One of my favorite songs is “Everything Glorious” by David Crowder Band. One day my friend Candice and I were driving to lunch and that song was playing in the car. We were both unusually quiet and just letting the lyrics sink in.

“You make everything glorious and I am yours, what does that make me?”

Candice spoke first. “It takes a lot of faith to believe that doesn’t it?”

I hadn’t considered that before, but yes, yes it does. People are messy. We are messy. I am messy. Life is a series of occasional victories and a whole lot of mistakes. Cleaning up from those mistakes usually feels anything but glorious. But if you’re walking out of a mess with your head held high and your eyes set on God’s will, then you’re moving on to better things and that, indeed, is glorious. You have to have faith to know that God sees it that way too.

One of my greatest challenges in pastoring people with financial problems is getting them to not be so hard on themselves and to enjoy the process. Our inclination is to continue to berate ourselves and beat ourselves up over things that can no longer be helped. Don’t do that. And even if we’re not beating ourselves up, it always seems like someone is more than willing to step up and do the job, pointing out every flaw and mistake, and dangling in your face all the ways you’re not perfect. Well, no one is, and frankly, I would much rather hang out with people who don’t pretend to be.

He makes everything glorious, so just go along for the ride. It will be okay, and eventually, things will look downright glorious again. In the meantime, remember that you are more than the sum of your mistakes and more than the sum of your victories. You are simply a child of God, messes and all, and He makes everything glorious. And He thinks you’re glorious right where you are.