A New Scale

Stop judging by appearances, but judge justly.  John 7:24

How do you measure your goodness?  How can you label your value or your worth?  Society has lots of ways to do that for us and I’m here to tell you they’ve got it all wrong!  Switching from little to middle lovelies has brought lots of challenges and even more blessings.  When people ask if I think I made the right choice I can say there are little lovely things I miss but overall I LOVE the middle lovelies!  However my first “What was I thinking” experience came last week as I was preparing report cards.  YUCK!  First of all, adding and dividing all those numbers was awful, second; summing up an entire quarter of work in a two digit number was a lousy thing to have to do and thirdly; I realized how little that number or letter really says about the person it was assigned to!  The whole experience left my brain bubblin, so I took it to prayer and out popped a post!

Thursday afternoon I watched kids look at a collection of letters and begin to make assessments and judgments about themselves and their classmates. I saw confidence soar and plummet.  I saw joy and I saw frustration…all because of a letter in a box and I wanted to scream.  After some thought I realized it’s not just students that do it…we all do it.  We look at a scale that measures one specific part of who we are and we apply it to our entire being.  I think to some degree we have all been affected by a letter or a number assigned to us by someone else. Some people look at their age and let it dictate how they should act or what they should do.  Some people look at the number on the scale or on their tag and instantly feel pride or shame.  Some folks look at a test score or an income to determine their station in life.  What about the people who use the age of someone’s house or car to judge their worth or value.  Oh yeah and the almighty judgments made based on income or address.  How quickly we forget they are just numbers that reflect a piece of information about one part of our life…they don’t define us!  We worry about IQ’s and ACT scores and Credit ratings.  We stress about interest rates and debt tallies and gas prices.

How about we look at another judgment scale! What if we used the letter and number scale below to judge our greatness and importance instead…

WP – wonderfully and perfectly made (that’s all of us…ALL of us…flaws, sins and all)

100%  - that’s the amount of minutes in each day God watches, protects and loves us; that’s also the amount of minutes each day he asks us to do the same with each other

HS – humble service…that’s our true measure of goodness and it was demonstrated by the washing of 12 men’s dirty feet

QP – quiet prayer…that’s the letter combination to make us all winners

12 – seems like a small number but 12 uneducated, common men spread the Gospel in an astounding fashion; how often do you spread the Gospel like they did

3/1 – the perfect number…the essential number…the lifesaving mystery number Father, Son, Holy Spirit 3 in 1…the answer to everything no matter how large or how small

I’ll bet if you really thought about it a little while, you could come up with more to add to the list.  I’d love to get a piece of paper giving me a HS for the day…that’s a good mark on the scale of Christian goodness don’t you think.  It’s time we start looking beyond the scales and measures our culture sets up and look for the things that really matter!

A Seed To Plant:  Which label or measure above are you going to work on this week? Pick one and take it to prayer then make sure you look for that measure in others while you try to amplify it in yourself. 
Blessings on your day!