Can you feel it the tug of all the responsibility… all the voices calling your name and the laundry piles and the sink with its dishes and the phones incessant rings (maybe turn them off, warm smile)? Can you feel the weight of responsibility pulling on you? How can you spend life gazing upward when everything is pulling your vision down? When it seems all the demands call your eyes to the immediate instead of the eternal?

You learn to offer your heart up to God even while your eyes are gazing down at all the good and holy callings to fulfill them by some miracle of His grace.

And sometimes this comes with much difficulty. Grace isn’t a free pass to a do nothing sort of life. Grace is a path to do beautiful and hard things for our Savior.

Grace isn’t a free pass; grace is a path…

Sometimes I am momentarily on top of whatever list I have jotted down. Most of the time I am in the fray, in the midst of a wonderful highly demanding life that includes all the joy you can imagine. It requires all the selflessness you can muster up, and oh I have tried to muster it up, you too? It never works because…

Working in your own strength is a sure way to fail.

That’s the thing you simply cannot live a full life by your mere effort. You live a demanding life by seeing everything being sifted to you as an opportunity to do two things… Make much of Jesus and make much of others.

We can get weighed down or we can bow down in prayer for the help we need and get lifted up.

The thing is life has always been demanding in every generation. You were placed here to know God, love Him, and to do the things He has called you to. There’s no perfection in this, not the slightest drop, but there can be joy and repentance and love in it. And you will feel the impatience rise up in you and you can crush spirits or build them. You can show people, little people like your kids, that life is more about list tending than love giving, or you can show them how to make it through the demands. You can show them Jesus in all things.

The truth is we can delight in the Lord and work heartily unto Him in every single thing, or we can live mostly impatient, quick tempered, shoving people about like they are obstacle standing in the way of our goals. This would be a life with a wrong aim.

To be required to do certain things is a part of life… There are just things must be done. It’s the manner in which you do them that makes them pleasing worship to God or not.