“And I’ll give it all to you God, trusting that you’ll make something beautiful out of me!”

As I sat listening to Bethel Church worship on Youtube this Saturday morning, this line from one of the songs clung to me. In this season of my life, God is doing miraculous things all around me, and He is truly using me to spread His love to others. How humbling that He would use me, because my imperfect love is nothing like the love He has to offer. Often in this life we can feel a pressure to perform, to accomplish. It’s engrained in our culture and work ethic to outperform others so that we can rise above and make a way for ourselves. While this might have merit on Wall Street, this is not at all how God sees us. God does not require us to perform at a certain level, and he doesn’t want us to make a way for ourselves. God wants us to offer up our lives to Him so that He may use the gifts, skills, personality, passions, and desires that He has given us in ways that only He can dream up. God already has a way for us, and that way is more fulfilling than any way we could come up with on our own. Walking down this path doesn’t occur because of anything we can attain, but rather by submitting our own selves, and our prerogatives, fully to Him. Doing life our own way is like putting a puzzle with a million pieces together without having the picture, the end result, to aim for. The puzzle maker provides the pieces and the finished picture, so we use both. Going our own way in life is taking a million pieces of ourselves that God has given us and trying to make our own creation with them. We might be able to assemble something with a few of the pieces, but we will never be able to use them all to make a creation that is beautiful, awe-inspiring, and makes sense. God has given every single one of us specific pieces and He has a magnificent picture for how those pieces will fit together and, in fact, how everyone’s pieces fit together. It’s the most important, impressive puzzle ever.

In the same way that God wants us to offer up our lives to Him, He also wants us to offer up our fears and performance anxiety. I know I fall short of this daily, as I walk in this season. “Is my work really helping people? Am I doing enough for God?” I see this happening in churches all across the U.S. as well. God is not calling us to ‘win’ so many souls, or to check off a certain number of boxes on the ‘changed-lives sheet,’ but to simply offer up ourselves for His use. If we are obedient, He will take care of the rest. If we listen to His call, He will move us where He wants us, and it will be (and already has been) the most spectacular, beautiful experience we could ever imagine.

Next time you are afraid you are not performing enough for God, rest in the knowledge that He is bigger than the earthly boundaries and trials we face, and trust that He is making something beautiful out of you.