The Great Design – Renewal

 Life today conspires against renewal.  At one point, our society valued self-denial or deferred gratification.  Spouses sacrificed for one another in pursuit of long-term goals for their marriage, for their family.  Parents trapped in an unsatisfying relationship stayed together for the sake of the children.  People knew who lived next door and there was a sense of commitment to all who dwelled on the same block.  If one family faced a crisis, others were made aware, not through gossip and fiery rumors but out of genuine concern and compassion for those we understood to be a part of our lives, a part of our community.

Self-denial, honoring commitment, compassion and concern for others, sacrifice for greater good, were fabrics of society visibly seen and foundations in which life was rooted and grounded.  The essence of what life was about, of what was worthy and imperative, believed to be of the highest order, allowed lives to consistently undergo some process of renewal through experiences encountered, driven by principles diametrically opposed to selfishness.  In our conscience there was a healthy sense of what mattered most and some understanding of what brought life fulfillment, joy, and happiness.  Though we could not always explain it, our spirits understood the Great Design.

Somewhere along the way there was a gradual shift in culture and the self-denial ethic morphed into the self-fulfillment ethic.  This was a dramatic swing and the transfer turned some of what we valued upside down.  A seismic shaking brought about a rearrangement of ethics, of values, of what we deemed important, spawning a palpable change in the mental and emotional landscape of our lives.  Not all of this change was positive.  Some changes hinder and create fabrications of what ultimately grants fulfillment, of what really leads to happiness.  In numerous ways, our culture has become an instant society that devalues relationship, diminishes sacrifice, and cheapens commitment.  We are more prone to listen to our emotional needs and seek to have them fulfilled immediately, without sacrifice, without waiting, without considering others.  Consequently, we jettison anything that proves complicated or disconcerting, tiresome or boring.  Under the new rules, the powerful act of renewal loses out, the Great Design breaks down.

Many lives today lack vigor and freshness.  Our relationships, our marriages, our experiences, our days, quickly become stale.  With the enormous emphasis on self, there is a tendency to ignore the present, producing less and less time for conversation, for contemplation, for reflection.  We have this tension, a steady sensation of not enough; not enough time, not enough leisure, not enough rest, not enough money, not enough toys.  This lack of satisfaction places our lives in a state of restlessness and agitation, creating an uneasiness which obscures reality and dangerously complicates the journey of living; often blinding us to our true purpose, to the meaning of life, to what ultimately fulfills.  Passageways to renewal become shrouded, leaving us hollow and vacant, fragile and weakened.

Humanity is God's magnum opus.  Of all creation, the splendor and majesty of everything created, we are the one and only aspect of God's handiwork made in his image.  The Great Design is the creation of humankind, formulating us to need God and to need one another.  It's only through the dynamic of relationship – vertical and horizontal – that we can reach the Shangri-La of life; the rapturous space where living is fresh and full, amazingly alive with wonder and astonishment.  As we stray from proposed constellations in which life was fashioned to flourish, God's natural act of renewal shuts down and our spirits and minds are left wanting.

God designed life to be filled with acts and occurrences that generate renewal.  Our lives are living, flowing, and sinuous, budding, growing, and emerging.  In the way we replenish our bodies with proper nutrients, causing them to renew and attain fullness, we must do the same for our spirits and minds.  This is part of the Great Design; this is how we are made.  Should we stray from our purpose and ignore this facet of our lives, renewal is not experienced.  Life becomes blasé, dull, unfilled, empty.

Renewal means to make life new.  It's an innate process that restores freshness, vigor, and vitality, restoring what has become faded or disintegrated.  This process happens naturally as long as we feed our lives proper nutrients.  Renewal is a constant state that keeps churning and spinning, activating itself in the decisions we make, the things we do, hour by hour, day by day.

Everything within creation operates on the cycle of renewal.  Day becomes night, becomes day.  Seasons come and go and come.  Flowers bloom and die and bloom.  Tides rise and fall and rise.  Vegetation foliates, exfoliates, foliates.  Creatures replenish, excrete, replenish.  Bodies wake, sleep, wake.  God designed the world with a natural order and the process of renewal is at its heart.  Our spirits are no different from any other form of creation.  There is a perfect design and when we operate within that intent – do that for which we were created – renewal takes its course in our lives.  Accordingly, we experience fullness and abundance.  When we step outside our intended purpose, chaos ensues.

