Growing in the Fruit of the Spirit — Galatians 5:22–23

If you had a headache, you probably wouldn’t reach for allergy medicine. You would look for something that addresses what is actually bothering you.

I often think about this when it comes to studying the Bible.

Psalm 119:105 tells us that God’s Word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. What a beautiful picture of what Scripture is meant to be in the life of a believer. A lamp allows us to see where we are walking. It helps us recognize where we might stumble and which direction we should take.

Yet, I wonder how often we approach the Bible without considering the areas of our lives that desperately need its light.

We may be walking through a season of anxiety while reading through Genesis. We may be struggling with unforgiveness while working our way through a completely different portion of Scripture. And although there is tremendous value in reading the Bible from beginning to end, sometimes we close it feeling as though we haven’t found the encouragement or direction we were hoping for.

This doesn’t mean God wasn’t speaking through what we read. Every part of Scripture is profitable, and we should never limit our understanding of God to the passages that seem immediately relevant to our circumstances.

But I have learned that there is also great value in approaching the Word of God with intentionality.

Sometimes we need to ask ourselves, What is happening in my heart right now? What area of my life needs to be brought into the light of God’s truth?

One of the passages I return to when examining my own spiritual growth is Galatians 5:22–23, where Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit:

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

These qualities are not simply a list of admirable behaviors. They are evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work in the life of a believer.

And when I examine them carefully, I often recognize areas where my flesh is still fighting against the work God desires to do in me.

Perhaps I am becoming easily irritated with my children. Perhaps I have allowed worry to occupy more of my thoughts than prayer. Or perhaps my words have lacked the gentleness I so readily encourage others to practice.

Friend, the beautiful thing is that God doesn’t reveal these areas to leave us discouraged. He invites us to bring them before Him. The Lord wants to transform our hearts, renew our minds, and teach us to walk in His ways.

Over the years, I have found three practices especially helpful when confronting struggles and seeking to grow in the fruit of the Spirit.

1. Study Scripture With Your Struggle in Mind

When I recognize an area where I’m struggling, I begin studying what the Bible says about it.

If I’m struggling with patience, I study biblical patience. If I’m having difficulty forgiving someone, I look at what Jesus taught about forgiveness. If I’m in a season of waiting, I study people in Scripture who learned to trust God through uncertainty.

I don’t want to find verses simply to make myself feel better. I want to understand God’s perspective, even when it challenges my own.

Friend, God has given us His Word so we can know Him and learn His ways. Whatever season you’re walking through, allow His truth to guide you through it.

2. Keep God’s Word Before Your Eyes

Romans 12:2 reminds us that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds.

When I recognize a particular struggle, I begin memorizing Scriptures that speak to that area of my life.

I write verses on sticky notes and place them around my house. I repeat them while doing ordinary things, meditate on their meaning, and pray through them.

If I’m struggling with anxiety, I want God’s truth to become more familiar to my mind than my fears.

Second Corinthians 10:5 teaches us to take our thoughts captive and make them obedient to Christ.

Friend, you don’t have to continue thinking the same way you’ve always thought. The Lord can renew your mind and teach you to respond differently, one obedient step at a time.

3. Learn From Those Who Have Walked Before Us

One of the gifts of belonging to the body of Christ is that we don’t have to walk this journey alone.

Faithful Christians have spent years studying Scripture, walking through difficult seasons, and sharing what God has taught them.

I love reading Christian books that continually point me back to God’s Word. They have encouraged me, challenged my thinking, and helped me grow.

Of course, no resource replaces Scripture. But there is wisdom in learning from believers who have walked before us.

Recently, I organized some of my favorite Christian books around the nine fruits of the Spirit, hoping they might encourage others in their own spiritual growth.

A Life That Bears Fruit

When Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, he is not giving us a list of qualities to produce through our own strength.

Fruit grows because there is life within.

In the same way, the character of Christ is formed in us through the work of the Holy Spirit as we learn to walk with Him.

But this does not mean we remain passive. We are called to abide in Christ, study His Word, put away the works of the flesh, and walk in obedience to what He teaches us.

And sometimes that begins with the simple willingness to acknowledge an area where we need to grow.

Perhaps today you recognize that your home needs more gentleness. Perhaps your thoughts need to be brought under the truth of God’s peace. Perhaps the Lord has been showing you an area where self-control or faithfulness has been lacking.

