Barbecue & Becoming Unrecognisable

Just got home from a barbecue at Becky's.

After a prayer meeting at church this evening, we decided to go to her place to cook hamburgers on the grill. Bacon hamburgers, that is!

It wasn't long before they were all gone. The cook was awesome, the company was great and the pickles made everything go down really easily.

After dinner, we spent the rest of the night playing cards sitting on the road outside the garage.

It all sounds very simple, but I actually had a lot of fun. Mostly because I wasn't constantly feeling on edge as the people around me weren't spitting curse words left and right. I also felt comfortable because I knew that I could speak freely about Christ if I wished to. Hanging out with Christian friends is really different from hanging out with non-Christians.

It seems as if the very air around us changes when Jesus' name isn't thrown around meaninglessly.

How I wish sometimes that all the people I hung out with were only Christian friends... But that's just impossible. Not to mention, cutting myself out from the world like that would be going against God's command to be a light in this dark world (Matthew 5:14-15) and to spread the gospel wherever we can (Mark 16:15).

Yesterday, my mom said something really interesting.

She said that after spending some time with my dad this past week, she realised that he has become a completely different person that she could not recognise anymore. She said that he was just so different from the man she met almost twenty odd years ago.

Thankfully, the change she indicates is a positive one, all thanks to the workings of God in his life.

When I thought more about it, I saw how fortunate my dad was even through his trials over the years. Even at my age, he had already amassed quite a small fortune and he believes that he would have become a multi-millionaire by now if not for the stock markets crashing in the 90s.

If my dad had not lost his money and prestige back then, would he have drawn this near to God over the years? It's quite unlikely. I think he would have continued living in a wayward fashion, caring only for himself and little for the needs of others.

Harsh, I know. But I say this because my dad and I have more or less the same sort of personality in this matter. If God had not brought me down at certain points in my life, you can be sure that my head would be the size of Jupiter right now.

This is precisely why "sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart." (Ecclesiastes 7:3).

You don't see successful people happily running to church after they hit the jackpot, win homecoming queen, or become the president of the United States. The people that you truly see repenting and turning their lives to God are usually the people who have been so broken down and battered by life that they finally understood how undeserving they are.

Obviously some people will twist this by saying that when people come to a dead end in life, religion is just one of the things that they will turn to, alcohol being another one of the "escapes".

Perhaps.

But the broken are so much more better off than those who live their entire lives with smiles on their faces and empty souls on the inside- only to die one day and realise that they have wasted their time on earth when Jesus was calling their name every single day.

Anyway, what my mom said about my dad really made an impact on me and I had to ask myself this question: will people still recognise me in twenty years?

My preferred answer would be- no.

I don't want to be recognisable.

I want people to look at the person I am (if I'm still alive, God-willing) and not be able to see any traces of the old me at all. If I am loud and boisterous now, I want to become a godly woman of a "quiet and gentle spirit" (1 Peter 3:4). If I am a lazy bum now, I want to become an industrious, hardworking woman who gets up before dawn to tend to matters (Proverbs 31:10-31).

I know what some of you are thinking...

Fat chance! No way! Impossible!

Trust me, I have doubts too.

But one thing I do not doubt, that my God is able and He is willing to take this heart and change it into something so different, so amazing, that you would not be able to deny that it was God who did it when it is done!