Have you ever seen a cropped picture, thinking you knew what you were looking at and then the full picture came into view to reveal something significantly different? Your synapses were already firing, and your right brain had concluded a couple dozen things until you realized you were next door to wrong. I’ve been there many times following Jesus. I thought we were going to one place…a place the Holy Spirit had whispered about…a place I saw in my heart, but the destination looked almost completely different. In retrospect it had the heart of what I heard and what I saw, but the flesh of it was nearly unrecognizable. That’s where life finds me these days. On my backside, scratching my head, and humbled. Humbled that my paradigms have been so skewed, but also humbled at how God has been able to do more than I imagined through my discovery.
I really thought life was taking me in a different direction, and yet I am where my heart envisioned. I’m floored to this prone position by how it can be both. God never misled me. He was telling me all along. I just had my own interpretation of it all. But this is His way, and it always had been which leads me to believe that it always will be. His ways are just so much higher, and by higher I kinda think that also means lower. Like the last shall be first. The greatest is the servant of all. He uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. I just couldn’t fully see it before.
Destiny is finally the proud owner of a piece of property that will soon house a new building. By soon I mean not as soon as I’d like, but nonetheless, the season is changing. And it’s not just changing for us. We’re going where we’ve dreamed for years, but we’re going without many of our favorite people. God is taking several of our families into new seasons too. This isn’t really the way I envisioned it, but I’ve already belabored the irrationality of doing that. God’s ways are higher.
Despite how we got here, I have a new excitement. I love the team that God is building. I’m looking forward to where we’re going. My enthusiasm is just more mature these days…more pruned…more grounded. I’m finding the beauty in that.
Several years ago, I heard the Holy Spirit whisper that He was about to make me able to apprehend divine things but that I wasn’t yet ready to hold what He’d give me. I went forward from that encounter with an excited expectation. I didn’t realize that in order for my capacity to be enlarged, everything in my life would be tested. It took me to the end of myself before I could find more inside of me.
God allows us to walk through stuff, because we can’t be who we once were to face what’s in front of us. God will use what we went through and what we’re going through to make us who we need to be for the next phase of life. I still get sad at times over what seems lost, but when I zoom out, I know that the loss of it is making me who I need to be. It’s giving me a wider perspective. I’m enjoying that view right now.