to others. He has drawn me up.