This one’s for you

What if you get to the ripe old age of, let’s say, over 50 and you realize you haven’t accomplished much? You know. You haven’t been successful in business, haven’t revolutionized a product or a process, haven’t been invited to speak before large crowds, haven’t even written a break-out novel. Heck, what have you been doing with yourself?

Worse yet, what if you were voted most likely to succeed by your high school classmates? How disappointing to start off with so much gusto and glide in with so little to show for it.

I’m not looking for sympathy here. I’m just stating the facts. I was given lots of tools and lots of resources and an open door to the world. That comes with strings. The strings are: use these gifts, talents and treasures to build up the kingdom. I’m looking back on a lot of projects that were started and not finished. Good ideas whose time just never came. Efforts and initiatives that fizzled and went out. Queries I didn’t follow up on or projects that had their season but were unsustained. Left behind. Lost.

One day I will be called to give an accounting. To lay all my deeds and doings on that scale and see if they balance against the plans God had for me. We’ll see, He and I, whether I have contributed what I was meant to while I was here.

Yesterday, I got some good news about this moment. There is a place for invisible deeds on that balance. Things we don’t see but God does. Time and age and distance and despair may blind us to what God sees so clearly. But every now and then we’re given a glimpse of the invisible. Someone is kind enough to share that what we said or did a long time ago has stayed with them. It’s become a part of their story – a good part – that has meant much and lingers still. We have forgotten these things. In fact, we are reluctant to believe we are even responsible for these things because, let’s be honest, we were really not such good people back then. But still, something real remains, and it gives life.

Somehow God is working His eternal in our lives here on earth even without our knowing. And that’s good because, had I known it, I would have messed it up for sure. I am feeling especially blessed today for the kind recallings of this old friend who says the old me still lives on in him – in a good way. How do you account for that? No telling. I’m just glad God’s doing the accounting.

And I still have time left. It’s a wonderful life. Now, to finish that breakout novel!!