GOOD, BETTER, BEST

If the truth were told, we are good people: people in general, not just the people we know or who go to our church. That might be true, probably is true, but that is getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say, at least at the beginning, that people are good.

We are good because God created us and God does not create anything that is of its very essence not good. To be sure, good people do bad things. Good people take the good of creation and do bad with that good. A good person takes a good rock and throws it through a good window. The rock and the window will always remain good; the thrower has become less than good for the moment.

What we are good at, we good people, is in the living out of our faith. Some would call it "the practicing of our faith," probably because we never ever get it truly and totally right. There are always those rock-throwing incidents in the lives of each one of us. That is called sin. We are never totally freed from sin in this life. So we good people who do a good job in living out, in practicing our faith, all know that we can be better.

           

We can always be better no matter how good we are. We can always be better because we all fall short of perfection, of being the best, of never being able to be better because we have reached the summit of being good. That is an unreachable and an unattainable goal even if it is a goal that we each strive after.  Our goal in life as a Christian, or as anything else for that matter, is not to be simply good enough, or better than the next person, but to be the best even as the best will never be perfect.  Whether that "best" is the best we can be or simply the very best is not the point.

           

It is easy, of course, to take another and even take ourselves to task for our failures to be less than the best, for only being good enough or better than most. It is easy for me to stand in the pulpit and point out failures and shortcomings – sin. It is also easy to be satisfied with who we already are. To emphasize one or the other is wrong and will get us nowhere. It certainly won't help us grow into a better person, into a person who strives to be the person God created us to be.

Just who is that person? What does s/he look, think, act like? That’s the question, isn’t it? That is why we need to constantly examine our lives, how we are living out our faith. The point is not to remind us that we are failures. The point and the purpose is to help us understand that practicing our faith involves our whole being and our whole life and that by being attentive to that being and to the various parts of our life, we good people will find ways to become better, better in every way.

           

There is a lot we know about how to practice, live out, our faith. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but we are already doing a good job, if you will. But there is even more that we do not know. There is more that we should know. We know that, do we not? No one can make us learn more or practice harder. What we also know is that good always wants to become better and better is never satisfied with anything less than the best. That is what we strive for each and every day.