I wrote yesterday about my daughter’s life verse and that got me to thinking about my own verse. If you would have asked me a year ago what mine was, I would have easily quoted Romans 12:1-2 explaining that my whole life should be a living sacrifice to God.

For years I claimed it and took such great comfort in the Message version of that verse. Especially verse 1.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Because I felt like my life was so ordinary it was great to know that as long as I honored God with my ordinary He’d be pleased. But in wanting to live my life as a living sacrifice through the ordinary, I can see now where even those steps of obedience became old routine to God.

There is more to life than just living it for yourself, while claiming you are living it for God. Yes, He wants us glorifying Him in our ordinary lives. But I’m learning that what I thought would glorify Him, is not really how He intended me to glorify Him. Or maybe He has grown me to a new place of obedience? I think he has moved me more from verse 1, into verse 2. “Don’t become so adjusted to your culture that you fit in without even thinking.”

Ouch! Nobody wants to stand out or I certainly don’t. But as God continues to lead me I’m recognizing more of what He wants and trying my hardest to quickly respond. That definitely goes against our culture! As my thoughts become blurred and new habits come into play I really wonder what God is doing.

While my life verse might be changing me and still a little out of focus, my motto stands true. “I consider my life more like a mosaic than a puzzle. My life’s pieces don’t fit together nice and neat. However, God has used each piece to make something beautiful as He is the mortar that holds my life together.”

Hallelujah for His mortar that holds all my crazy pieces of life together! Yes, and even those pieces where I don’t see just how they are going to fit yet.