What is the most important thing that you have? I am not asking what the most important thing in life to you is. Instead, I am asking what is the most important thing that you have in life? When you have considered your answer then I have this question. Is there anything in life that is more important to you than the most important thing that you have?
How important is your family to you? How important is your health to you? How important is your work to you? How important are relationships to you? How careful you are with the things you value reveals just how important anything is to you.
Being careful doesn’t mean what you might think. Careful means we are full of care about who we are and what we mean to life and in the world around us.
Being careful means living as if we cannot be replaced in the lives of others who hold us important to them. It means living as if we are the lifeline to a better life for others. Being careful means knowing that life is less about us and more about someone or something else.
When we are not careful, we open the door to carelessness. Carelessness abounds when carefulness is missing. Being careless simply means we place more importance on our lives than on the lives around us. When we are careless, we are more concerned about where we walk than we are about where we take others.
One of the reasons we find it difficult to become careful is because we are selfish. A selfish person is the most important person to that person. A selfish person is the most important thing to a selfish person. A selfish person is the most important desire to a selfish person. A selfish person does not have to be careful; a selfish person simply lives careless of other things.
Knowing that carefulness is important to living our best, we must learn to become careful. But how do we do this when we don’t know how to get ourselves out of our way? Psalms 119: 33-40 has this answer, “Teach me, O Lord the way of Your statutes, and I shall keep it to the end. Give me understanding and I shall keep Your law. Incline my heart to Your testimonies.”
Here scripture is saying that there is something more important in life than ourselves. It is saying there is something more important in life than the way we are living our lives. We should not just be concerned to do what we want to do. We need to be careful about what our lives means to all life. It is as if the Lord is asking us to ask Him, “Please make me careful about how I live this life.”
If we did that, He would show us:
- How to be careful about the things that should be the most important things we have in life outside of a relationship with Him. We would learn we cannot be at the center of what is important to us.
- How to be careful about the things that should be the most important things we desire in life outside of what we want from Him. The desires we have for ourselves should be balanced by the desires we should have for others.
- How to be careful in those times when we are the most important things in life to people and things outside of ourselves. We learn we may be the center of someone else’s life.
Learning to be careful about life is learning to ponder everything you do and all that you are just in case you are the object of what is important to someone else.
Let this prayer be yours: “Lord, Make Me Careful so that I may please You in all things, and so that I may be the right things for others who pray to You looking for something or someone to be an important part of their lives. Lord, Make Me Careful to be careful!”
Live a Delivered Life. Love You.
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