Whatever it may be, don’t allow that realization to lead you away from Him in discouragement.

Friend, draw near to Him. God is not finished with you. He desires to shape your heart, strengthen your faith, and produce beautiful fruit in your life.

Open His Word. Study His ways. Ask Him to renew your mind and produce in you what you cannot produce on your own.

After all, the purpose of a lamp is not simply to admire its light, but to walk by it.

And what a beautiful thing it is when the Word we have studied begins to shape the life we are living.

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A Little Resource for You

I recently created a digital reading list with 25 Christian book recommendations organized around the nine fruits of the Spirit. These are books I have personally read and found helpful in my own walk with the Lord.

If you would like a copy, leave a comment below, and I would love to send it to you personally.

One of the most transformative lessons I’ve learned about enjoying my life came from a book that felt less like reading and more like sitting across from a wise grandmother who was lovingly teaching me how to live.

One of the lessons that stayed with me was something so simple, yet it completely changed the way I understood my everyday responsibilities.

Work was never the curse.

I love that the very first pages of Scripture introduce us to a God who works. In Genesis 1, we see God creating the heavens and the earth, bringing order, filling the world with life, and delighting in what He has made. Again and again, He looks at His creation and declares that it is good.

And when His work is complete, He rests.

Then, in Genesis 2:15, God places Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

I find that fascinating because this happened before sin entered the world. In a perfect creation, where everything was good, God gave Adam something meaningful to do.

Work was part of God’s original design for humanity.

Now, when we get to Genesis 3:17–19, something changes. After Adam disobeys God, the ground is cursed. From that moment on, his work would involve painful toil, frustration, thorns, and sweat.

Notice the distinction.

God didn’t introduce work as a punishment for sin. Work already existed. What changed was the hardship and frustration that would now accompany it.

And I think that’s a beautiful truth to recover because work has developed a terrible reputation in our world.

We look forward to weekends, vacations, retirement, and pretty much any opportunity to escape our responsibilities. We celebrate shortcuts, making things easier, and accomplishing more with less effort. And while I certainly appreciate a good vacation, I believe we’ve become so accustomed to associating work with something unpleasant that we can begin treating anything requiring effort as something to avoid.

I believe the enemy has done an excellent job convincing us that anything requiring work must somehow be a punishment.

And what a terrible thing to believe, considering how many of the beautiful things God has given us to enjoy require a tremendous amount of work to cultivate.

As someone who teaches the Bible, I’ve experienced this in an interesting way. Whenever I teach about an aspect of the Christian life that requires discipline, sacrifice, or consistent effort, there’s a little part of me that worries people will lose their enthusiasm.

Have you ever noticed how quickly our excitement about something can disappear when we discover how much work it requires?

Yet most of the things we deeply desire in life require our attention, our effort, and our willingness to grow.

A healthy marriage requires patience, forgiveness, intentionality, and difficult conversations. Beautiful family relationships require correction, discipline, sacrifice, and countless ordinary acts of faithfulness.

Even emotional maturity requires work. Learning to manage our emotions, recognize unhealthy patterns, take responsibility for our behavior, and grow in wisdom doesn’t happen simply because we want it to.

Well, it’s the same with our spiritual lives.

Hebrews 5:14 describes mature believers as those who have developed discernment through constant practice. I love how Scripture connects maturity with training. There are things God develops in us through the very process of exercising what we’ve learned.

It’s one thing to believe that patience is good; it’s another to practice patience when someone is testing every bit of it!

And this is where our negative view of work can become such a trap. We desire the fruit of a beautiful life while growing increasingly resistant to the effort involved in cultivating it.

But God’s Word gives us a much better picture.

The Work Is Doing Something in Us

I’ve learned to pay attention to the kind of person my responsibilities are helping me become.

The most valuable thing about our work isn’t always what we accomplish. Very often, it’s what God is developing in us through it.

The patience we learn while raising children. The humility we develop in marriage. The perseverance we practice when something doesn’t come easily. The wisdom we gain through responsibility. The love that grows when we faithfully care for others.

I love how the apostle Paul describes this process in Romans 5:3–4. He explains that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.

God is interested in more than the finished product. He is also at work in the person we are becoming.

I often say to myself that I don’t want to spend my life wishing away the responsibilities that make up the life I love.

There is work involved in raising my children, teaching them, caring for my home, nurturing my marriage, and serving in ministry. Some days are easier than others, and I certainly don’t enjoy every task equally. But I find so much encouragement in knowing that God can use these ordinary responsibilities to accomplish something beautiful in me.

