Excellence

I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. —Abraham Lincoln

There are countless Christian women who would love to be married and aren’t. There are also plenty of married women who have days when they’d rather not be married! One woman is overwhelmed by the demands of her highpowered job as another searches, desperately, for employment.

Excellence isn’t concerned with how you are compared to how others are. Excellence is concerned with how you are compared to the potential of how you are supposed to be. In other words, excellence has to do with God’s destiny for you. Are you progressively pressing forward and moving toward what He wants for you? Are you defining your decisions, thoughts, and actions by the highest quality and authenticity you have to offer? That is the measure of true excellence.

At one time or another, all of us have wanted our situations to be other than they are. In the end, though, the King won’t ask us if we got everything we wanted. He will, however, survey what we did with what we were given. If that “something” is singleness, did we maximize the opportunities we had to love and serve? If we’ve had the opportunity to practice medicine, did we apply ourselves to be the best we could be? If we swept streets, did we do it with as much care as Bach did when composing music? God invites each of us to pursue excellence in the roles we’ve been given.

Application

1. What is the stuff of your average day? Is your heart burning to be doing something different?

2. How can you practice excellence today in the work you’ve been given to do?

Prayer

God, I confess that I get restless. I long to do something other than what You’ve given me. Today, give me passion to serve You with excellence. Amen