Potential

Potential, both a blessing and curse.

A chance at worthy achievement or each passing day a reminder of a life to which you can never measure up.

Sadness unlike sadness, yet there a path unlike paths.

***

Is not this world a heartbreaking version of what it could have been, eroding and swallowing up in large and little ways lives full of potential?

Was not the Son of God filled with the greatest potential of all—holding together the entire fabric of existence, reigning above all else in absolute perfection—and yet in human flesh tasked with carving wood, teaching fishermen, healing sickness, hanging on a cross?

This human life pushed Him to the limits of sweating blood at Gethsemane, crying out in anguish on the cross, and ultimately brought what seems an impossible salvation to a desperate humanity, but could Jesus not have been even more if our world was not haunted and full of hatred?

Let Jesus be our pattern and comfort, for our mission like His will not draw upon all with which God has gifted us. Some gifts may be precisely what we are told to leave behind. For we live not to exercise all our gifts or to find fulfillment in what we do, even for God, but to grow in unseen obedience and love.

To be bound to this haunted world, to be swallowed up, even crucified, makes possible a potential for our lives beyond our imagination. It grants us the opportunity to do that which is greatest in the truest sense—to love God and everyone else when it is most costly and stripped of any false rewards.

In the end, we do not most worship Christ’s supremacy but His sacrificial love.