His Workmanship

*A shepherding moment*

This morning, as I was praying and reading my bible, God gave me an idea. (This is how most of my good ideas come, FYI - conversations over an open Bible...)

I was thinking about something my kid said yesterday...something about not feeling like they had any use or purpose. It broke my heart and I was asking God how we should address that when He reminded me of 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."

I thought about reading this verse at the breakfast table, but then God gave me an even better idea! (He's pretty creative if you haven't noticed.) You can see from the above picture what this became - a challenge to design a robot with a specific job in mind. My kids are creative and learn well through stories and examples so I knew this would help them. But as a side note, if creative stuff doesn't do it for you, no worries. Discipleship doesn't have to be cute. It's all about reading God's word, applying it to our lives and breaking it down into bite sized pieces for our kids. You can do this in a style that is uniquely you!

After the kids designed their robots I asked them what special features they engineered and how those features helped their robots to complete their assigned tasks. They came up with some great stuff!

Then we read Ephesians 2:10 and talked about how God designed each of us with specific work in mind and He built in special features that we will need in order to be good at our jobs. Which is pretty amazing! But what if the rescue robot decides he'd rather build houses? He probably wouldn't be very good at it because he doesn't have those design features and now there's no one pulling people out of the water!

Do you think God makes mistakes when He designs us? Do you think it was a mistake that you were born with brown hair, or that you will be a bit short or that you can build anything out of legos? Do you think it was a mistake that your Aunt Marie was designed without eyes and with an extra chromosome? Nope. God doesn't make mistakes. He designs each one of us perfectly for the work He has for us.

Everyone who belongs to Jesus has the same goals in life - to love God, love people and make disciples. We all have the same goals but we will live them out in different ways.

Let's pray that God will help us to recognize the design features that are unique to us and to strengthen them so we will be ready to walk in the specific work He has planned for our lives! Amen!