Sloth the Sloth

Sadie got a new stuffed sloth this week that she loves. I asked her if she had picked him a name yet and her answer struck a cord in me. She said “he doesn’t need a name mommy, he is a sloth so we call him sloth”.

Y’all...how profound, right? 

What if we acknowledged each other as “human”? What if we didn’t place unrealistic expectations on others or, wait for it, even ourselves? What if we simply called each other human, treated each other with the same level of kindness, didn’t expect perfection of each other or seek it for ourselves?

In my bible study we just finished talking about the fall. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree and realized they were naked, God asked them two questions...

Where are you?

Who told you?

Lysa T teaches that those two questions can mean so much more than the context we probably read them in. 

Where are you? In your depression, in your anxiety, in your sin...where are you? God is with you but where are you? 

Who told you? Who told you that you were naked, who told you that you were any less than a child of God? 

The truth is once sin entered, we realized we were less than perfect, “naked” in every sense of the word, but our hearts didn’t lose the desire to be perfect. We all know Christ conquered perfection for us so that we could have eternal life with Him but the thing is sometimes our hearts desire to be perfect keep us from embracing the “made perfect through Christ” mentality that we’re all taught in church. That’s when we start labeling ourselves and others. That’s when we start throwing around judgements about how others should or shouldn’t live their lives when the truth is we  all (Christians) are struggling with some form of sin. We start comparing sins and each other when the truth is if we spend our time in comparison we will always leave with disappointment. We will never be truly satisfied or made perfect without Christ.

We are all human. None of us are perfect. None of us are anything apart from Christ so what if we all acknowledged that?? If we could all extend the grace of that acknowledgment I think kindness would certainly spread. I think we could all take a lesson from Sloth the sloth. I am not “Lauren the (__)”, I am Lauren the human. The human who makes mistakes, sometimes learns from them and sometimes repeats them. The human who loves the Lord but sins. The human who lets people down and also builds them up. 

Each one of you reading this probably have a label you’ve placed on yourself or a label that has placed on you. We all need to remember that we are simply “>insert name<, human, made perfect through Christ”

Hebrews 10:14

It’s easy to type this and much harder to live it...I know this. I just really love the idea of sloth the sloth so I wanted to share...♥️