Our universe runs by faithful and consistent laws.  The sun always rises in the east.  Rain brings to earth its most needed resource.  Planets follow dependable orbits.  Animals migrate annually.  Nothing in the natural order is found wanting.  You see this and feel this when you stop and savor the natural world around you.  Gaze up at the stars at night, look across a beautiful meadow, stare at the endless expanse of blue on any beach, or marvel at majestic peaks.  Something resonates in our spirits when we look at the splendor of creation.  Our interior world experiences deep peace and contentment.  We are looking at order, viewing creation functioning as it was designed to do.  In turn, our spirits connect.  They align with the Creator's intent.  A properly aligned mind and spirit directs our lives to the abundance God promised us.

God has built into our systems a rhythm of life which we must not violate: output and input; work and rest; service and worship; personal time and family time.  It's very easy to neglect some of the less active disciplines.  We live in a world that continually bombards us with messages emphasizing self – you deserve a break today, look out for number one, you can have it all now.  Such messages run contrary to the Great Design.  God set certain rules in motion and within those rules exists a natural process of design that must be followed in order for life to blossom, to thrive.  When we drift outside of this design, life becomes arid and stale, uninspired and flat, blank if you will.

When asked to identify the most important rule in life, Jesus immediately replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”  His answer summed up the Great Design, declaring what the course of life should be.  Jesus did not come to earth to reverse established laws of order by creating different laws.  He fulfilled the law of order already set in motion.  His life demonstrated the powerful act of renewal.  Furthermore, Paul wrote the following to the Philippians and the Romans: Let this mind be in you that was in Jesus; be transformed by the renewing of your mind.  These verses leave me asking questions: How can I possibly love God with all my heart, mind, and soul?  And how do I renew my mind, get the mind of Jesus, and practically live this out?

I found my answer by following the pattern Jesus set.  We renew our lives, our minds, our hearts, by engaging the acts of Jesus.  When we live out such acts – show kindness, love others, bear another's burden, exercise faith, commune with God, place others first – renewal comes.  As we give, we receive.  Life is not a meaningless sequence of actions but an arena to live out the will of another world, to live out the Great Design.  In doing this, renewal comes to our lives and we are satisfied, fresh, fulfilled, abundant.  We are made new.

God's world is active and alive, filled with wonder and awe.  It's not filled with deadness or emptiness; it's filled with life.  And life always births more life.  Money, possessions, accomplishments are not alive.  They are dead.  They do not feed our spirits.  Thus they never satisfy.  They create euphoria for a moment but do not fulfill and they do not renew.  Only something living can renew.  What is living?  Caring for the poor, loving your wife, creating memories for your children, visiting a friend, sending a note, engaging God, helping others.

When our lives focus on self, are driven by self, we become addicted to self.  This is what happened in my life.  I became preoccupied with self, and this sent me on an endless hunt to find fulfillment.  The classic pattern of addiction is to increase the dosage: the more we do, the more we want, the worse we feel.  Though we may get what we want, internally we remain empty.  Our inner life is left craving.  Due to how we're designed, acts born of self are not enough to satisfy; they do not fulfill.  It's difficult for our success-mad, egocentric culture to grasp this crucial truth.  It's understandable only when the false values that obsess us are stripped away.

It has been a humiliating and dark experience, a pilgrimage through a desolate desert filled with extremely difficult and painful realities that helped me rediscover this invaluable truth.  Focus on self, possessions, accomplishments, bring no lasting joy, they do not renew my spirit.  They blind me from seeing what I need most is infinitely more precious and indispensable than accolades of success and roaring accomplishments.  What I need most is a genuine and authentic relationship with my Creator; a sincere compassion and brokenness for others; a humble and meek attitude that permeates everything about my life, everything about who I am as a person.  For the greater part of my journey I strived for these.  But somewhere along the way I lost them, and in losing them I lost myself and lost my way, causing God's act of renewal to lie dormant in my life for a period of time.

The spiritual awakening I have encountered has allowed these truths to again govern my life, enabling the process of renewal to work again in my world.  This has helped me recognize and understand I need divine empowerment that comes from outside of me and my giftedness, empowerment that comes from a place of rebirth; a place of honesty, a place of integrity, a place of humility.  This place is the foundation of my life, the bedrock of my faith, the place I now live.

In one sense, I have never felt more alive.  An acute awareness of life envelops me every moment of every day.  I see things and feel things I overlooked for so many years.  I find beauty in the simple: phone calls, writing cards, staring at pictures.  Other elements of life, like touching grass and seeing the immense blue and breathing fresh air and feeling the warmth of the sun are moments I now cherish.  For nearly a two-year period, most of these were taken from me.  I hang on to every word in conversations with my daughters, and when I get off the phone I recall the words they spoke.  I live for those moments where I hear their voices.  To me it’s magical.

