The other day my mom and I were in the kitchen making homemade mashed potatoes for a family dinner. YUM. As a Southern girl, there are a few things that just need to be homemade and mashed potatoes is one of them. Sweet tea is another. Anyway, as we were finishing up our tag team on the potatoes (she peeled, I washed and cut), I noticed one potato left on the counter that need to be washed and peeled.
“You don’t want to use this one?” I asked her. “No, I can’t use it. It’s rotten on the inside.” As soon as she said that I flipped the potato over and saw where sure enough, it was rotten to the core. It looked like all the other potatoes and you sure couldn’t tell from the outside that on the inside it was filled with black, gooey, potato crud. It was empty and hollow. It looked like this:
Have you ever felt like the inside of a rotten potato?
Maybe on the outside you are able to maintain the appearance and the illusion that you’ve got it all together, but on the inside you feel decomposed and icky. I battle with this sometimes. I carry the stress of work, trying to stay on a healthy eating plan, balancing family, friends and church responsibilities very heavily. On the outside, I appear like a healthy normal potato, but inside I feel rotten and defeated sometimes.
Or maybe you are a “normal potato,” but you find yourself surrounded by a bag of rotten potatoes (don’t you just love all my potato analogies today!) and sometimes it makes you want to be rotten too. This is a difficult challenge, that as Christians we deal with…daily.
But friends, the one little detail we often forget is that we don’t have to carry it all on our shoulders. Yes-God put us here on earth to be disciples for Him and to spread the word of the Gospel. To bring others to Him. But guess what? He never said we had to do it alone!
Do you think God just said to Noah “Just build an ark, throw some animals and your family on there, and thanks for being obedient.” No! Of course not. He was with Noah all the way through to the very end.
God is with us through our normal potato days and our rotten potato days. He can see when we’re feeling icky on the inside, even when we pretend we’re okay on the outside. And He provides us with the most wonderful and gracious unconditional love that even we can’t understand, nor do we deserve.
So today friend, if you’re feeling like a rotten potato, I encourage to stop and pray for God to give you courage and patience, strength and the ability to trust that only He holds the ultimate power for our lives.
He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. ~Philippians 1:6
By the way, those homemade mashed potatoes turned out pretty awesome. Thanks mom.
Blessings,
Amanda
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