Ecclesiastes 3:12–13 tells us that enjoying life, doing good, and finding satisfaction in our work are gifts from God.

I love how Scripture brings us back to this beautiful truth: God designed us to find enjoyment and satisfaction in meaningful work.

Instead of seeing our responsibilities as obstacles to the life we want to enjoy, we can begin recognizing that much of the life God has given us to enjoy is being cultivated through those very responsibilities.

The Good Work Prepared for You

God knows the life He has entrusted to us. He knows the people in our homes, the responsibilities on our shoulders, and the places where we serve.

If you’re a mother, there is meaningful work in nurturing, teaching, correcting, and loving your children. If you’re a wife, there is meaningful work in cultivating your marriage. If you’re a teacher, there is meaningful work in patiently investing in the people entrusted to your care.

If you’re serving in your church, caring for someone with special needs, building a home, working in an office, or faithfully serving your community, there is purpose in the work before you.

And I would hate for us to miss the treasures God has placed in our lives simply because we’ve become convinced that anything requiring effort must be something to escape.

I want to enjoy the work of cultivating what God has entrusted to me. I want to appreciate the privilege of having people to love, responsibilities to steward, and opportunities to grow.

After all, the greatest treasure may not be what we accomplish along the way, but who God is making us as we walk with Him.

And I can’t think of a more encouraging way to end this reflection than with Ephesians 2:10:

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” — Ephesians 2:10 (ESV)

We are His workmanship, created for good works.

So let’s learn to trust the goodness of the One who created us, and embrace the work He has prepared for us with gratitude and joy.

Work was never the curse.

“Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy.” — Micah 7:18 (NIV)

Who is God?

This question started haunting me toward the end of 2025, as I was preparing to close one year and begin another. I was looking through my Bible, thinking about what I wanted to study next, trying to decide which book of the Bible I should read or what book I should pick up to accompany my time in the Word. And for some reason, the same question kept coming back to me: Who is God?

Now, you have to understand why this question was so strange to me. I know God! I’ve walked with the Lord for years, and I have a very real, vibrant, walk-by-my-side relationship with Him. I experience Him so personally when I read my Bible. There are moments when I can almost hear His voice through His Word, and when I pray, I can feel the Spirit guiding me in prayer. So it wasn’t that I was suddenly questioning whether I knew God or whether He was real. It was more like this question had been planted in my spirit, and I couldn’t quite shake it. Who is God? Not what does He want me to do? Not what does He have planned for my life? But who is He?

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that although I had spent years studying the Bible, so much of my reading had been directed toward things I wanted to learn for my own life. How to be a better mother, how to grow spiritually, how to navigate relationships, how to serve Him better. And there’s nothing wrong with any of those things. But I began to feel this tremendous pull toward studying God Himself. I wanted to know His nature, His character, His attributes. I wanted to understand who He is, even apart from the things He does for me.

So, for the first time, I decided to dedicate the majority of my reading to that one pursuit. I read books like Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis and The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer. I also included Jen Wilkin’s None Like Him and In His Image in my devotional reading. And I found myself genuinely excited about all of it.

I remember asking the Lord, “Where can I find You in the Bible? I mean, I know You’re everywhere, but where should I go to learn about You?” And I felt drawn to Deuteronomy, which became such a beautiful place to study the heart of God. I wanted to see how a God like Him would establish a nation, what He considered important, what He commanded, what He loved, and what His dealings with His people revealed about His character. I also spent time in Matthew and Mark, getting to know Jesus through the Gospels, and in Revelation and Job. I wasn’t reading simply to finish another book of the Bible. I was on a quest to answer this question: Who is God?

And somewhere along the way, I discovered something that I don’t think I was expecting at all. The more I learned about who God is, the more I began to understand who I am not.

I am not God.

I know, I know. Quite the revelation, right? Haha! But stay with me, because this was genuinely one of the most humbling and freeing realizations of my life.

As I studied God’s attributes, I learned about what theologians call His communicable and incommunicable attributes. Fancy words, I know! They even made me feel like a little theologian for a moment. Haha! But the more I learned about the attributes that belong to God alone, the more I was confronted with how much of the turmoil in my own life came from trying to possess them. My judgment of others came from trying to be omniscient, as though I could know their hearts. My exhaustion came from trying to be omnipresent, as though I could be everywhere for everyone. My struggle with my limitations came from wanting to be self-sufficient, needing nothing and no one. And my fear of change came from longing for immutability, wanting circumstances to remain the same when only God is unchanging.