Looking back, I see how so much of my life was not lived in the present.  I constantly found myself chasing dreams, planning new ventures, rarely taking time to stop and realize how blessed I was as a man, how much God had given me.  I did not realize any of this until I lost everything, until I was separated from everyone I love.

I was blessed with the most amazing woman and I took her for granted.  I became entangled in my own world of dreams and thoughts, seldom satisfied or content, consistently wanting more, wanting bigger, wanting better.  Frequently, I was not available emotionally, often lost in my head chasing and pursuing, rarely stopping to look into her soul, to listen to her heart, to allow myself to be mesmerized by her amazing, fascinated by her stunning, enthralled by her brilliance, awestruck by her gorgeous, captivated by her incredible.  Inadvertently, I failed to appreciate the magnitude of her gifts and allowed my selfish interests and desires – which in the end meant nothing in the bigger world of my life – to become of primary importance.  What is life if you build an empire but lose the one person you love with your entire heart, the one person who completes you?

Treasure the people God placed in your life.  Some say love matures.  I do not believe this.  There is nothing mature about love.  I believe we use such terminology as an excuse to avoid facing reality and admitting that certain feelings may have faded, that endorphins have quit flowing, that we have allowed love to become lost.  We lose sight of the wonder and awe and magic of love.  We take love for granted and assume it will always be present.  Love does not die, hearts do.  The human heart –the field that contains love – must always be cultivated, tilled, watered and harvested.  If not, it will become a wasteland where love cannot grow and flourish, where love cannot blossom.  The beautiful field – the heart – once filled with love, becomes a dry and desolate field as a result of apathy, neglect, and indifference.  Don't allow the hearts of the people you love to become a barren wasteland thirsting for drops of affection, longing for showers of compliments, aching for sprinklings of adoration, yearning for a trickling of time and tenderness.  Love the individuals in your life.  Treasure them.  Adore them.  Make time for them.  And give them your whole heart – hold nothing back.

When you care for another, when you deny yourself, when you honor commitments in the face of feelings that call for the opposite, your mind and heart, your life is renewed with sparkle and dynamism.  The acts of these qualities persistently send your mind and spirit through the process of renewal; they birth newness and vitality.  They recreate life.

God's plan is not for us to live in a febrile fog, drifting aimlessly on windless waters.  No, his desire is for our lives to experience renewal, sanctioning his rushing wind to catch our lives and send them to dizzying heights.  We experience maximum life when our spirits are aligned in a way that expresses the will of the Designer.

Fill your life with moments that continually keep you on the path of renewal.  This approach does not contradict what our hearts yearn for; rather it fully employs the design features God built into our spirits to fulfill us, causing our lives to be fresh and vibrant and transcendent.  The wisest man of all time reminds us with these words, "Store God's commands in your heart.  If you do this you will live many years and your life will be full.  Whatever you do, do well.  For when you go to the grave there will be no more planning, and you must give an account to God for everything you do."

Transformation

As human beings, we have an inborn desire for God.  Whether we are consciously religious or not, this desire is our deepest longing and most precious treasure.  There is a constant yearning in our hearts to find fulfillment, a pining for completion.  We live on a broken planet fallen far from God's original intent, and this state of brokenness magnifies the emptiness in our hearts.  It impels us to seek, to search, to hunt for wholeness, for a fullness that not only brings our lives meaning and purpose, but one that leads to peace and contentment.

In the normal course of providence, God works through and in creation, not despite it.  God did not design our planet as an arena to showcase his greatness and his power and his sovereignty.  He certainly could have done this if he so desired.  Instead, he designed it to be governed by relationship.  God longs to relate to us personally, to love and to be loved.  As with us, God's greatest desire and need is relationship.  In the truest definition of who God is and what God is like, Scripture tells us God is love.  In order for love to be love and for love to survive, love needs relationship.  Without relationship, there is no need for love.  Without love, there is no fulfillment, no wholeness, no completeness.  Absent of this totality, we are left in a wounded state pursuing any course or path we sense might satisfy our emptiness and unfulfilled longings.  Sometimes, like the parable of the Prodigal Son, these conduits lead our lives to inconceivable locations of loss, humiliation, regret, and pain; locales we presume will forever alter our lives and deprive us of a future filled with blessing and goodness.

