Constructive Criticism

I have discovered that I do my best thinking when I am suffering from insomnia. Or perhaps that is when God talks to me the most.

I was sitting in my room unable to sleep and I picked up a paper that had just been handed back to me. I flipped through the pages that I had poured my heart and soul into only to find that it had been bloodied by the red ink of my professor. When you first see that you want to cry. You think to yourself I'm doing all of this hard work and it's still not good enough! Then I look at my grade and I see that I have an A. It's a 90 barely an A but an A all the same. So why all the red marks and comments? I wonder this as I begin to read my professors notes. I see that all of them say things like "change the wording here it will sound more professional" or "remove this paragraph it's just clutter". All through my paper are these helpful suggestions that will "get me closer to my goal" What is that goal? Well according to my professor my goal is to make her not pick up her pen while reading my paper. She told me that she wanted to read it and be able to pick up her pen at the very end and simply write excellent.

I think you all know where I am going with this. Sitting here at 4:00 am I started thinking about how our walk with God is kind of like that. God is our professor so to speak. Sometimes we feel like we are doing everything right and we're working so hard to live right and do his will. Then we go to church and the preacher steps on our toes or maybe reads our mail. At first you want to cry and you feel like nothing you do is good enough but then you really start to listen and all God is really saying is "if you'll just make this small adjustment you'll be a little closer" or "get that out of your life it's just getting in the way of our relationship" Never does God look at our lives and tell us how awful we are, instead he looks at our lives and he tries to tell us how to get closer to our goal. What is our goal? To hear God say well done at the very end!

I want to learn to take the constructive criticism that God gives me with a good attitude. The kind of attitude that says I'm going to take your suggestions and make a few changes because I don't just want to make it by the skin of my teeth. Just like I'll take this paper and make the suggested changes and hand in a fresh clean copy that she can just write excellent across the top of. I want God to be able to write excellent across my life when it reaches the end.