This past weekend my wife and I went with some friends to Lake Texoma to go striper fishing. It was a great time being on the water, and a lot of fun. The first question that everyone asked when we got back was how many we caught. (My wife did better than me, but that is a whole other story, and we won’t go there.) The truth is we didn’t do that great over all. Nobody limited out, and for those who had gone before it was under expectation. But I’ve learned something and thought a lot about it since we’ve gotten home. If we had known what the results would have been before, the trip might have been canceled, but then so many other things we got to experience would have been canceled such as the great meal, the jokes, the laughter, the conversations on the boat, the beauty of the sunrise on the lake, the fish we did catch and seeing the joy of my wife whoop up on me catching those fish. Sometimes it is easy to measure success by the wrong thing, and therefore leave out all the peripheral benefits that were enjoyed.
Sometimes our Christian walk is measured the same way. We count our successes or blessings based in goals reached rather than the experience and life lessons learned. Our goal as believers are to be like Christ, yet that is a goal that will never be obtained. Many, therefore, beat themselves up in the failure, get frustrated, and their joy is robbed. We should rather measure our blessings not by the pluses or minuses of being like Jesus, but rather the experience of becoming like Jesus. Sure we are going to fail, and God already knows this, but the joy of the experience should be much more of our focus rather than only seeing our failures and faults. We are covered in grace, and we strive as we may to be like Jesus, but we should also enjoy the ride on our way to that goal.
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