Occasionally we travel certain paths not of our own choosing.  We do not come into this world alone and we make no choice regarding our birthplace, our environment, our family.  We arrive in a fallen world of imperfection alive and fluid with the active dynamic of relationship.  We are linked to others, and this arrangement of connectivity can pull our lives down paths we never desired or chose of our own volition.  Be it routes of our own design or nomadic choices of others to whom we are attached, sometimes we wind up in strange lands of captivity, foreign domiciles in which the grimness of our surroundings blind us from anticipating recovery, picturing hope, envisioning healing, visualizing wholeness, imagining freedom.  In truth, our wounded state veils us from seeing who God is and what he can do, concealing one of life's certainties: God can transform our lives, transform our surroundings, and transform our circumstances.  It also masks us from recognizing who we are, God's creation, obscuring us from comprehending who we can someday become, God's triumph.  At the heart of all reality is God, an unimaginable source of power and love.  In the face of such reality we can grovel down paths of our own choosing and remain in unfamiliar abodes of captivity, or we can allow his work of transformation to take its course in our lives.

Because we live in a world of matter, most of the ways we encounter God include materiality.  God's own state however, God's preferred milieu if you will, is the realm of spirit.  It is only through Spirit touching spirit – through transformation ­– we become the people we are designed to be: people complete and whole and content, lacking in need and want.  We cannot become what God has called us to be unless we accept our wounded state.  God already knows who we are; we are the ones who must find a way to come to terms with our true selves.  If we are made in God's own image, God will make a way to fulfill our deepest longings.  Transformation is that way. 

Transformation is cooperation with God, a consent that opens the way for grace to work so we can experience the majesty and wonder of life God's way.  Jesus said, "I have come to give you life and life abundantly."  This is life beyond, life above, life exceedingly more than all we can ask or imagine.  We only find, discover and experience this life by allowing God to do his work of transformation in our lives, by engaging him and trusting him and submitting to him no matter where we find ourselves, no matter how hopeless our conditions might seem.

The story of humanity is one of God choosing to give away power and entrust individuals with the gift of free choice.  Virtually everyone who has breathed life and walked the planet has failed God some way in handling this freedom.  Even those we place on a pedestal, our heroes of faith, messed things up badly at some point in their journey.  Those whom God picked to lead new ventures, his select – Adam, Abraham, Moses, David – made dreadful choices adversely affecting their lives along with the lives of many others.  Yet, they recovered and overcame through the process of transformation by submitting to the hand of God and allowing his hand to do its work in their lives regardless of where it led them and what it put them through displaying God's great verity: nothing irredeemable has happened or can happen on our way to our destiny in God's full world.

In short, transformation is the work that brings God into my world and ushers me into God's, permitting visible and invisible worlds to congregate.  Encounters and contact with God do not just provide a moment of spiritual ecstasy; they equip me for living, for life.  They change me and launch me into the abundant life God has planned for me, enabling me to experience grace through my defects, mercy in my failures, and abundance and blessing in adverse circumstances triggered by the hand of another's doing.  Every now and then the strands of messiness and confusion and unfairness manage to braid themselves together and – in the most improbable and miraculous way – offer up a radiant affirmation of possibility that transcends anything you could ever hope to imagine.

Most of our struggles in a life of faith circle around two themes: why God does not act the way I want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to.  Transformation is the precise point where these two themes converge, and it's the process God uses to mold and shape us into his image.  By allowing his work of renovation to take place, change is experienced in all facets of our lives.  God does not exclude any part of who we are from this process of conversion.  This act of alteration touches our hearts, our minds, our emotions, our bodies, our relationships, our careers, our dreams, our trials, our failures.  No part of us is immune from God's hand of change, for transformation is the sudden immersion of his Spirit into the universal world surrounding our lives, the current of all life flowing in and through and around us.

 

Transformation is a continuous act of renewal converting deep personal internal structures into visible surface structures enabling formations to evolve in form and function, causing one to experience change detectable and noticeable.  It's a painful and joyful experience and a path we do not walk alone.  God walks with us and gives us strength and courage to change.  He fills us with power to become new people and imbues us with hope, enabling us to see our lives not only for what they are but also for what they can become.