I realized how easily I could dishonor God’s character by attempting to sit on His throne. Not intentionally, of course. I wasn’t walking around thinking I could do a better job than God! But sometimes I was behaving as though everything depended on my abilities to do things that only He could.

We are called to reflect His character, not assume His responsibilities.

And while that realization was humbling, it was also incredibly freeing. Because yes, I am not God, but He is. And goodness, He is so good at being God.

That’s something I kept thinking throughout my reading. God is so good at being God! He knows when to forgive and when to correct. He knows the right time for everything. He is perfectly merciful and perfectly just. He knows what I cannot know, sees what I cannot see, and understands things I will probably never understand on this side of eternity. And the more I studied Him, the more I found myself resting in His sovereignty.

This morning, as I was reading Micah 7, I came across that beautiful question: “Who is a God like you?” And I smiled because here I was, after spending so much of this year asking who God is, reading a prophet who was marveling at the very same thing. Micah had been describing the unfaithfulness of God’s people, the corruption around him, and the difficulty of finding those who were righteous. And yet, when he turns his attention to God, he speaks of His compassion, His mercy, and His faithfulness to the promises He made.

I love that because people change, circumstances change, nations rise and fall, and generations come and go, but God remains faithful. He doesn’t exist within the limitations of time the way we do. Tomorrow is not a mystery to Him. And when I read about His mercy, His wisdom, and His faithfulness, I am reminded again that there is no one like Him.

I think that’s why I would encourage everyone, at least once in their lifetime, to go on this kind of quest: study the character of God. And if theology sounds boring to you, I promise there are some wonderful books that make it approachable. You don’t have to become a theologian to fall in love with learning about God.

Because, friend, I think we are living in a time when the world is constantly asking us to become our own gods. We are told that we hold our future, that the answers are within ourselves, and that we can control our destiny. And I wonder how much of our exhaustion comes from carrying a weight that was never meant for us to carry.

God calls us to be like Him in character, but He never calls us to become Him.

So if you find yourself in turmoil today, if your responsibilities feel bigger than you, or perhaps you feel like what you’re doing is small and insignificant, I want to invite you to lift up your eyes. Spend some time getting to know the God who created you. Let His greatness, His wisdom, and His sovereign authority overwhelm your heart.

I think that’s what the psalmist was doing when he wrote:

“I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.” — Psalm 121:1–2

What a wonderful thing it is to know where our help comes from. And even more wonderful to remember that it certainly doesn’t come from our ability to have everything figured out. Ha!

God is so very good at being God. Trust Him today.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much of life is built in really small moments. I think homeschooling has made me notice this more because so much of what I do with my girls every day can feel incredibly small. We practice one vowel, one sound, one number. Sometimes we go over the same thing so many times that I wonder if it is even sticking. Then one random day, they know it. Something that felt like it wasn’t going anywhere was actually building the entire time.

I think our lives with God are a lot like that.

We love the big moments. We love the answered prayer, the breakthrough, the opportunity we prayed for, the moment when we can finally look back and say, “Wow, look what God did.” But lately I’ve been wondering how many of those moments started with something so small that we almost didn’t think it mattered.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about some of the sweetest things God has brought into my life and how ordinary some of their beginnings were. A conversation. Showing up somewhere. Sending a text. Saying yes to something I could have easily said no to. There was no way for me to know at the time what those little decisions would become.

Zechariah 4:10 says, “Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin.”

I love the wording of that verse because it doesn’t say that the Lord only rejoices when the work is finished. He rejoices to see it begin.

I think sometimes I’m so focused on what I’m asking God to do that I overlook what He has already put in front of me to do. I want to know where something is going before I give myself fully to the beginning. I want to see the fruit while God is asking me to be faithful with a seed.

But a lot of our lives are lived in the seed part.

It’s reading your Bible this morning even if you don’t have some incredible revelation afterward. It’s praying again for the thing you have prayed about a hundred times. It’s reaching out to the person God keeps putting on your heart. It’s going for the walk, making the meal, sitting down with your child, working on the idea, having the conversation, or simply doing the next thing you know you’re supposed to do.

None of those things feel particularly impressive while you’re doing them. That’s probably why they can be so easy to dismiss.

