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.