The prophet Haggai spoke to a people lost and misguided by their own ambitions. They were laboring but with minimal return.
They “planted much but harvested little,” had clothes but never got warm.
God said, “And what you brought home, I blew away. Why? Because My house still lies in ruins, while each of you is busy with his own house.”
Humility comes before honor.
Proverbs 15:33
Through Haggai’s messages, God taught the people to align their efforts to heavenly will, to dedicate their work to building the kingdom.
“Work! For I am with you,” God declared. “Consider carefully your ways from this day forward. From this day on, I will bless you.”
The latter glory shall be greater than the former. “And in this place I will provide peace,” God promised.
In this example, we see the futility of working without God’s counsel, and therefore the plight of any poet or playwright, writer or journalist, who does not understand their work as an extension of God’s will.
How do we determine what God puts on our hearts to write, draw, or create?
What if our breaking point is the starting line?
What if it all falls apart so we can be made whole?
We uphold integrity in what we do, through our actions and words. Integrity reflects our values. In a deeper sense, integrity means the fullness, completeness, and wholeness of our being — the integration of our parts, the intersections of our identities.
Integrity is the reflection of our individuality, and culture challenges integrity by pushing conformity as social media influence or success as a billboard. Making it means doing a certain thing a certain way for a certain outcome.
But what about creating, discovering, and expressing according to the uniqueness that is you?
“Humility consists of being precisely the person you actually are before God, and since no two people are alike, if you have the humility to be yourself you will not be like anyone else in the whole universe,” Thomas Merton said.
If the world breaks you, ask what grace can do with the pieces. Invite Love to put everything back together.
Our undoing is actually the becoming of who we are.