But when I think about my girls learning to read, I know I would never look at one little vowel lesson and say it doesn’t matter simply because they can’t read a whole book yet. This is how they learn to read. The tiny lesson isn’t separate from the bigger goal. It is part of how we get there.

Maybe there are things in my own life that I need to see the same way.

Maybe I don’t need to know what this small act of obedience will become. Maybe I just need to be faithful with it today and trust that God sees the whole thing while I can only see this little piece.

So that’s my prayer this week: Lord, help me pay attention to the small things. Help me not become so consumed with what I’m waiting for that I miss what You’re doing right now. And when You put something small in front of me, give me the faith to believe that small does not mean insignificant.

Sometimes it’s just a vowel.

But then one day, they’re reading.

“For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt… And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted… for the LORD your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.”
Joshua 2:10–11

Would you believe me if I told you these words were spoken by a prostitute?

Her name was Rahab, and if I am quite honest with you, I see a little bit of myself in her. Rahab was not an Israelite. She didn’t grow up among the people of God or experience the miracles Israel had experienced. She was a woman living in Jericho who had simply heard about what the God of Israel had done—and she believed.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons I love her story so much. I didn’t grow up in church either. There wasn’t a long history of Christianity passed down to me. Somewhere along the way, I heard about Jesus, I believed that what I was hearing was true, and that belief changed the direction of my life. And in some ways, isn’t there a little Rahab in all of us? We heard the good news about a God we could not see, we believed, and our lives changed because of it.

Hebrews 11:31 remembers Rahab as a woman of faith, and James 2:25 points to her as an example of faith that produced action. She heard, she believed, and then she acted according to what she believed. But there is another part of her story that has been sitting with me lately.

When the spies arrived in Jericho, Rahab told them that her people had already heard about their God. She even mentioned the Red Sea, an event that had happened decades before. Israel had spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before Joshua finally led the next generation toward the land God had promised them. We don’t know when Rahab first heard these stories or how long she had personally been thinking about the God of Israel, but we know this: God’s reputation had arrived in Jericho before His people did.

And it makes me wonder about all the people who can be sitting on the other side of our obedience that we know absolutely nothing about.

When Rahab hid the spies, she asked them not only to save her, but to save her family. Eventually, a scarlet cord hung from her window, and when Israel entered Jericho, Joshua 6 tells us that Rahab and her family were spared. This woman who had only heard about God became part of His people. Even more beautifully, Matthew 1:5 later gives us her name in the genealogy of Jesus Christ.

Her obedience was not only for her.

And this is where her story becomes very personal for me.

My father-in-law has spent years faithfully walking with God. He is a man of prayer, the kind of man who would wake up early in the morning to pray for his family and pray over his children at night. One of the things he emphasized strongly while raising his children was sexual purity and devotion to the Lord. At the time, that obedience probably looked like something he was simply responsible for teaching his own children.

But one of those children eventually became my husband.

Ira carried those convictions into our marriage, and I came from a very different family story. Divorce and sexual sin had affected generations of my family, and I had not inherited the same example he had. Yet something God had taught my father-in-law, and something he faithfully passed down to his son, eventually became a gift to me too. It entered our marriage, it entered the home we built together, and now it is entering the lives of our daughters.

And somehow, it traveled even further. My younger brother lived with us for five years, and in many ways we helped raise him. He watched those same values lived out in our home, and today it is beautiful to me to see how strongly he carries some of those convictions himself. My father-in-law’s obedience reached a young man from an entirely different family who wasn’t even born when some of those seeds were first being planted.

That is what I want you to remember today.

If God is asking you to obey Him in an area of your life, you may only be able to see what that obedience means for you right now. You see what you need to surrender, the boundary you need to establish, the habit you need to change, or the step of faith you need to take. But you cannot see all the people who may one day live in the blessing of the obedience you are choosing today.

There may be a Rahab somewhere on the other side of your yes.

We talk often about how our disobedience can affect other people, and that is true. But sometimes we forget the beautiful opposite truth: our obedience affects people too. Someone may learn to pray because you prayed. Your children may inherit a conviction you fought hard to establish. Someone who joins your family years from now may receive the fruit of a decision you are making with God today.

You may never know how far your obedience will travel. So obey Him anyway—not because you can see everyone who will benefit from it, but because you trust the God who can.

