This is a photo of my family on a vacation at Opryland in Tennessee. Honestly, I don’t remember much about that vacation, but this photo reminded me of how my parents had this desire for us to wear matching t-shirts. I’m guessing because it was easy to spot us if we wandered off. But I really think that they wanted us to be the same, only different.
This photo was on one of the photo boards that we had at my mother’s wake after her passing. These boards were given back to us by the funeral home after the cemetery committal. However, this photo had fallen off the board and was left behind in the hearse. The funeral director sent it to me, and when I opened up the envelope, my mind flooded back to my childhood.
As you can probably tell from the photo, I was not thrilled with the idea of matching shirts. I always had this mentality that I didn’t want to be ‘the same as everyone else’ because I was unique and different, because that’s how God made me. And wearing matching shirts made me look like everyone else.
What I didn’t realize until looking at this photo today is that even though we had matching shirts, that didn’t mean that we were the same. Yes, we were part of the same family, but we were all separate people on a single mission – enjoying time together while on vacation.
We are all the same, but we are also different. God calls us to embrace our unique gifts and talents that we were given, and to use them for God’s glory by sharing these gifts with others. As it states in Ephesians 2:10:
For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.
Another translation states it this way:
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
We are all called to use the good works that God has planted within us because each of us have a divine purpose for our lives. Therefore, we are to seek God’s will and to be aware of the opportunities that God places before us each and every day. This means that we are to live a lifestyle of service and love to everyone we encounter.
It doesn’t matter if we wear the same shirts at the same time in the same place. What really matters is that we use our own unique God-given gifts to help our fellow neighbor, because that is what God had planned for us from the very beginning.
God really does have a plan for us. Do we trust in the plan? Read more here.
