Character

As 2010 begins to wrap up, it's always a good time to look back at everything that God has sent through the year. There are always ups and down, high points and low points, things you want to always remember, and things you'd love to forget. Yet, as we experience each of these, God molds and forms our character, taking our rough clay and molding it into something that, hopefully, more resembles His Son.

Character formation is perhaps one of the most inexact things to measure. How do you know when someone has character? What is the difference between character and integrity, if any? How do character and personality interact and relate to one another? That's what makes it difficult to gauge how you have changed in character over time.

For myself, I have seen where God is really working on me and molding me. One area in particular is that of compassion and care. Sometime over the course of the summer and fall, it really struck me how God has a deep, heartfelt compassion for the people of this world, and that the Christian faith is best expressed when God's people have this same compassion. That involves getting over ourselves and our sense of self-importance, and truly making people the top priority.

That means that we reflect Jesus in our interactions with others. We genuinely care about them. We can all spot someone who doesn't really care, who is only using us to get something of benefit for themselves. Over the past few months, I have been shaped to care for others in greater, deeper ways. At times, that has even caused conflicts between myself and others when it meant that they didn't get their way since it was more self-centered. But I am okay with that. As long as God, myself, and the person for whom I am demonstrating compassion and care know, I'm fine with living that way.

Paul writes that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. I have seen how God is working on the character part, noting how all of these are inter-related in my life. My hope and prayer is that you see God doing this kind of work in your life as well.