Your obedience may begin with you, but by the grace of God, it does not have to end with you.

This Is My Jar

This morning, I was lying in bed feeling defeated. My girls have been sick with a mouth virus for what feels like forever, I haven’t been feeling well myself, and although the house is finally clean, my mind could still produce an endless list of things I could be doing. There are drawers I could organize, plans I could make, work I could get ahead on, things around the house that would make our lives easier later. Instead, I was lying in bed, scrolling and comparing myself to everyone who seemed to be doing more with their day than I was.

Eventually, I had to tell myself, Emely, stop. Stop judging your life. Stop comparing it to everyone else’s. This is your life. There will always be someone doing something I am not doing. Someone is working out today. Someone is building a business. Someone has a perfectly organized home. Someone has more energy, more discipline, more money, or simply a completely different capacity than I have in this season. None of that tells me anything about whether I am being faithful with the life God has actually given me.

That thought stayed with me as I read Mark 14 and the story of the woman who came to Jesus carrying an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume. She broke the jar and poured the perfume over Jesus, and almost immediately, the people around her began evaluating her decision. “Why this waste of perfume?” they asked. They even had a perfectly reasonable alternative for what she could have done with it. The perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor.

What struck me this morning was how familiar that sounded. We are so quick to decide what should be done with someone else’s jar. And if no one around us is doing it, we are often perfectly capable of doing it to ourselves. We look at what God has placed in our hands and begin imagining all the other ways we could be using it. Maybe I should be accomplishing more. Maybe I should have more children by now. Maybe I should be further along financially. Maybe I should be more disciplined, more organized, more productive, more successful. Comparison gives us endless suggestions for what we should have done with our perfume.

But Jesus did not join their criticism. He defended her. And then He said something I cannot stop thinking about: “She did what she could” (Mark 14:8).

She did what she could. She was not responsible for doing what someone else could have done. She was not asked to carry someone else’s capacity, calling, resources, or assignment. She took what was hers and poured it before Jesus.

This morning I felt the Lord reminding me, this is your jar. My life is my jar. My marriage, my children, my home, my work, the ministry opportunities He gives me, my gifts, my resources, my limitations, and even the amount of energy I have in a particular season are all part of what has been entrusted to me. I don’t have to spend my life wondering whether my perfume would have been more valuable if it had been poured somewhere else.

One of the verses I have carried with me this year is Psalm 16:6: “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” I keep returning to the idea of boundary lines. There is a portion of life that God has entrusted specifically to me. Accepting those boundaries does not mean that I stop growing, dreaming, working, or allowing God to stretch me. It simply means that I stop measuring faithfulness by somebody else’s portion.

Maybe someone else’s perfume is being poured into a business right now. Maybe hers is being poured into six children. Maybe another woman is writing a book, building a ministry, caring for an aging parent, pursuing a degree, or working long hours to provide for her family. None of those lives diminish the value of another. The question is not, What is everybody else doing with their jar? The question is, Jesus, how do You want me to pour out mine?

And sometimes the answer will look incredibly ordinary. Today, faithfulness may look like reading my Bible, holding sick children, making sure everyone has something to eat, and allowing my tired body to rest. Tomorrow it may look like recording, teaching, exercising, organizing, serving, creating, or building something God has placed on my heart. I don’t want to call one day meaningful and another wasted simply because one produced something the world can see.

There is also something freeing about realizing that I do not need to have an opinion about everyone else’s jar. I can spend so much energy thinking about what someone else should change, how someone else should respond, or what someone else should be doing differently. But their perfume belongs to them. I have enough before the Lord in simply asking Him to continue sanctifying me and teaching me to faithfully steward what He has placed in my own hands.

Perhaps that is part of what surrender looks like: opening our hands to the life God has actually given us instead of constantly negotiating for another one. Not abandoning dreams or pretending difficult seasons are easy, but trusting that even within these boundary lines there is a beautiful inheritance.

I want to learn to look at my portion and say, Lord, this is my jar. It belongs to You. Teach me how to pour it out for You. And when comparison tries to convince me that what I have offered is too small, too ordinary, or should have been used differently, I want to remember the words Jesus spoke over that woman: “She did what she could.”

What a beautiful thing it would be to reach the end of a season, or eventually the end of a life, and know that we did not do everything, we did not become everyone, and we did not fulfill every expectation placed upon us. We simply took what God placed in our hands and faithfully poured it at the feet of Jesus.