Can you do better?

As a child, I heard this line more times then enough. My teacher, Miss Hearn, had a habit of saying to me, “Try your best.” The truth, I had not done my best and I knew it. I might have deceived myself to thinking I had. What was she implying? What was she telling me or seeing in me? Had I done my best? More then once I would take it back and make a feeble effort and try some more. Well, most of the time. Other times I would say yes just to get it done and over with.
I remember reading of someone being asked to do some writing and when they handed it over, they were asked, “Is this the best you can do?” With that they took it back and reworked it. Again they handed it over only to hear, “Is this the best you can do?” Again they took it back and reworked it. A third time they handed it over and heard the same words. This time they said they believed it was the best they could do. With that the person read what was handed to him.
The interesting part of this is, it needs to matter more to us then to anyone else. Or so I think. Any one of us can do something but only we know when it’s the best. And not just when we think we need to. Back to my school years. Sometimes, as I said, I just wanted to get it done. At other times it was a competition. We wanted to do better then everyone else. I remember doing the best I could, knowing I could possibly be the best. This didn’t happen often and when it did, I was proud of what I had done. I learned something from this. When I was the one to have the last word on how good or poor it was, or when I wanted to impress someone, then it mattered.
When I was in my first year of grade six, yes, I repeated six, I didn’t want to impress anyone. Not even myself. It was a year of doing nothing and succeeding. A year of going through the motions and handing in my class projects that had no connection to what I was capable of. But my teacher would continue to say, “Try your best.” At that moment, close to the end of the year, I finally got it. She knew more of what was in me then I did.
When do we do better, really better? Only when we take pride in ourselves and what we can accomplish. Just after the end of that year my Sunday School teacher talked to us and said something that changed me forever. What he said was, God doesn’t make junk. It was the first time I thought of it in relations to me. God made me and I am not junk and God knows what is in us when we don’t ourselves. If so, then He has put within us all the abilities to do an excellent job at anything we do. It’s also true for me and true for you.
Let’s be practical. We sing, “Getting to know you, Getting to know all about you.” If that is aimed at God, and we work on our relationship with Him, does He have to say the same thing to us? Is that the best you can do? Jesus did the best for us. Maybe what we really need to hear is, “Good and faithful servant, come into your rest.”
Something to think about.
Rob