I knew a couple who were a fairly unique pair of individuals. Each one had their own quirks to say the least. But one of them was less unique than the other. Ok so I’ll shoot straight here – one of them was just a bit much and was a hard person to get along with much of the time. This individual would tend to over share information, and life needed to be their way all the time!
I often said that the less hard to get along with spouse was a saint for how they dealt with the other. A saint in this case isn’t someone who died centuries ago and is now remembered for all eternity. Rather a saint in this usage is someone who was willing and able to put up with a lot of baggage out of love for the other person. They were a good person.
In my experience it seems as if we tend to throw the saint word around a little bit too easily in my book. We tend to miss the point of what a saint really is. I don’t think a saint is necessarily a genuinely good person. That diminishes the real value of what a saint truly is. Instead a saint is someone who has experienced the goodness of God.
Do you see the difference? It’s not about my goodness that makes me saintly, rather it’s about knowing I’m not all that good and still experiencing the goodness of God’s great love for me.
There’s something kind of special about being this kind of a saint. When we can acknowledge our “not goodness,” it makes the grace of God that much more powerful and amazing. When I recognize the tremendous amount of grace I’ve required from so many people, the easier it is for me to see the goodness in others.
Being a saint doesn’t mean we have it all together, or even that we’re necessarily all that good of people. It means that we’ve experienced something that not everyone realizes. We’ve experienced the goodness of God in immeasurable ways.
So have you experienced the goodness of God? Then you too my friend are what I call a saint!
