Daily Devotional

"MAN!"

by Justin Linscheid on May 27, 2023

My 1-year-old daughter Jane is virtually obsessed with a statue in our neighbor’s yard across the street from our house. It is a statue of St. Francis of Assisi, but Jane just calls it “Man!” She often looks out our front window and exclaims, “man!!” She will whine until we either distract her in some way or pacify her with a trip over to see the man. Each morning when I wake her up, I know that at some point I can expect her to want to go over to see the man. A simple walk over to see the man and the affirmation that he is still there is enough to make her content for a while. She is funny with it and I get a kick out of it. Although, seeing that she is not yet 2 years old and already interested in men, I will need to keep a close watch on her.

Soon, she will likely no longer be interested in this statue. I imagine mentioning this obsession to her when she is 10 and her finding it silly. She won’t want to wake up and see it at that point.

Yet in Jane’s obsession of “the man”, she is not so different than many of us.

We might not be infatuated with a statue, but we go through seasons in which something seems so important to us in the moment. Whether it is a pair of shoes, a car, a certain house, a relationship with a certain someone, a job, a sport we play, etc., we can all likely relate to something being very important to us at one point in time only to live to see it fade from our desires over time. At one point we thought about it often, maybe changed our lives because of it, or even felt like we couldn’t live without it. Now it seems silly that it meant so much to us. Perhaps we lived to become disillusioned as our hopes were dashed because we put so much of our hope in it.

1 John 2:17 tells us, “And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever.” There are many things in this world that we crave and even center our lives around, things that hold our hearts captive. These are things that can even hinder our fellowship with God if we allow them to. Yet if we could zoom out and see things clearly from an eternal perspective, we would wonder why some things mattered so much to us and why other things didn’t matter more to us.

The Bible tells us that this world is not forever but that God and following Him is. By God’s strength and perspective, we can learn to release our grip from sinful cravings that captivate our hearts, and instead center our lives upon the unfading glory of loving God and walking His ways.

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