Have you ever been sitting in a room full of people and all you can think about is everything they are that you aren't?
All the ways that they are better than you?
All the ways that you don't measure up?
All the areas that you are better than them in?
All the ways you need to improve, so that you can be on the same level?
God is continuing to teach me about the body of Christ.
I can't tell you how many times this has come up in my life over the past 5 months.
God has taught me a lot of different things around scriptures concerning this topic.
Recently, He showed me the importance of seeing certain things as different instead of better.
I have this really bad habit of taking two things, placing them side by side and deciding which one wins the competition and takes the title of "better."
I can do this with anything.
Appearance. Spiritual Gifts. Personality. Jobs. Schools. Families. Ways of doing things.
Really anything can be a competition for "better" if you want it to be.
What God has been teaching me is that I look at things as a ladder.
Everything is part of a ranking system and I continuously rank anything and everything to see where it falls on the ladder.
Which Spiritual gifts are better?
Who is funnier?
Who is prettier?
Who loves Jesus the most?
You name it and I can rank it on my ladder of better and worse.
I guess the best way to describe it is like the "Who Wore It Better Section" of People magazine.
They take celebs who are wearing the same dress(mind you they both look stunning in it) and they vote on who wore it best.
It is the same dress, but the way they accessorize it and create the look can be drastically different.
The readers analyze it and decide who wins.
I do this a lot in life.
I take two things that are similar and compare them in order to see which is better.
But it is starting to make more sense to me to see things as simply different.
She wore it different, not better.
It is actually a beautiful thing that God created us all so diverse and that we are all so different.
What God is showing me is that He doesn't work in ladders at all.
People are all different and when you stop and think about it that is really beautiful.
What if we change the way we think from let me be better than everyone else, to let me be the best version of the person that God created me to be.
We spend so much time competing and trying to be like everyone else, when as cheesy as it sounds, we should just focus on being us because that is who God created us to be.
God created each of us with a purpose and He has created us with everything that we need to fulfill that purpose.
So if we all have different purposes, we are all going to need different things and be different people, so that we can fulfill our specific purpose form God.
Our God is so incredible and created us all as individuals.
He is a God who loves details and made each of us so intentionally different.
I no longer want to try and fit into someone else's mold when He made me with a very specific purpose and made no mistakes with me.
I want to embrace the gifts he has given to me and the person He has made me to be instead of trying to be everything everyone else is.
What He always brings me back to is how the body of Christ is so diverse and how we are that way not so that we can compete for who is better, but so that we can work together.
After all, every part is necessary and the body wouldn't function the way it was intended to if that part wasn't present.
When we embrace the differences as a good thing and not a competition for who is better we can do amazing things together.
I see the body of Christ displayed in my team all of the time.
We are all so different and have different personalities and gifts.
This could create a place that is full of disagreements, misunderstandings and even jealously, but it is amazing to watch our differences work together.
To see how God can use us in ways as a team that we could never do as just an individual.
It is the most amazing thing to see all of our gifts working together.
To see everyone using the things that God has given them and owning them, instead of trying to be everything everyone else is, and realizing that every part is important and necessary.
All of the parts of the body of Christ are very different, but none of them are better than another because we need every single part of the body in order to function.
