Rearranging, Shifting, Sifting, and Replanting

Driving down the neighborhood that I'll soon call my new home I can't help but notice the number of "For Sale" signs that seemed to all pop-up over night. This summer as I've gone on walks I've watched the signs go up, the trucks and boxes and furniture come and go, and the signs disappear. In many ways, it almost seems like the world in general is in a transition season. That there is a great shifting of pieces to be rearranged for a specific purpose. And I can't help but wonder if in a very short time that purpose, the reason for why people have been suddenly up-heaved and replanted in new places at work, life, school, church, home, etc will be revealed.

As I write this I'm coming to the end of my transition season. It has been one year. One year ago the course of my life was radically shifted and now my new journey begins in a new job (starting Monday), a new apartment (in September), and a new career pursuit (in October). Following all of this will be a couple new babies, new financial burdens, new communities, new friends, new problems and complications. Everything has changed in my life.

The other day I was watching my niece, Kerrigan, learning how to do a new puzzle. She's very good with spatial arrangement and is pretty quick to figure out how place more complex shapes in their right place. In many ways I've felt a bit like a misplaced puzzle piece. My shape was too complex, too specific, too confusing to be placed in any ordinary place. And I think in many ways, what I thought was my place for the longest time was very close but it was really someplace that I was forced into, that I had believed was me and so I tried to believe that my shape really fit where I was being placed, and yet it didn't work and the whole puzzle was falling apart. And then something happened, God stepped in and everything was rearranged and shifted to their proper place.

In many ways this required a lot of sifting inside of me and within my life. The kick-start to this entire last year was a special prayer session called Sozo that was really where God began to work in my life. In one part of the session God (in an imagery-form of communication and allegorical story-telling) showed me that my emotions were all jumbled up and needed to be contained within a beer-vat that was 10x my size. I needed to peer in to see what it looked like but it took a lot of effort and then when I did look over the rim I couldn't make out anything distinct, everything was muddled that wasn't supposed to be muddled and everything was blended that wasn't supposed to be blended. So Jesus did something interesting, he placed a spigot at the base of the vat and poured it all out. As the fluid was coming out there was a large amount of sediment that began to collect and I started trying to dig through it. This sediment became what I went back to time and time again in discussing things in counseling. The sifting, the narrowing and the squeezing through the narrow opening allowed me to move ahead with what was really important and leave behind the things that weighed me down and seemed to be destroying me.

And the more I sifted through the muck, the sediment, the burdens and lies and hardships the more I was able to be replanted in new places. At first it was a new church, then it was a new career direction. Now it's a new job, a new apartment and a new education. I feel like God cut away at so much of my roots that in many ways I'm still a little tender and I'm still adjusting to all of these new things. But he needed to reach the places that were green so that I could begin again and grow even more. And one of the cool things is that God doesn't just want us to live, he wants us to thrive! So that sometimes may mean that I'm apart of something that I struggle to understand how this connected to everything I believed before this last year. Or it may mean I learn to be more and more vulnerable with people and allow myself to rely and depend on them. That often means reconstructing what I thought was the right way and adding more complexity, more intricacy and ambiguous connections to the belief and viewpoint. It means learning to understand what are the things I value. And what is at the core of those said values?

For me, the core of my values all comes down to understanding God's heart. Which is not a simple, clear-cut core to have. And yet that's the core - everything else flows from it and is understood and comprehended according to that.

Ultimately, our life stories are not our own. They are a piece to the grand puzzle. And so although we each have been given the gift of life and are asked to steward it well, I wouldn't want to steward my life on my own because I would mess it up very quickly. It requires surrender of control to God. And as challenging as that can be, He is a God who smiles upon us, who gives us good things and leads us along the paths we should follow (Isaiah 48:17). And even though we may stand out like puzzles pieces with no place to fit, our purpose is not lost on God. In fact, our purpose in life isn't even on this earth, in this life. Our purpose is for Him, for eternity, for serving Him and bringing Him, alone, glory, honor, and praise. When we meet that purpose, nothing else in life really requires us to "fit in." Our identity is found in our belonging to Him; and because He was enough we don't have to strive to find our place in this world, because we already belong, we already fit in Him.