You Cut Me Down To Size and Opened Up My Eyes, Made Me Realize What I Could Not See

Sometimes when I am looking for song lyrics to fill the title of each day's post, they have this incredible way of exactly fitting what is on my heart. Today, I wanted to write about the book I just finished reading, and for some reason I wanted to use lyrics from a song on Coldplay's album called "Swallowed in the Sea." Right when I was listening to the song, I knew that the lyrics were perfect for what I wanted to write about today.

With all that said, here goes. Today, I finished reading Louie Giglio's new book "i am not but I know I AM." One of the things that reaffirms my faith daily is the knowledge that God is at work in the world, and I see it through small things. Throughout college there have a been a few running themes in my life, but the largest one has been learning what it means to live out John 3:30 when it says, "He must become greater and I must become less." What does it mean to die to myself and live as Christ each and every day?

As I have written about before in the space, I had the chance to hear Louie speak at the Converge Leadership Conference that I was able to attend in Atlanta. The power of his message was not that he introduced anything revolutionary or groundbreaking, but that he provided clarity to a life that sometimes seems anything but clear. He reminded us that the end of evangelists, ministers, musicians, writers, and others who follow Christ is the same. In the end, we are not seeking to bring more people to Christ so that the scoreboard in Heaven is greater than the one in Hell. The focus of all that we do is to bring more people to God so that he receives more praise, his fame is greater, and his renown is the desire of our hearts. Everything we do points to his glory.

We can throw ourselves into making our lives all that we have ever dreamed, but in the end, when they are piling the dirt on our caskets, that story ends. The timeless grind of eternity presses on and we will be forgotten. But what if we could tap into immortality? What if we could become part of the story that will never die? What if we could throw away our starring roles in the story that fills a drop in the ocean of eternity for the story that will take eternity to play out? This is the focus of Louie's book. Again, it should be nothing new to us, but I think we have somehow allowed ourselves to clutter things to the degree that we forget what we were created to do in the first place. I'll leave you with the following passage:

"So often we think that everything begins when we step through the door. We think that the project happened because we had the brilliant idea, and are convinced that the mission was accomplished because we chose to participate. But things don't start when we have a "vision," or when we think of a new way of doing things, choose to act, have a burst of creative inspiration, give or pray. God's story is the already-in-motion story, a story that was happening just fine before we arrived and is going to go on just fine with or without you and me. That's why we should wake up each day on the lookout for the Story of God, constantly thinking to ourselves, "God is already here, What is he up to?"