I have found great comfort in knowing that many of God's servants throughout Scripture have found themselves in situations of captivity, in settings distant and lonely and difficult, surrounded by conditions that should have destroyed their faith.  Somehow they overcame the elements of their torn-up lives and chose to trust God and walk with him.  I think of Joseph who was betrayed by his own family, sold into slavery, and then thrown into prison in Egypt.  I consider Daniel who was abducted and forced to serve enemy administrations in Babylon and Persia.  As a result of committing civil disobedience and breaking the law, he was delivered to a lion’s den to be ripped apart and eaten alive.  Then there were Moses and Peter; the former went on the run for years in the Sinai Desert after murdering another, and the latter found himself in prison facing imminent death through beheading.  And let’s not forget David who was so overcome with lust for a beautiful woman he allowed his cravings to escort him down the painful path of adultery and induce him to murder the stunning beauty queen's husband.  All of these found themselves on crooked and dangerous paths, either through acts of their own choosing or because of someone else's decisions, and those selections sent them to a point far removed from God's intent for their lives.  Instead of turning from God and hardening their hearts, letting bitterness and failure deprive them of God's future blessings, they allowed God to work in their state of affairs by reaching out to him and opening their lives to his work of transformation.

In turn, God was with them and brought each one of them through their crisis in a unique way.  He also used them powerfully in their given environments and situations.  Their faith and unshakable conviction in a living God was the main reminder of a reality contradicted by their surroundings.  This resilient belief served to restore the truth belied by everything around them and caused them to believe they would overcome, that they would one day rise from the ashes of apparent destruction.  This is perhaps the most powerful truth the process of transformation has taught me in my darkest personal crisis.

Every so often, events in our lives take place and it's not until we arrive at some distant point where over time we can see how these events have shaped themselves into a meaningful pattern.  Back when they took place, we did not understand the full significance of such experiences and the lessons they imparted, nor could we see how they fit into the larger part of our story, our journey, especially when they are negative experiences partially created by our own hands.  Our lives in some sense are a roundabout tale filled with loose threads of twisting roads we ply with our choices and decisions, and sometimes we get lost amid the unexpected detours and the landslides of complications that cascade down upon us as we venture through the harsh and wondrous journey of life, of living.  Over time we see how these digressions and dead ends also provide and fill our lives with insight, depth, discernment, discovery, leading us to a place of healing.  Once we come through we can look back and make peace with failure, hurt, injury, and regret.  This empowers us to continue our journey, giving us strength to make wrongs right, freeing us from the past, enabling us to again engage the future.  Hope resides with what is yet to come, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past and glimpsing the road traveled.

Occasionally we arrive at a place so distant and so far beyond the margins of our known world, a place we believe is the end of the road, a place of lost hope, one that is the most isolated and foreboding place on earth.  But sometimes this is the place we need to land.  For it's here we discover depths of life we never knew existed.  We learn things about ourselves we never understood.  We come to a place of dependence that lies beyond anything material, anything created by our own talents and gifts.  This is a place uncorrupted by the false pretense of misguided egos chattering in the background filling our minds with the detritus of narcissistic thoughts in which we naively believe we are better or more important than others, that we play some heroic or grand role in the world in which we have been placed.

In my current arrival at this spiritual and emotional place, I have discovered it's the most liberating place a person can land.  For it's here we fully find truth and freedom, truth that matters, freedom that frees.  This place is seen throughout Scripture and it wasn't until men stumbled, fell and landed in this place did they discover the truth and freedom that transformed them into the great individuals they became, individuals who went from trusting God to individuals whom God could trust.  It's this discovery that has instilled in me a fierce and hardened belief that happy endings can be found anywhere, at anytime, at anyplace – in a lion’s den, in acts of betrayal, in abject failure, in wanderings through lonely deserts, in prison.

Transformation is the process God brings us through, enabling us to believe and to pursue, to chase the ending we know God has for us.  We must never give up.  Never.  Miracles and destinies of fate merge at the most improbable intersections, crossroads on the road of life one could never envision or imagine.  And they often arrive at times we never expect.

Allowing God to do his work of transformation in my life has birthed a new feeling inside, a hope that surfaces once the darkness has passed.  It is the rare kind of feeling that comes when something inside is woken from slumber and brought forth to live.  As I sit and contemplate and look back on the road traveled, I listen to the tick of an unseen clock marking murky moments of time passed.  The tick in my mind holds me and carries me and keeps me like the slow swing of a pendulum suspended in air, moving back and forth across two passageways.  Momentarily, I sit in a trance; I see the process of change as the world has stopped.  Transformation has taken its course.  The old is now gone.  The grief, the anger, the pain, the hurt, they reside in the grave.  New life has begun and with it are signs one finds when the rite of passage is complete.  My heart surfaces through the dark, hard, rocky soil; like new growth in spring signifying the end of the black, cold, dreary winter.  God has not placed a period in my life that signifies an end; He has placed a comma that signifies a pause.  The best is yet to come.  New life.  New love.  New moments.  God's abundant life awaits me.  It awaits you as well.  Allow God to transform your world, to take you down the path that leads to this abundance.  He believes in you deeply.